What's Happening Now

A Conscience International team was in Greece and Turkey in September delivering relief aid to hundreds of refugees fleeing the war in Syria and the terror of ISIS in Iraq. Our work in Greece and Turkey is ongoing with a followup team of 15 volunteers in October helping to build transition camps to shelter the continuing influx of refugees and migrants. We are coordinating our efforts with our local partners in Izmir, Seljuk, and Kaiserli as well as with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) through its Country Director for Greece

Middle East Program Director Cliff Gardner and his wife, Marilyn, a registered public health nurse, took medical supplies along with their field expertise and nursing skills to offer helping hands in a mobile clinic serving IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons). 

Conscience International has delivered a truckload of food to help 250 refugee families survive for one month in northern Iraq.  Rice, beans, spices, cooking oil, and hygiene items go quickly. Hunger is the never-ending problem among people who are without jobs, opportunity, and finances to support families. Refugees exist in tents made of steel pipe frames covered in plastic. Others survive in unfinished buildings without walls, each family living in curtained-off ’rooms.’  

You haven’t heard much about it on the news because there were so few deaths, but the landslide and flood affected areas in the Chin State province of Myanmar brought on by unremitting monsoons and worsened by Cyclone Komen, has left more than one million people, (one-third of them children) victims of homelessness, disease, and hunger. Medical aid, food, shelter, and emotional support are desperately needed.

Imagine a hospital staff going on strike because supplies to care for their patients has been exhausted. Imagine suffering patients without medicines or necessary surgeries or even changes of simple dressings due to lack of essentials. That actually happened in Jos, Nigeria when hospital workers walked out, frustrated by the drain on consumable resources.

Angelo Velis is on a long-term mission—to encourage, motivate, and inspire the young people of Guatemala to reach their greatest potential and empower a generation to assume future leadership roles in their home country.  As Conscience International’s Community Development Director for Guatemala, Velis travels often to Central America to reinforce partner relationships and meet with agricultural and industry leaders who are lending their expertise and facilities to sanction youth programs leading to jobs and commissioning volunteer teams to come help train them.

The daily exodus of thousands of Iraqi refugees escaping to neighboring countries, or the relative safety of Iraq territories farther north, continues unabated. Leaving cities and villages they may never see again, families are fleeing for their lives, shattered by the loss of homes, livelihoods, schools, and hope, desperately escaping ISIS militants who have destroyed, burned, tortured, raped, and killed in their quest to capture city after city.  

Their days were spent studying in a one-room school, and they slept on the same hard mud floor at night -- boys on one side, girls on the other.