Every winter season creates severe, life-threatening risks for adults and children alike - with plummeting temperatures making conditions that make maintaining even the most simple daily tasks difficult. For needy families, rising utility costs, inadequate shelter and limited access to what they need to guard their health make for a truly nightmarish reality filled with uncertainty and pain. Read to see in detail what they face, and how your compassion can warm their hearts and bodies with crucial aid.
As harsh winter temperatures encroach, impoverished families have a myriad of new challenges to deal with:
Unsafe shelter
Low-income housing is often made cheaply and for immediate relief, rarely taking into account seasonal changes and long-term stability. Because of this, the cold isn’t truly kept out and often the damp and wet from rain and snow gets kept in. Additionally, poor heating leads families to use dangerous alternative sources like ovens and space heaters - putting them at severe risk for carbon monoxide poisoning. If this wasn’t enough, these same families often don’t have adequate clothing within their homes to make up for these multiple layers of lack, as they huddle together in sharp discomfort.
Ongoing illnesses
As a result of insufficient housing and clothing, as well as having to rely on neighbors and their local community for support, poor families also become more exposed to seasonal cold and flu bacteria. Low temperatures also aggravate long-term asthma, heart and blood pressure health, and make worse the pangs of hunger from malnutrition. With no urgent relief in sight, whole groups of relatives, friends, neighbors and passersby suffer in silence for months on end.
Transportation impediments
As fuel costs increase, those in poverty cannot use their vehicles as often or at all to get the essentials they need and perform their daily tasks fully. Children go without school days, adults go without days of work income, and the elderly are forced to walk in life-threatening weather just to care for themselves. Additionally, any public transportation available to them becomes immediately affected, forcing them to remain where they are with yet another immense challenge arriving to their already meager livelihoods.
How You Can Help Them
This winter, countless families will face frigid nights without shelter, warmth, or hope. Your gift for them can deliver life-saving essentials including blankets, coal, firewood, heaters for families and so much more to beneficiaries in countries like Afghanistan, Palestine (Gaza), Lebanon, Pakistan and the United States.
Help turn their darkest winter into one of light.
