Trucks arrive loaded with water, food, clothing, blankets, mattresses... These are donations collected from various regions of the country since the tragedy in Rio Grande do Sul raised awareness in other Brazilian states.
Ivanir de Souza was responsible for transporting the load from Bahia. The driver, accustomed to the North-East-South-East route, was visiting the deep south of the country for the first time. “I always knew that Rio Grande do Sul was a wonderful place to visit. It’s a shame that my visit is under these calamitous circumstances,” he said. “The journey was undertaken as an emergency to deliver aid as quickly as possible,” he concluded.
Just a few days earlier, the “Dom Bosco” Institute had received an aid consignment from outside, this time from Curitiba. “Thanks to an agreement made by a relative of one of our employees, we got in touch with an entrepreneur from Paraná who, along with three other companies in the fertiliser sector, managed to send a large delivery to our school,” says Maria Elvira Jardim Menegassi, Executive Director of the “Dom Bosco” Institute in Porto Alegre and responsible for organising the school as a distribution centre.
This convoy, containing over 40 tonnes of food, was joyfully received by all the volunteers who, working on an assembly line, unloaded every kilo of the products sent: rice, sugar, coffee, flour, and oil. The donations were tranferred to food baskets, which were distributed the next day to the displaced people.
Members of the National Security Force from the state of Tocantins also visited the “Dom Bosco” Institute in Porto Alegre, where they were welcomed by the Salesian Provincial of the “San Pio X” Province of Brazil-Porto Alegre (BPA), Fr. Ademir Ricardo Cwendrych. The group, residing between Palmas and Brasília, toured the school and the class rooms used for sorting the donations collected for the emergency and praised the organisation of the work carried out at the school.
Source: BPA Province
