From school to healthcare, from access to food to social integration, a project promoted by Lorenzo Dilena, of the Pime Lay Association, is aimed at the most vulnerable people in the Far North of Cameroon
A woman burned in a domestic accident who had been lying dying on a mat for four days. Students left at home because they had not paid their school fees. Detained in inhumane conditions. And then elderly women abandoned to themselves, without care and without food, single mothers without even the necessities for a daily meal, people with mobility difficulties without support.
«The urgencies and needs that are encountered every day in Yagoua are the most disparate», says Lorenzo Dilena, volunteer of the Pime Lay Association (ALP) which has been operating in the Far North of Cameroon since 2021. «However, all these stories have in common one thing: women and men of all ages and of all religions find themselves alone with an urgent need, blocked by a life situation that leaves them no hope for the future.”
As happens in many countries, in Cameroon too the impact of globalization and more generally of an unequal economic development model leaves many, too many people behind. The ancient bonds of solidarity of the village and the family are broken. The race for better living conditions causes many to abandon the countryside in the direction of the big cities and thus ends up breaking the family and social ties of the past.
This picture is further aggravated by a stagnant political and social situation. Rights in Cameroon are affirmed on paper and are systematically violated every day, corruption is widespread and suffocating. Poverty is widespread in the country and clientelism pervades all sectors of the economy and public administration. According to the Transparency International rankings, Cameroon is still among the most corrupt countries in the world – in 144th place out of 180 for transparency (2021). It is from this context that the project was born “Hope for the last” (K832), which Lorenzo wishes to launch in coordination with the missionaries on site and with the basic committees of Caritas and Codas-Caritas of Yagoua to provide material and economic help to 400 people in conditions of vulnerability and extreme need. There are four axes of intervention: school, health, food and social.
As regards the educational field, the project aims to guarantee the right to education through the purchase of school materials and the payment of the enrollment fee for orphaned children and students, children of single mothers or those who in any case , even in the presence of their parents, they experience difficult situations.
The health plan provides financial support for medical visits, the purchase of medicines and partial coverage of surgical operations for people with economic difficulties. The objective is to prevent the spread of endemic diseases linked to the lack of clean water.
In the food sector, the provision of basic foods (millet, rice, sugar, smoked fish, dried vegetables and legumes, for example) is planned to approximately 100 families of poor and vulnerable people with insufficient access to food. In this case the project will intervene with an emergency supplement to prevent malnutrition or malnutrition. It is therefore a question of providing these families with the sustenance necessary for a dignified survival, while waiting for a more lasting solution.
Finally, various interventions fall within the social sphere, such as support for lonely and abandoned people and those with disabilities, but also extraordinary support for prisoners and ex-prisoners.
«Every day we find ourselves observing the harmful effects of a development process that structurally creates waste – observes Lorenzo -. Robbery appetites are the fuel and systemic and capillary corruption is the oil that makes the whole gear turn.”
It is in this economic, social and ethical context of extreme need that the project intervention of the Alp volunteer is inserted, which aims to lend a hand to those who have remained alone and excluded from society, crushed by apparently small situations but infinitely greater than their own Strength. To give back a shred of hope to the least.
DONATE NOW
Support the project “A hope for the last. An assistance and support project for 400 vulnerable people” – K832: you will offer concrete emergency help to children, women and people in difficulty.
You can donate to the project with credit card or PayPal at this link: dona.centropime.org/unasperanzapergliultimi or by bank transfer toIban IT89M0623001633000015111283causal: K832.