Please help my hometown in Brazil flooded

Hi, my name is Flavia and I’m raising funds to help some families in my hometown Bom Jesus do Itabapoana in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The region was drastically flooded in the early hours of last Saturday 23/03/2024. After heavy rain, lots of people were woken up around 3am with water already inside their homes. Everything happened very quickly. 20.000 families were affected. Thousands of families lost everything they had. The situation is catastrophic.

This is very close to my heart, my husband and I, my oldest daughter, my parents, siblings, most of my family were born in this town. I lived there 19 years of my life, before I came to live in the UK. When I was 5 years old, my family lost everything in the flood in this same town. We were left only with the clothes we were wearing and had to flee our home with water already on our hips. At that time, lots of people helped us, with donations and washing the mud from our things, trying to recover what we could. We even lost our home, when we went back, there were only a few walls left. Slowly we got back on our feet. This time, I have many families and close friends affected, but I’m thankful, they can slowly recover their losses. Some friends from the UK, are asking me if they can make a claim to their insurance, but, unfortunately, they don’t have insurance, it’s not common in Brazil to have insurance. This money will be used for families in deeply need, who are desperate and have no idea how to restart their lives from scratch, many with small children.

So, I’m trying to raise some funds, I will send everything to someone I chose and I deeply trust. If I raise £1.600, I believe we can help at least 3 families to get essential things to start their lives again.

If you are close to me, you will know that this is very difficult for me to be raising this money, not something I like doing, I’ve been thinking about this for the past 3 days and finally decided this is the right thing to do.

If you want find out more about this, please do get in touch with me. I have dozens of videos and photos of their situation and can explain better.

If you can’t help, that’s okay, I would appreciate if you could share this with someone. Thank you so much.