Sending Indonesia Aid After the Tsunami

Our Partners Need a Fishing Boat

Giving Children Hope needs your help with the Indonesia micro-enterprise project.

We need a power fishing boat, with 150 horse power, and an outboard motor to send to our partners in Indonesia!

To donate, please contact us at “info@godaid.org:mailto:info@godaid.org” and place “Fishing Boat” in the subject line.

Thank you for your support!

2009.07.20 by Harmony Trevino

From disaster to re-development: The California Bakery

Giving Children Hope President John Ditty and construction consultant Pat Buers recently returned from a trip to Indonesia where several micro-enterprise programs are successfully in operation! In Banda Aceh, the GCH sponsored “California Bakery” is in business, producing bread and pastries for the local community and providing locals with a source of employment. GCH provided “California Bakery” with the equipment necessary to begin work, including ovens, mixers, baking pans, and cooking materials. The bakery is located on a street that was fully submerged following the tsunami, but today, numerous businesses have been rebuilt, their owners, managers, and employees working diligently to reinvigorate the hard hit economy.

John Ditty spent time on Nias Island, where GCH’s local affiliate, Giving Children Hope – Nias is headquartered. GCH’s Indonesian staff is hard at work managing and overseeing development projects that will enable the islanders to regain their self-sufficiency. To support a commercial ship business and a fishing cooperative, Ditty and Buers worked together with staff members to build a dock at the waterfront near the office. GCH has already facilitated the construction of a Juwita and, with the support of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Laguna Beach, another Juwita was recently completed. Plans to build an entire fleet of shipping boats will be fully explored with the assistance of partners.

Nias Island is the site of the GCH supported Training Center. Located next door to GCH’s local office, the Training Center was developed to host displaced families for 3-6 months, during which time the families will be trained in either pig or goat farming. In the next month, the first seven families will be settled into the Training Center, where there day to day needs during the training time period will be met by sponsors from the BNKP Indonesia consortium of churches. GCH expects that the Training Center will provide families who have lost their livelihoods with a new skill set appropriate to their home environment.

While on Nias Island, John Ditty and Pat Buers also visited multiple church sites in need of reconstruction following the devastating earthquake which destroyed 80% of the infrastructure on the island. Two new sites to be assisted were assessed and Buers, a construction consultant, discussed earthquake resistant construction methods with church members.

The last days of the trip were spent in Jakarta, Indonesia, where John Ditty met with Lutheran World Relief representatives to discuss medical student participation in the “Young Doctor, Young Nurse” program. This public health program set on Nias Island endeavors to recruit medical students and doctors from Jakarta to Nias for two to three week rotations to instruct local school children on basic health promotion disease prevention and to work in clinics. Three teams of doctors and medical students have already come to Nias Island and in the near future, GCH plans to partner with Indonesian medical schools to enlist more health professionals for this essential program.

2009.01.30 by

Containers of Aid Arrive for tsunami victims

Several containers of relief supplies, which arrived in Indonesia at the end of September, have cleared customs and are currently being prepared for distribution by the United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM). Within the next couple of weeks, a bakery in Bandeh Aceh will be up and running with new ovens, stoves, mixers, pans, and tables; a power plant in the Banyak Islands will light up additional homes with a new generator; and churches in Nias will be rebuilt with the provision of building materials.

Each of these areas were devastated by the tsunami on December 24th, 2004, and then by an earthquake on March 29th, 2005. Giving Children Hope (GCH) has played a large role in relief efforts and has remained committed to assisting Indonesian communities destroyed by these natural disasters. GCH has continued to provide relief items-such as tents and mosquito nets, while also enabling community members to become self-sufficient by facilitating the development of micro-enterprises that serve the community- such as the bakery in Bandeh Aceh. Rebuilding infrastructure has also been a significant focus-in Nias, a predominantly Christian island, 1,000 of 1,200 churches were damaged or destroyed-GCH is steadfast in our commitment to rehabilitate these churches.

GCH has established an office in Nias in order to remain connected to community reconstruction activities. Three people are now working out of the Nias office on a permanent basis. This on the ground support is especially essential as GCH is preparing to launch the “Young Doctor, Young Nurse” program. Set in schools, the program trains students in basic health promotion and disease prevention. In 2006, volunteer medical students from Jakarta will come to Nias as part of their required internships to assist with the further development of “Young Doctor, Young Nurse.”

2009.01.30 by

Another team to Indonesia

A Giving Children Hope team of four persons led by John Ditty has just completed a mission to provide oral polio vaccinations to children in the Banyak Islands of Indonesia. Fifty children received the vaccinations from the team with supplies left with a paramedic for another 200 children. The team took to the jungle trail, stopping at houses along the way to administer the vaccinations with a distribution of rice done at the same time.

The beauty of the Banyak Islands in Indonesia is matched only by their remoteness. Located off the western coast of Sumatra, the Banyaks were the epicenter for the March 28, 2005 earthquake that devastated the island of Nias. The Banyaks did not sustain the same degree of damage to structures as did Nias, due primarily to the fact that the majority of structures in the Banyaks are made of wood as opposed to the concrete structures on Nias. The problems now being experienced in the Banyaks are the result of the tilting of the islands. Some portions of the islands have risen up out of the water while other portions have sunk. Some villages along the coastline are now under water. Trees along the coast are dying either because their roots no longer reach the water table or because they are inundated with saltwater. Fishing docks and piers in some areas are now standing on dry ground. Where the islands have been pushed up, wells are now dry.

John Ditty, President of Giving Children Hope first visited the Banyaks in January 2005 to assess the damage from the December 26, 2004 Tsunami. As you would expect, many of the residents of these islands are fishermen and lost their boats in the Tsunami. Global has received a grant to build ten fishing boats which will be leased to fishermen at a very affordable rate to help them get back on their feet. The first five boats should be delivered later this month with five more to come in September.

The team also provided short-term emergency relief by delivering rice to some of the more isolated areas of the Banyaks. A member of the team commented about the rice distribution: “There was a lot of laughing and smiling. We left the rice at the first house on the trail and let people know where it was. As we were hiking back out it became a parade. As we would pass a house, the people that lived there would follow us. We had kids running in front of us (barefoot of course) and adults trailing behind us. It was a pretty exciting event.”

2009.01.30 by

GCH team to Indonesia

Giving Children Hope (GCH) has a team of five men on the ground in Indonesia. Founder and CEO, John Ditty, John Bibler, Jonathan Ditty, Mike Humphrey and Matt Gibbons left a week and a half ago to work alongside Giving Children Hope’s Indonesian office on Nias Island. Upon waking this morning and hearing news of the 8.2 magnitude earthquake that struck off western Indonesia, staff, family, and friends of Giving Children Hope were eager to hear news of the team’s safety. John Bibler’s wife received a phone call minutes ago and found the team is in fact safe and doing well amongst the excitement of the quake.

The GCH team brought 3,000 pairs of eye glasses to fit the Indonesian people as well as assessing our current micro-enterprise projects of bakeries and fishing boats and is implementing a new structure of our micro-finance loans. Yesterday, the team left for Teluctalam to fit children in rural villages for reading glasses and to take part in medical outreach. The team is expected home on Friday night, September 14th.

Reports are still coming in and Giving Children Hope is waiting to hear more before deciding how to respond the areas affected by the quake.

2009.01.30 by