IHE Humanitarian Response Team member documenting the earthquake-collapsed buildings in La Guaira, Venezuela, with heavy machinery working in the background.

Active campaign · Earthquake response

Venezuela Earthquake Relief

IHE's Humanitarian Response Team works with local volunteers in Caracas and La Guaira, where the greatest need is in the tent camps. One mission was completed in July. The next leaves September 15.

Support the September mission

Mission report

What the July mission did

July 13–20, 2026 · Caracas and La Guaira

From July 13 to 20, an IHE team worked alongside local volunteers in Caracas and La Guaira, reaching families displaced by the earthquake. The greatest need is in the tent camps, among them Ojitos de Chávez, where families with young children and older adults keep daily life going.

The team delivered infant formula, oral rehydration salts, non-perishable food, hygiene kits, and medical supplies, packed by hand into suitcases and handed over directly in the camps. The supplies are itemized in the mission's donation inventory, published below.

In the camps, the team also held art workshops with the children: markers, small canvases, and afternoons of drawing between the tents. The finished paintings traveled to "El Arte de la Resiliencia", the benefit auction supporting the relief fund.

None of this happens without the local volunteers who worked beside the team all week: organizing, turning needs into lists, making sure every suitcase reached the right hands. Every mission that follows is built on that partnership.

On video

The July mission on video

Footage from the team on the ground in Caracas, La Guaira, and the camps.

Photo record

The mission in photographs

Every photograph below was taken by the team during the July mission. No stock imagery. The record runs from arrival and supplies to the deliveries, the art workshops, and the ground reality in La Guaira.

Watching the children paint in the middle of all that was the most moving moment of the mission.
Juan Candelario, Director of Operations

Arrival & supplies

Deliveries in the camps

Art workshops with the children

On the ground in La Guaira

Benefit auction

El Arte de la Resiliencia

The children of the camps painted 30 works in the July workshops. The paintings traveled to the United States in the team's suitcases.

Every work is open for offers from $100. All of it returns to the camps where the young artists live.

Meet the 30 works

Transparency

Every dollar documented

Every IHE mission publishes its donation inventory and its expense report. The actual documents, not summaries. Donations to the Venezuela fund are restricted: they pay for this relief work and nothing else.

Donation inventory · July mission (PDF)

The July expense report will be published when the accounting period closes.

The full manifest

Everything that travelled, line by line

The July mission travelled with two customs manifests: the purchases made in Cúcuta, on the Colombian side, and those the team carried from the United States. This is both of them consolidated, with the same totals those documents declare.

Everything that travelled, line by line
Category	What it includes	Total
Food	Rice, beans, lentils and pasta for the camps' communal kitchens.	32 bags
Infant nutrition	Canned infant formula.	12 cans
Medicine	21 different medications: paediatric syrups for fever and cough, antihistamines, anti-diarrhoeals, anti-inflammatories, burn cream, gum pain gel and water purification tablets.	91 units
Rehydration and fever	One hundred oral rehydration sachets and three hundred acetaminophen tablets.	400 units
Hygiene	400 children's toothbrushes, 200 adult brushes with toothpaste, 200 toothpaste tubes, 300 soap bars, 300 body wipes and 100 travel shampoos.	1,590 items
Toys and art supplies	Dolls, toy cars, balls, Play-Doh, crayons, watercolours, markers and twelve canvases. Those canvases became the works in the auction.	39 pieces
Tools and rescue equipment	Flashlights, work gloves, rope, backup batteries, handheld radios and tools, handed to the crews clearing rubble in La Guaira.	27 pieces

Quantities are those of the original manifests, unrounded. The July expense report will be published once the accounting period closes.

Between one mission and the next

The need does not take a break between missions

The team spent a week in La Guaira. What those families need lasts all year, and it does not wait for us to come back in September.

That is what Humanade is for: the IHE platform running in La Guaira and Vargas, the same areas as the mission. There, neighbours post what they need and others post what they can give, and they reach each other directly. There are open requests for water for a whole neighbourhood, medicine for a health post, school supplies for children who lost theirs. And offers too: someone has put a covered warehouse up for storing donations, free, for six months.

See the open requests on Humanade

Next mission

The September mission

Departs September 15, 2026 · About 10 days

Seven or more of us travel from the United States and Colombia, and local volunteers join us on the ground. We return to the same camps, with more hands and more to hand over.

Deliveries of medicine, hydration, and food
Physical and mental health care days
More art and play activities with the children

Fundraising goal

$10,000

When the $10,000 goal is met, the campaign expands to a $13,500 mission that adds physicians and health professionals traveling from the United States.

Updated July 24, 2026 · The campaign has just opened