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COVID-19 Rapid Response Project

COVID-19 RAPID RESPONSE PROJECT

As COVID-19 has spread throughout the globe, we have surveyed the organizations in our coalition to find out how things have changed and what they need at this time.

The answers are sobering:

“The women and girls still stuck in the red light districts are starving. They have no food and are not being fed by the brothel owners and pimps. Because the brothels have temporarily closed down, the women and girls have no way of making money to purchase basic food and hygiene supplies. They cannot work, but they cannot leave. They are desperate and have called us asking if we can just bring some rice because they are so hungry.” 

“We cannot intake new survivors because we don’t have the budget for the COVID-19 tests and quarantine required to keep our staff and residents safe and healthy.”

“The poor in our community are even more desperate. They have no food and are sending their daughters to the cities to look for work, and we know that the recruiters offering these ‘jobs’ are actually traffickers. Even though we provide prevention education, the need for food makes it a risk that they are willing to take. We want to help feed these impoverished families while they cannot work so that they don’t send their daughters away.”

In response to these sobering consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia, our coalition partners are jumping into action, considering themselves “essential services” as they offer potentially life-saving care packages to the women and children who are still not free to leave the area, adding food distribution to their prevention work, and finding ways to ensure that survivors are still able to access needed services including residential care. In our conversations with organization leaders, we learned that many of them are using their own salaries to purchase food or COVID-19 tests or rooms for quarantine. We believe that the Dark Bali Impact Team can come alongside these frontlines organizations and help them provide emergency care to the women and children that we all care so much about.

Would you give to this COVID-19 Rapid Response Project?

For $5 per week, you can support this project that allows outreach teams to bring a care package of essential food and basic hygiene supplies directly into the brothels in Indonesian cities to sex trafficking victims and sex workers who have no other way to provide for themselves during Indonesia’s ongoing tourism restrictions. Along with food, these teams are bringing compassion and connection and building relationships with victims that we hope will eventually lead to escapes, rescues, and recoveries. For $25, you can provide a COVID-19 test or two nights of quarantine in a safe place while survivors wait for their test results so they can enter an aftercare facility.

Thank you for joining arms with us and caring for some of the world’s most vulnerable people during the COVID-19 crisis. Thank you for shining a light in Indonesia.

UPDATE: Through the generosity of dozens of individual donors, over $10,000 was granted to the Indonesian grassroots organizations in our network directly involved in dealing with the effects COVID-19 pandemic on survivors and victims of human trafficking as well as those most vulnerable. THANK YOU to each person who donated or shared about the project!

 

covid medical update