[News Boquete] Buenos Vecinos De Boquete Newsletter August 2023

Buenos Vecinos De Boquete Newsletter August 2023

View this email in your browser In This Issue: Thank You For Your Response How Else Can You Help? Family of the Month Thank You For Your Response In last month's newsletter, we reported that, for the first time in our history, we had to turn away families needing our help and create a waiting list of people we are unable to serve, except with an initial emergency food delivery. This was due to increasing food prices and increasing need over the past two years causing our monthly expenses to rise from $3,600 to $4,600. Thank you so much for your response! Several people stepped up to help, either by sponsoring a family for a year via a quick and easy monthly gift through PayPal, or through a generous one-time donation. We are pleased to announce that five families from our waiting list will now be receiving a vital monthly delivery of food staples to bridge the gap between what they can earn and what they need to feed their families. Please help us feed more families in need. A gift of $40 per month will sponsor a family of four for a year. There are still another six families on our waiting list. Your donation could make a big difference in their lives. It is easy to do through PayPal, even if you don't have (or don't want) an account with PayPal. Just visit our website at www.buenosvecinosdeboquete.com and click on "HELP NOW" to reach our donation page, then click on the "Donate" button. This will take you to our PayPal account, where you can choose the amount you wish to give and check the box to make your donation a recurring gift. The amount you choose will be deducted automatically each month from your designated credit or debit card. How Else Can You Help? We continue to ask for donations of KLIM, an enriched powdered milk product that is essential to our families without electricity or refrigeration to provide important nutrients for their children and elderly family members. We need the 360g size of KLIM which comes in a bright yellow can. A can costs less than $5.00 and can be found at Super Baru, Romeros, and other grocery stores. Please consider adding a can or two to your grocery list and drop them off at our Tuesday Market table. We also continue to have a huge need for large water and bleach bottles with handles for our successful Food Start Program. The empty bottles get filled with soil and vegetable plant seedlings (peppers, cucumbers, lettuce,cherry tomatoes, etc.) which we deliver to our clients for planting in their home gardens. We've had a good response with people bringing bottles to our BCP Market table in the Arco Iris building across from TapOut, and we've started receiving bottles back from our clients after they transplant the plants, so our monthly supply is improving, but please continue to help outwith your empty bottles. Family of the Month In our newsletter and through other media, including word of mouth, we have expressed that there is a growing wait list of families who are in dire need of our assistance. Our pleas for help caught the eye of a benefactor. Thanks to the kindness of this generous sponsor, one of the families on our waiting list is able to receive food assistance from Buenos Vecinos de Boquete.  Delima lives in the mountains above Boquete with her four children and her mother.Their home is a hodge-podge construction of pieces of tin propped up with chunks of wood that also are used to fill in the gaps between the tin. When it rains, the shelter is filled with water. She cooks the small amount of food that they have on a wood fire inside the house. Delima was abandoned by her husband and receives no financial support from him. She does the best she can to provide for her family but has been unable to find work. Her oldest child at 19 is no longer in school but cannot provide for the family. It is difficult for many young adults to find work in the rainy season,especially if one is considered an "unskilled laborer." Two of Delima's children attend school and her youngest is only two years old. Delima's mother is not allowed to work, having reached the mandatory retirement age for women. The rainy season is especially challenging for this family, which makes it difficult to stay healthy. There is little work available and what there is does not pay well. There is the hardship of trying to stay dry in what amounts to a lean-to. Buenos Vecinos is grateful for the support of the community which enables us to provide non-perishable food to Delima and her family. Delima and her family are incredibly grateful to the donor as well. Having a bit of food security will go a long way to improving their lives. Buenos Vecinos exists to help people who are unable to meet their basic food needs. We have provided emergency food support on many occasions and have been successful in helping families through hard times. We will help them with food support until the working age adults in the family can find enough income to become self-sustaining. If you prefer to donate by cash or local check, please visit our table in the Arco Iris building at the Tuesday Market, or contact Trish at BuenosVecinos79@gmail.com Be sure to check out our website and Facebook page: Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/BuenosVecinosDeBoquete/ Website: http://www.buenosvecinosdeboquete.com/ Copyright (C) 2023 Buenos Vecinos de Boquete. All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website. Our mailing address is: Buenos Vecinos de Boquete Boquete, Chiriqui Panama City Panama Add us to your address book

___________________________________________________________________
The above message was distributed by News Boquete, a free subscription-based community service.
News Boquete's ONLY public email address is news.boquete@gmail.com.
For more info and use policy, visit https://www.dropbox.com/s/24y1vz2vae9iaen/News_Boquete_Policy.pdf?dl=0.

If replying to this message, reply ONLY to the ORIGINATOR (typically your email application's 'Reply To' function works).

To stop receiving these emails, send a message to news.boquete@gmail.com with the word unsubscribe in the subject line or body of the message.

© 2005-2023, News Boquete. All rights reserved. Public redistribution strictly prohibited without prior written permission.