Donations in memory of Roque Cyril DSouza | Giving out rations to help during lockdown | One of our students being creative again | We have Electricity! | Goa is feeling the pressure | Preparing Rations for families | A Year Ago...

Our thoughts and thanks are with the family of Roque Cyril DSouza who passed away recently. Roque owned a small local shop and loved keeping it well stocked for the children in his village.

After his passing his son got in touch and donated two car boots worth of goods. The latest one had boxes and boxes of Ice cream and drinks. We have already given out most of the items from the first load and will give the ice cream out during this week.

Thank you Our condolences to the family. May he rest in peace.

The 'lockdown' in Goa is continuing and although the cases are much better than they were Goa still has a very high positive rate compared to other states. Due to this the lockdown is continuing and putting extra strain on families that rely on a daily wage.

We continue to support our children and were delighted to receive a car boot full of items a few days ago. Most of which has already been given out to the families. Hopefully a few more items will be coming today.

One of our old students mentioned that he knew a family who was struggling so he kindly dropped off a goodie parcel to them

We really do have some great students, some excel at studies, some at art, or sports but this young adult who is studying at St Xaviers is great at studies and as you can see a great artist.

We were given a couple of canvases this week, so one of this particular student took one of them and recreated the image in paint. I think it looks amazing.

I showed Jan the re-created artwork and Jan offered to buy it back - Wow! I have to say he is very talented.

Please let us know your thoughts so I can pass them on to encourage him to do more.

We have finally got electricity back and hope it is here to stay. It has been draining this week without it and so delighted to have creature comforts back like fan and hot water. So nice!

We continue to give out rice, flour, dal etc to the families of the children we help, we have also give out to a few others but due to the electricity problems it has slowed us down a little.

As well as food and health care items we have also been giving out clothes for the younger girls as we got a great selection donated this week. (Thank you Jan and Trupti).

If anyone has any CHILDREN's clothes we would be delighted to receive them. (PLEASE NO LARGE / ADULT CLOTHES)

The last couple of weeks have been very difficult in Goa with Vivid cases exploding all over India and Goa having the highest positive rate out of all the states with it peaking at just over 50%.

We were eased into what seems like a very soft "lockdown" which to be honest is not really lock down as there are so many people out and about.

To add to the woes, we were hit hard by a cyclone which uprooted trees, just in the locality of Goa Outreach there are at least (within 1km) 6 trees fallen across the roads (and u haven't been out much, found those in one trip). Most of these have pulled down electricity lines, the small road Infront of the center has at least 3 damaged sections with the worst just outside our door.

There has not been any power since Saturday morning. I have had to empty the fridge and given chilled food out to a few families. There is no WiFi, no computer I am just managing to keep my phone charger (for now) but I don't know when power might come as there is so much work to be done here and so many places.

It's so humid at present now that the cyclone has moved on, so sleepless nights without fans.

On a positive note I have picked up some donations from Trupti this morning - lots of great children's others, inline skates and more!

Due to the terrible hardships that families are facing in Goa at present we spent the morning sourcing 500Kg of rice, 500 Kg of Flour, 150kg of sugar, Turdal, Sunflower Oil and 50Kg of Tea Powder.

All of this comes in huge sacks, the flour and Sugar in 50Kg sacks which all needed to be man handled into the centre and then measured out equally ready to be given out.

We would like to thank Gopi, Gunjan, Manju, Devappa and Papu who spent four hours packing all the dry good into bags ready to be given out.

The good thing about helping is that they were the first to take a sack of goodies home with them and we hope that most of the stock will be given out tomorrow to the families.

If anyone would like to support future ration drives then we are happy for goods in kind, or financial donations.

By this time last year we had already been giving out rations to the children and families around Goa for over a month. We never thought that restrictions would still be in place a year later.

This latest lock down has seen more families return to their native place as cases continue to rise in Goa. For the last 3 days the number of new cases have been over 3000 and the percentage of those tested being positive rose to an unbelievable 51% a couple of days ago. That meant for every two people tested, one was found to be covid positive!

We continue to support the families and thankfully with this latest lockdown they have had over a day to prepare.

Please stay home and stay safe in this uncertain time, for more information about what we do or you would like to support us then do get in touch via our website