Crisis in Georgia: CRS Aids the Most Vulnerable

"CRS partners on the ground were able to swing into action immediately," says LeAnn Hager, Acting Head of the Office for CRS Georgia.

TBILISI, Georgia (CRS) - As an estimated 128,000 Georgians who fled violence in early August struggle to stay afloat in temporary shelters, Catholic Relief Services (CRS) is providing emergency aid to displaced people throughout Georgia.

After fighting broke out in and around the areas of Tskhinvali, Gori and the Kodori Valley, tens of thousands fled their homes, sometimes on foot, for safer areas. A CRS assessment team was immediately dispatched to Georgia to join CRS staff already on the ground. Arriving in Tbilisi via Yerevan, the team visited makeshift shelters and assessed the most immediate needs, including food, clothes, cookware, mattresses, bedding and hygiene supplies. CRS' partner, Caritas Georgia, began feeding hundreds of people from its existing soup kitchens and bakeries on August 10th.

"CRS partners on the ground were able to swing into action immediately," says LeAnn Hager, Acting Head of Office for CRS Georgia. "In the first days of the crisis, they fed thousands of people who would otherwise have gone hungry."
CRS is focusing on the health of the displaced people, most of whom are living in crowded, unsanitary buildings without adequate bathrooms. CRS is providing them with hygiene items like soap, detergent, toilet paper and sheets--items desperately needed by people who fled the conflict with just the clothes on their backs.
The CRS team also traveled to the western city of Kutaisi to assess the needs of displaced people there, and were the first non-Georgian aid workers to arrive. With a local partner organization run by formerly displaced people themselves, CRS will in the next few days begin to provide food, non-food items like stoves and trauma support to some of the estimated 14,000 displaced people in and around Kutaisi.

"While we hope that the majority of Georgians displaced by this conflict will be able to return home very soon, some may never be able to," says Mark Schnellbaecher, CRS' Regional Director for Europe and the Middle East. "We are responding to their immediate needs and also looking to see how we can most effectively help them in the coming weeks and months. The money that CRS has committed will help thousands of suffering people in the difficult weeks ahead."

Catholic Relief Services is the official international humanitarian agency of the Catholic community in the United States. The agency provides assistance to people in more than 100 countries and territories based on need, regardless of race, nationality or creed. For more information about CRS and the agency's operations in Georgia, please visit www.crs.org. Catholic Relief Services is a member of the global Caritas network, a confederation of 162 Catholic relief, development and social service organizations working in over 200 countries and territories. For more information about Caritas, please visit www.caritas.org.

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Reprinted by Catholic Online with permission of Catholic Relief Services (www.crs.org)