Four million Venezuelans and counting, one in 8, have been compelled to pack up their lives and leave their homes or face certain death due to lack of food, medical attention, and physical safety.
Being A Refugee
People seeking refuge are not fleeing poverty, they are fleeing danger.
Refugees are people at their most vulnerable: forced from their home, living without the protection of their state, and in many cases without the bare means of survival.
The Venezuelan Exodus
Moving mostly on foot at the rate of five thousand a day, the majority of Venezuelan refugees, cross into neighboring Colombia. From there some move on to Ecuador, Peru, and Chile. Others have gone south to Brazil.
Our Story
We are a biblically inspired coalition of moral communities of professional clergy, healthcare providers, and human beings of conscience searching and mobilizing healthcare resources on behalf of refugees
Oz Stakeholders have a unique opportunity to be leaders in reshaping the humanitarian response
Desperate for care and often undocumented, Venezuelan patients are overwhelming Brazilian emergency rooms as they turn up by the thousands.
Today 40% of total patients in hospitals of northern states of Brazil along with Venezuela border are Venezuelans.
In Boa Vista, capital of Roraima state, births of Venezuelan migrants at the city’s sole public maternity hospital rose from 288 in 2016 to 572 in 2017, providing the latest measure of the growing humanitarian challenge on Brazil’s border.
Dr. Kathleen Page, an infectious disease specialist at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, visited border towns in northern Brazil that are now hosting tens of thousands of migrants. Page, who is originally from Uruguay, says the local Brazilian hospitals are overwhelmed with incredibly sick people.
“ I felt that in these wards I was going back to the 1980s,” Page says. People were dying of opportunistic infections. They were emaciated, dying of chronic diarrhea, infections in their brain — things that we know are treatable and preventable. And to give credit to the Brazilian doctors, they were doing everything they could to help people, but the hospitals were at capacity.”
She traveled to the Brazil-Venezuela border as part of a fact-finding trip for Human Rights Watch.
“I interviewed over 100 people crossing the border, and I would ask them, ‘Why did you come?’ ” she says. “Ubiquitously the answer was food or health care.”
Conference & Expo
September 2, 2019
Cooper City-Florida, USA
