Needed Donated Medicines Arrive in Nepal

In addition to providing volunteer medical teams to support the people of Nepal in response to their multiple destructive earthquakes, Project HOPE has also organized the donation of medical supplies and medications to aid in their healing process.

To say that it’s challenging to orchestrate shipping these donations to the middle of a disaster zone would be an understatement. Nepal has only one airport with only one runway to support large aircraft, creating a supply bottleneck to all arriving emergency supplies.  Because of damage to that single runway in Kathmandu, heavy cargo planes have been banned from landing and most cargo is now limited to commercial aircraft.

Project HOPE’s donations from the United States made it quickly to Doha, Qatar, before getting delayed in a long queue of other cargo.Through assistance from Nepal’s Ministry of Health, HOPE’s logistics team was able to bump our pallets up in priority because the supplies were in such dire need.After they were finally on the ground here in Kathmandu, the customs process started, an arduous series of paperwork and signatures that again was thankfully expedited by the Ministry.Seeing all 64 boxes of supplies in the Ministry’s warehouse felt like a huge victory after the weeks of effort put in by Scott Crawford, Vladko Uzevski, Dalibor Tasevski and the entire HOPE Gifts in Kind team to get them there.

In total, $4.7 million of donated Project HOPE materials are now in the hands of the Department of Health Services at Nepal’s Ministry of Health and Population. Those medical supplies will begin their distribution to hospitals in all 14 districts of Nepal effected by the earthquakes within the next few days. The entire shipment weighted 4,487 lbs. (2035 kilos) arriving on 8 pallets.

But this is just the beginning. Tomorrow another $1.7 million of donations will arrive at the airport in 32 more boxes to be processed for pickup the next day. More donations are in the pipeline and will be arriving within the next few weeks. Despite the unavoidable holdups and bottlenecks, Project HOPE’s medical supplies and medications are reaching the people of Nepal at a time when they are most in need.