Update Campaign “Care for Beira”
How caring a university can be for Mozambique! Geraldine Beaujean of SHE Collaborates was in Beira when cyclone IDAI hit the country hard. On Thursday, March 28, FHML started the fundraising campaign “Care for Beira” within Maastricht University initiated by SHE. € 17,000 has already been donated for this campaign.
Fantastic and heart-warming initiatives started in our faculty. Students donated and shared messages on social media. Human Biology was the first department to take action. Immediately they baked cookies together for Mozambique. Even before the start of the weekend, they donated €500 to the campaign.
UM-sport donates the proceeds of the rental of towels to this goal for a whole month with the motto: “Don’t forget to forget your towel”. The UB comes into action, study associations breed on plans etc. An explosion of creative ideas from caring people with the heart in the right place. Thank you all!
2nd year BMS student Amanda Macamo, our Mozambican FHML student immediately helped with a supporting video call for help and spoke to her fellow students.
We hope that more people will follow these fantastic initiatives to make the result even more rewarding. Reconstruction is already taking place in Beira, which requires a lot of energy and costs loads of money. Our partner university UCM in Beira has sent a budget overview and the expected reconstruction costs amount to 1,8 million euros.
Contact with Beira is still difficult due to the damaged infrastructure and communication is still slow. The message from the rector of UCM reached Maastricht:
“Thank you for your support. Thank you too for the good news, I mean the campaign for our University. Our institution is greatly weakened by the destruction caused by the IDAI cyclone. Thankfully, we did not register any human victims but we registered serious material damages to our infrastructure and equipment. In the face of a panorama of general destruction, we are, at the same time willing and encouraged to start anew and we began the work of reconstruction for the benefit of our students and the Mozambican population to improve the living and educational conditions and standards again.
All of us are very thankful for Maastricht’s initiative. All the best, Padre Alberto Ferreira, Rector of the Catholic University of Mozambique”
Please stay involved. Donate now to bank account IBAN: NL21 INGB 0653 6632 42 under the name Stichting Universiteitsfonds Limburg / SWOL with reference to "Care for Beira", Maastricht University.