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Season's Greetings to all our friends and supporters!
Thanks to your support, we are concluding another strong year of service delivery under increasingly adverse conditions. Our ability to do everything that we do depends on the continued support of all of our friends and donors.
Thank You!

It might be hard to imagine, but the situation is only worse and worsening in Venezuela in this time of crisis. Our Turimiquire Foundation has been striving to help as much as we can on three important fronts: reproductive health, education, and humanitarian. We are assuming a key role not only with the low-income population that we customarily serve, but also with the hard-pressed middle class which desperately needs to survive to rebuild the country. If there was ever a time that we need everyone's support, it is now.   

Staff member Marcela preparing school supplies to distribute to our high school scholarship students at our rural education center.
Surgeons in the Santa Rosa Clinic in Cumaná operating on low-income rural patients who would otherwise have no access to these critical services.
THANKS to a grant from the Erik and Edith Bergstrom Foundation, we have been able to sustain and extend our family planning services this year in the face of the absolutely desperate demand that we are facing down here. Due to Venezuela's economic collapse, short term contraception supplies (monthly hormonal methods) have no restocking in sight. We are working to fill the shortage with the stability of longer acting methods, i.e., IUDs, implants, sterilizations. Hundreds of women are benefiting from this support, but thousands more urgently remain to be helped. Families simply cannot afford to have more children under the current crisis conditions in Venezuela. There is no way we can better empower women and their families than by giving them the opportunity to control their fertility.
You can learn more about our work in family planning and the story of our Foundation in this article in December's edition of the Population ConnectionAltogether, we have served over 45,000 low-income mainly rural women, offering over 100,000 “couple years of protection,” the metric by which USAID measures family planning achievement.
Although our Foundation primarily focuses on reproductive health, with many public health services now completely unavailable in the country, we have extended our assistance to other medical areas as well. We offer hernia repairs and a variety of other out-patient procedures, as well as occasional support for oncological and orthopedic interventions. Where a single intervention might make all the difference, our goal is to make that difference in people's lives!
 
To understand the extraordinary collapse of what was once a robust public health system here in Venezuela, we recommend these two links:
Please contribute here to our family planning and public health work!
The future of Venezuela depends on the survival of its middle and professional classes, who will one day need to be there to rebuild their country. Dozens of friends and professionals with whom we work, including some of our most experienced doctors, have already emigrated to other countries searching for a better life. To understand the depth of this exodus, how profoundly it is affecting not only Venezuela, but the whole region, we recommend the following video: Escape from a Failed State.

When we help low-income families to receive the family planning and public health attention they need, we are also helping the professional classes of doctors, nurses, social workers, educators and others who work with us. The hyperinflation in Venezuela has substantially diminished the economic resources of the professional and middle classes who are paid in the local currency which is worth dramatically less every day. (Middle class wages have been driven down by hyperinflation to around $20/month in effective purchasing power!) Our support for these professionals and the clinics in which we work has become a significant factor in their daily survival. So by helping the poor, we are now also helping the professional classes who serve them. Those professionals whom we can help to stay in the country will continue to contribute towards building a better future for all Venezuelans.
"When we are dreaming alone, 
it is only a dream.
When we are dreaming with others, 
it is the beginning of reality."
 Dom Helder Camara

You Can Donate to the Turimiquire Foundation Online!

Your donation is tax deductible, and remember, more than 
93 cents of every dollar goes directly into the field!  

 
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Click the button, type in the amount
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Or you can use your credit card.

Please consider making this a recurring monthly donation.
You can do this right on PayPal, and it is a real assist for us.

Or you can mail your check
payable to the Turimiquire Foundation,
to our U.S. office:
 Turimiquire Foundation
William Bloomstein
 16 Crescent Street 
   Cambridge, MA. 02138 
USA

  
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