Chudar COVID-19 Relief Update #7

Thanks for your support to Covid relief efforts of Chudar. Your donation has helped us provide.

• Groceries and sanitary kits to 500 families across 15 communities in Chennai and villages in Chengalpet and Tiruvannamalai
• Masks to 6000 people in the community
• 400 bottles of sanitizers made using WHO guidelines, to families in the communities we work with

Though the lock-down was relaxed in the past couple of weeks, hotspots like Chennai still face several restrictions. Most of the underprivileged who are employed in the unorganized sector, depending on daily wages and public transport to get to work, have not been able to resume and are still facing several challenges to make ends meet.

In our quest for reaching such people, Chudar volunteers have been able to identify many such families living without even a roof on their heads in the heart of Chennai.

Nivedha our volunteer has distributed groceries, vegetables and masks to 20 families who are living on the streets in Saidapet, some of them on platforms in the street opposite to the Gurukulam school. While speaking to them she found that many of these families were displaced earlier during the December 2015 floods in Tamilnadu. Since then, they have been dwelling on the streets without a permanent home. Some of them are employed as temporary workers with the corporation as cleaners and sanitary workers on a contract basis, some others were daily wage labourers employed in construction activities of various kinds. One of them said, ‘it’s just been four years when tragedy struck us and now again we are bearing the brunt, we live in the hope that this will change.’

Community Kitchen in Kadalur village: Mani, our volunteer from Chudar, as part of our relief efforts helped the local SHG coordinator in setting up a community kitchen. “Kadalur is a small village on the ECR, close to Chennai. Majority of the people here, work as sweepers and do odd jobs like gardening, small construction works, road repair or fishing for daily wages. When the Government announced the lock-down, the first few days were normal but after that, many widows and older people could not get access to food. Ms.Jayalakshmi, SHG coordinator also found that nearly half village had started to eat seafood call Matti (a variety of clams) which addresses hunger temporarily but not enough to satiate it. The children were literally starving, so with the help of a few others in the village, she decided to form a community kitchen to provide these families with cooked food. I’m happy to share that we were able to provide with the required rice and other groceries to feed 50 families, so that they could at least have 2 decent meals a day.” says Mani.
Mask and Sanitizer distribution Valli our volunteer from Mylapore, has so far distributed more than 600 reusable cloth masks to the people in the community. She has not only distributed to people in the community but also to other smalltime vendors, vegetable sellers, sanitary and health workers in the area. When we spoke to her on how she single-handedly managed such a feat, she said that she would always keep around 10-15 masks hand in her bag and as and when she encounters people not wearing masks she would give it to them and explain the benefits of protecting oneself by wearing a mask
Chudar and its volunteers have also made sanitizers based on the WHO guidelines and distributed it to many families in the community and also to small shop owners and vegetable vendors. Many of them have used the sanitizer and said that they are more than happy to use it and quite thankful to the volunteers as they could not afford to buy them.