One unique quality about ADRA when compared to other humanitarian aid organizations is that, many times, ADRA is already working in an environment where a natural disaster or government instability happens to take place. Because ADRA is already on the ground and working, it is much easier to continue helping people and providing humanitarian aid when possible. Another unique quality that separates ADRA from other humanitarian aid organizations is the fact that ADRA is in a region for the long term. They do not show up, deliver aid, and then leave. Rather, we establish roots, and seek to help people over the long term with humanitarian aid, but also with resources like an education, skills for a job, helping people to set up and run small businesses, get shelter, grow crops, and learn how to live off the land and sustain themselves and their families.
Before the tsunami in 2004 that destroyed a great deal of Indonesia and the surrounding countries along the coast, ADRA was in many of those areas with existing programs in place to help the local people. In the region of the Andaman Islands of India, ADRA worked with people providing grief counseling. They formed women's groups because there were so many women who lost children, fathers, sisters, and brothers. While their husbands were out working they would be left behind grieving. Along with the counseling for grief that ADRA was involved with, they also encouraged the women in these groups to start handicrafts as a way to help them heal from their losses. In India, as well as in Thailand and Indonesia, handicrafts have helped many women to start new industries and livelihoods for themselves and their families. These simple handicrafts have also helped them with their pain. The groups of women involved have banded together to support each other through their great losses, and it has helped them move forward with life. Before ADRA's involvement with these women in this way, they did not have any such program in place. This was something that ADRA brought to their lives to enrich their lives and help provide them with a source of income and purpose to keep going.
That is just one example of a program that ADRA was responsible for starting after the devastating tsunami of 2004. ADRA was also able to get humanitarian aid into places that other organizations could not access due to government restrictions. What allowed ADRA to get the humanitarian aid through was the fact that they already had existing relationships with those government officials and the trust was already established.
This is a simple example among literally thousands of how ADRA is helping to provide humanitarian aid and support for areas of the world that are in crisis. You can take a direct part in helping to provide this ongoing humanitarian aid to these areas that need it most. When you give to the "Help ADRA Save Lives" fund you are changing the world for children, women and men in untold ways.
