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Venezuela has experienced growing and complex socio-economic unrest over the past few years, making this attractive tropical country a challenging place to provide our much needed human services. The evolving crisis has culminated in chronic food and major medicine shortages throughout the country. Many public health, education and social services have simply "fallen through the floor," which has been especially painful for our Foundation to witness and work with.
Fortunately, we have been able to maintain most of our services for what is an increasingly desperate local population under increasingly adverse circumstances. We may be small, but we make an immeasurable difference in the lives of those we touch. We are proud of our achievements - partially summed up for 2016 below - and we are determined to do everything that we can to continue our critical work in this land of growing need and tragedy.
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FAMILY PLANNING is our largest, most in-demand program. Due to a catastrophic nationwide scarcity of contraceptives, soaring unintended pregnancies, especially among adolescents, is one notable facet of Venezuela's public health crisis. In 2016 we were nonetheless able to deliver 12,700 Monthly Cycles of Hormonal Birth Control, place 655 IUDs, and perform 631 surgical sterilizations for rural women clamoring for the right to control their fertility. We are the only NGO delivering these services in eastern Venezuela; and now, under ever more difficult conditions in 2017, thousands of families are counting on our reproductive health program!
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HUMANITARIAN AID: Our strong connection with the private heath sector allowed us to offer several hundred humanitarian interventions in 2016: debilitating hernias, emergency cesarean sections, critical oncologic and orthopedic procedures. With everyone's help, surgical interventions can cost as little as $200 to perform, and can change a life. We also offer laparoscopic diagnoses and biopsies, cat scans and private medical consultations, helping poor rural patients who can no longer count on the public health system. While we stretch our limited budget just as far as we can, preventable mortality and morbidity sadly continue to grow in crisis-stricken Venezuela.
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RURAL EDUCATION: We offer 50 scholarships a year to enable rural high school students to graduate. Previously, many of these rural students abandoned their formal education at or before the sixth grade. Now, 500+ students have attended high school, 100+ students have graduated, and 25 of these graduates are currently in college with our support. Plus five proud college graduates!
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SERVYR MERIDA: Turimiquire Foundation and our Venezuelan partner Fundación ServYr now work in the western Andean state of Mérida. In 2013, our talented associate Gisela de Sarrazin (green striped blouse) started SERVYR MERIDA as an extension of our work in order to (translated here from her own words): " educate disadvantaged rural youth through a range of disciplines - culinary, agricultural, health therapies, yoga, meditation, arts and crafts, etc. - responding to the serious regional problems - lack of social values, high crime rates, drug dependence, teen pregnancy, depression, broken families - in the rural Andes mountains." Her initiative favors directly caring for and healing the individual, the family, the community and the environment.
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