No Baby Deserves To Starve! Two Girls From Subang Raise RM6,300 For Children’s Necessities

By Quinny Tan  •  in News
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The effects of this worldwide pandemic doesn’t stop to discriminate, even families with little ones who need as much care as we do are not spared.

Subang-born fundraisers, Tam Jia Wie and Ning Eka, started out #KitaJagaBaby when they saw the amount of people who showed signs of needing help on KitaJaga.co and decided to step up.

 

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A post shared by ️️Ning Eka (@tofuning)

The girls went into this project, thinking that their area was already a relatively well-off place, and were disheartened to find out otherwise.

They were shocked to see how many families actually needed help. It shed light on the areas that might need help within their community.

“There is a lack of emphasis on providing children’s necessities among existing initiatives in our community. Some parents even asked for basic kitchen ingredients like salt and soy sauce. If they can’t even afford these small items, how can they afford the bigger, more expensive items for their children? It was really heartbreaking to see children starving and the lack of emphasis on their needs. Hence, #KitaJagaBaby started,” they said. 

 

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A post shared by ️️Ning Eka (@tofuning)

The 22 year olds started their initiative a month ago, setting out to help at least 10 families a week, including single mothers, pregnant women, and parents with autistic children. JUICE had a chat with them to get a walkthrough of their process…

“Normally on the weekdays we will find families who are in need from the Kitajaga.co website, collect information from the families who raise the white flags with a brief description of them asking for baby necessities, and then we buy the items from the supermarket.

“On weekends, we will pack and distribute the goods (pampers, milk and cash assistance),” said the two girls.

One of the more memorable experiences they had throughout this project was when they visited three families living near a recycling centre.

“We would have never expected people to be living in that small space. It is very sad to see this in our own community, and it really made us understand our community a lot better.”

The girls started out by posting on their socmed, asking for donations for their campaign and received an influx of messages from friends and family to contribute to the fund. Over three weeks, they managed to raise RM6,300 and scaled this fund to help out 31 families in the area.

“We really didn’t expect people to donate so much, but we’re really grateful to see that people want to help out. Originally, we would have been happy if we could help 10 families, and we thought that was an ambitious goal,” said the organisers of KitaJagaBaby, thankful for the surprising reach.

Donations are now primarily done via links on their social media, but they have started reaching out to small businesses for a lending hand. @tuzi.bakes, a local cookie selling business on Instagram and friend of KitaJagaBaby, has also offered to donate 85% of their profits to help out the initiative. 

In addition, they have future goals to reach to larger organisations to help them further their mission. 

“Many families will not be able to recover from the loss from this pandemic, even when things go back to ‘normal’,” they noted.

“The most rewarding thing after delivering the necessities to the families is receiving their blessings and sometimes pictures of their kids holding the baby products that we bought for them. Some parents also send an audio of them saying thank you and sharing their blessings. That was one of the sweetest things ever to receive, seeing a huge smile on their faces when they receive the products.”

If you’d like to help out and further this movement, you can do your part in helping these families out here.

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