Portraits

Diana, 6, lives in Valle Hondo, a remote village in Caroni municipality, in southern Venezuela. Her school is benefiting from a school kitchen garden. Like her, 72 other children are learning how to cultivate their own food which has improved their school meals. Children are taking ownership of the garden, which is also helping to make their meals more nutritious.I enjoy watering and weeding the plants, I don’t like to miss school for a single day to see them growing.”

Noeli Apontes, 25, her husband Bernal Santana, 26 and their daughter Valentina walked for 16 days to return home, after losing the jobs they had in Peru.

“We are exhausted, after 16 days of travel it is like a victory, we are almost at home,” says Noeli. Humanitarian partners are supporting national efforts to scale up the #COVID19 response in Venezuela, providing assistance to more than 1 million people through health, water and sanitation services as well as women’s health, including giving support to the temporary shelters.

Meet Diego, a 7-year-old boy from Venezuela, who gets his temperature checked at the temporary shelter he’s quarantined with his mother and little brother.

His mother lost her job as a hairdresser in Colombia after closing measures were put in place to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in the country. They travelled for 23 days to get back to Venezuela, and now they are grateful to be home. “I am anxious, and I just want to see my grandma and cousins,” says Diego.

Three little friends pose in front of a temporary shelter for returning migrants, in a border town of Southern Venezuela.

Thousands of Venezuelan migrants are returning home from neighbouring countries amid the #COVID19 pandemic, as many have lost their jobs because of the restrictions measures and the economic crisis.

When kids, who’ve lost everything, give us their brightest smiles, who are we to say that things won’t get better?

Photo taken in Guiuan, one of the coastal villages in Eastern Samar completely destroyed by Typhoon Haiyan.

Marie is 7. She’s one of the 890,000 people forced out of their homes because of ongoing violence in the Central African Republic.

She lives in a camp for displaced, in Bambari, where the Ouaka river divides the Christian quarter and the Muslim one. Communities that used to live in complete harmony for decades are now torn apart…

Suzanne Kourma has lived through a lot of atrocities in her 80 years in the Central African Republic (CAR). But none match the violence she has witnessed over the past 2 years. Earlier this month, she was forced to flee her village because of fighting. Her husband was killed and she broke her leg before finding refuge at a camp in Batangafo, about 330 kilometres (204 miles) north of the capital, Bangui.

“They killed my daughter, burned houses, shops, and killed a lot of people. They’re raping people, even old women.”

Madeline Denam is 72 and she’s from a village called Bimbi, in the Central African Republic. Last month, she had to run away with her three grandchildren, leaving everything behind. She walked all day to reach safety in a camp for civilians displaced by violence.
“They killed my daughter, burned houses, shops, and killed a lot of people. They’re raping people, even old women.”

The #CARcrisis has left over half of the country’s population – 2.7 million people – in need of life-saving assistance.

Jane, 7, is happy she gets to draw and write again. More than 500,000 children in Haiyan areas are back in school two months after the typhoon. Resuming their education helps children like Jane and her family recover by regaining a sense of normalcy in their lives.

After safely giving birth in a health centre in eastern DR Congo, Josephine can now rest next to her baby. However, for many women in the country, giving birth can be dangerous and even life-threatening due to a lack of access to proper health care. To address this, we have helped rehabilitate 121 health centres in DR Congo, so moms like Josephine can give birth safely, and babies can have a good start in life.