Humanitarian aid

Yeah, that's a good question.

The first name of the group was Students for Humanitarian Aid.

It started as me and a couple students at the university I was at.

I was in my senior year at Wesleyan and then grew it from there because we posted some volunteer roles on LinkedIn that folks could apply to.

is a matter of urgent concern to us.

We have our own Latter-day Saint Charities organization and we have worked with other non-governmental agencies in extending humanitarian aid.

These include Catholic Relief Services, Mercy Corps International, the American Red Cross, the Red Crescent, the Salvation Army, Habitat for Humanity, and other groups across the world.

Today, this very day, As they have been during previous days, two helicopters have been flying rescue and mercy missions over the floodwaters of Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

Our humanitarian efforts reach far beyond our own.

to bless the victims of war and natural disaster wherever they may be.

Last year alone, we sent humanitarian aid to assist with 829 projects in 101 countries, giving $11-plus million in cash and $44 million in material resources for a total of $55-plus million.

I would like to suggest that this is no small effort, and the cost would have been much higher had it not been for the voluntary services of the very many who packed the goods in our warehouses in Salt Lake City and to those who unpacked them at the points of distribution.

He's been in Ukraine many times.

Mike's the man who gave up a successful career as an investment banker to found the New Zealand charity Relief Aid.

We've interviewed Mike in Ukraine before and in Syria, and Relief Aid's been on the ground in Gaza as well, many of the world's places in need over the last 10 years.

Good morning, Mike.

Good morning, Jim.

The commuter train cannot cross that bridge.

So when you look at it really practically, we've got people living in other parts of the city catching the metro to the river, having to walk across an exposed bridge that has been previously bombed twice, and then get to the other side of the river, get on another metro to get to work.

We're talking with Mike Seawright, the Relief Aid founder and executive director of Relief Aid.

Russian soldiers have occupied the city since the early days of the war in 2022.

A humanitarian mission will attempt to deliver food and evacuate some residents from the area.

The ceasefire is scheduled to hold until Sunday.

The federal government has unveiled new legislation setting updated rules around medical assistance in dying.

So stay tuned to see all those coming along.

But in the meantime, we're back with our Humanitarian Headlines series.

As a reminder, we use these to try and pay special attention to crises that the world has either moved on from or isn't paying enough attention to in the first place.

And in so doing, trying to build that community of people with you, the listeners, people who care about playing their part and helping people that they've never met in places they've never been.

So two things to point here are, first is the America First Opportunity Fund, and second is AID.

U.S. AID has been an institution that has been the pillar, the core operations of all of the U.S. aid programs abroad, humanitarian aid and other kinds of aid that U.S. provides to different countries.

And historically, this kind of aid and this program in particular was vital for countries in the subcontinent, if not India alone, which has considerable economic size.

It was very important for countries like Nepal, Sri Lanka.

And Bangladesh as well, because of their, you know, environmental conditions, climate conditions, and different internal disturbances as well, right? But Trump administration came out with a decision of ending USAID.

So they completely stopped USAID from existing and redirected whatever funds it had towards State Department operations.

And basically created a system where US aid operations went away from the humanitarian aid to aid that led to infrastructure development in the forms of loans, in the forms of grants and those kind of things.

Yeah.

It requires an unsentimental, unflinching ability to look at human desperation without breaking.

And incredibly, her wartime probation work was merely a prelude to the humanitarian work she undertook after 1945.

Which is where her story gets even more intense.

Yes.

But overnight in Ukraine and Sudan, we saw how a severed connection doesn't just, you know, stop the Internet.

It literally halts humanitarian aid.

Yep.

It erases education completely.

Isra- Israel, in the same way as Israel did its best, its level best, better than probably any other country could ever do, certainly could do today, of preventing civilian casualties on the battlefield.

Israel took remarkable steps to make sure that humanitarian aid could get into Gaza.

And indeed, during that conflict, significantly more humanitarian aid went into Gaza than before the conflict, than a comparable period before the conflict.

Yeah.

So there's absolutely, it's, it's-- I, I find it, um, I, I don't-- It doesn't surprise me that people make these accusations because I know why they're making the accusations, and they're making the accusations because, as I said before, because they are part of a deliberate campaign to undermine Israel.

And by the way, I include in that not just, um, the, the, the jihadists who are accusing Israel, but I also include organizations like the United Nations and many so-called humanitarian aid organizations which repeat the lies about Israel, and they are part of that same campaign, deliberately so.

You, you just mentioned the extraordinary measures that the IDF takes to prevent civilian casualties, things like, uh, roof knocking, aborted strikes, the leaflets that are passed out, evacuation corridors.

None of this is free.