Nutrition Site Number 3 has finally opened

Sunday Aug 5 was a special day for our nutrition team here.

To give you a bit of background. I have come to work as the Nutrition Project Manager for Medair. Medair is one of many NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) that is responding to the Rohingya refugee crisis which has brought an estimated 1.2 million people to Bangladesh. Most of them have settled in a huge area that is divided into 20+ camps called Kutapalong. A coordinating body has given different NGOs responsibilities in the camp according to what services they can provide. We have been asked to set up and run 3 different nutrition sites in Camp 6, Camp 16 and Camp 3. One of the biggest challenges was finding a little bit of land on which to construct the largely bamboo structure for each of the sites in a place with very high population density. The first two are already

running and Camp 3 was our last one to open.  

This is what happened a week ago on Sunday (incidentally the work week here runs Sunday - Thursday given that this is a predominately Muslim country-Friday is therefore the official weekend day). To get to the point of opening the site, beyond finding the space, the land had to be prepared with sandbags to prevent erosion and the structure needed to built. Next our registration team needed to register each of the households in our catchment area (the area we serve) that had children under 5 and PLWs (pregnant and lactating women) - amongst a general population of 40,000. The children under 5 and PLWs account for 6,000 persons. A couple of days before the site opened we had the food delivered to our onsite storeroom as well as all the supplies - tables, chairs, boxes of registration cards, scales, everything needed to run a nutrition site. Sunday morning our team arrived to meet our local Bangladeshi staff, our local Rohingya volunteers, and our community nutrition volunteers (also Rohingya). Introductions were made, we spent about an hour setting up the banners, the

stations and making sure everything was in place. Then around 10:30 the first beneficiaries arrived - those who had been asked to come the first day were a group of around 50 to allow our staff the chance to settle in and make sure everything was running smoothly.

Now 10 days later this 3rd nutrition site is well on its way to serving around 350-400 women and

children a day, providing all of them a monthly ration of enriched food. Phil and I actually just arrived in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, this evening. We are headed back to the US tomorrow for the wedding of our son Nathan to our soon to be daughter-in-law Anna Jeide. We look forward to seeing family and friends as we celebrate this special day. We'll be in Minneapolis from Aug 17 - 26. Feel free to give us a call or drop in for a visit if you're in the area while we're back.

Back overseas again.

C&P in Switzerland last September

For those of you who know us quite well, you might remember we returned to the US in December 2011 from South Africa. You might even have heard us say that our plans were to be in the US for 3-5 years. It has been a bit longer than what we predicted but we have finally made our way back overseas. It started back in September last year when we were invited to participate in an orientation course with Medair. Medair.org is a Swiss humanitarian aid organization. We have been very impressed with their values and their emphasis on serving the forgotten. This aligns well with the emphasis we always have had in ministry: serving the least served. Check them out!

In July we started a one year assignment in Bangladesh in order to be a part of the humanitarian aid response to the Rohingya crisis which has unfolded acutely over the last year in Myanmar - and now in Bangladesh. There are now around 1 million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh fleeing violence that is now most often being qualified as ethnic cleansing. Here is a story of one refugee: http://www.medair.org/en/stories/bangladesh-lost-together/.

Christine is returning to her calling of working with malnourished children and mothers, and Phil is doing logistics. We are thrilled to be part of an organization that is seeking to bring our professional, practical and management skills as an expression of God's love to the most vulnerable.

You may have actually seen Bangladesh on the international news. There have been student protests over the dangerous nature of Bangladeshi roads, provoked by two students that were killed by a bus. This is happening in Dhaka, which is very far from Cox's Bazar where our base is. But please be in prayer for this situation, that it would remain peaceful. We pray that this will provoke some much-needed change in driver conduct!

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Will you join us in prayer for the Rohingya people? A state-less people. A people who has suffered unspeakable violence. The forgotten.