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Over
800 million people in the world are chronically hungry,
including 5 million children under age 5 who will die from
malnutrition this year. Someone dies from hunger or hunger-related disease nearly
every three seconds. A child dies every five seconds (U.N.
World Food Programme). The
statistics on hunger are so incomprehensibly enormous,
they nearly overwhelm us into complacency: The problem is
just too big. Nothing can be done.
But
when these statistics become people, when the statistics
have names and faces, it becomes much harder to ignore the
problem. Fortunately, the names and the faces bring stories
of hope. Their stories become our stories — because we are
truly partners in seeking an end to hunger.
I was
traveling with colleagues from the ELCA and the
Lutheran
World Federation (LWF) program in Ethiopia. We were visiting
a group of about 30 community members of all ages who
were sharing their stories.
“But why aren’t you married?”
was a question I might expect to hear at a family wedding,
but not here on an Ethiopian hillside. One of the women
asked me about my life as an American woman — was I married?
Did I work? How were domestic chores divided? How many
children did I have?
Since I had been accustomed
to being the interviewer and not the interviewee, her
question took me by surprise. I explained about my job,
where I lived, that I am 33 years old, with no children and
no husband. More than a few eyebrows were raised at that
one, prompting the most vocal woman in the group to query me
further: What was the advantage of not being married?
I didn’t want to
over-simplify the importance of my being able to choose my own
path in life. Yet I also knew the critical inroads that LWF
staff, many of them Ethiopian themselves, had made in
engaging communities in conversation about the importance of
delaying marriage for girls so that they would continue in
school. Girls who are educated tend to marry later, have
fewer children, have healthier children, and experience
significantly less severe poverty in their families.
Education of girls and women is one proven factor in breaking the cycle of
hunger and poverty.
So as the question lingered
in the air, I saw the imploring looks from my LWF colleagues
to make the case for education and delayed marriage. And so
I explained how I had been able to go through college, how I now
owned my own home and was not financially dependent on
anyone. How I wanted to be married, perhaps even soon, and
eventually have children, but that for now, of all the
paths open to me as a woman, I had chosen this one.
As I waited for the
translator to finish telling my story, I saw a few nods of
understanding cross some of the women’s faces. At the end,
I understood better that this community was not just a
recipient of our World Hunger funding, they were true
partners in our common mission of ending hunger.
In
our church’s fight to end hunger and poverty around the
world and close to home, we take a broad approach. Education
is certainly a key strategy in this fight, but it’s not the
only one. Micro-finance, women’s empowerment, vocational
training, agricultural training, irrigation, animal
husbandry — all are proven development strategies that
reduce hunger and poverty around the world and at home.
Relief efforts address daily hunger, often in conjunction
with development projects that seek to end long-term hunger.
We advocate on behalf of our neighbors living in poverty to
our government, and we look inward through education and
awareness efforts that ask us to consider our own relationship to
people living in poverty. Our gifts to
ELCA World Hunger
Appeal make possible all these transformational strategies
through our support of key partners in our fight against
hunger.
One of our partners is Milly
Muyinga from Kakinzi, Uganda. She has eight children of her
own and is now the guardian of two orphans who lost their
parents to AIDS. It is both cost-effective to care for orphaned
children in family structures as opposed to an orphanage,
and, most importantly, it’s much healthier for them to be
raised in their home communities. Milly was eager to help
these two children orphaned by AIDS, but she needed an
additional income source to keep her new larger family from
falling into hunger and poverty.
met Agathe in a trip to
Haiti. She lives in the rural southeast mountains of Haiti,
near the border with the Dominican Republic. She has seven
children, the oldest four of whom are working in the
Dominican Republic. This is dangerous, often deadly work in
sugar cane fields and factories, but it's the only work
available.
Agathe and her family live in
extreme poverty. Until six months ago, the only hope for
her family were the dangerous opportunities of the Dominican
Republic. But with the support of ELCA World Hunger gifts to
Lutheran World Federation, Agathe is the proud owner of a
breeder pig and now two baby pigs. Agathe will sell the
piglets at market and with the proceeds, Agathe’s youngest
three children will attend secondary school. With their
cherished education, this family can begin to loosen the
tight bonds of extreme poverty.
Sustainable development
projects — those that strengthen a community’s capacity to
end the cycle of poverty — are a cornerstone of ELCA World
Hunger. But relief efforts — providing for direct needs with
food and shelter assistance — are also critical. Project
Hope, a food pantry in Omaha, Nebraska, partially supported
by a grant from our ELCA World Hunger Appeal, supplied over
5,000 individuals and families with food assistance
last year. And all this in a state we often associate
with abundant harvests and major food production for our
country!
About two-thirds of those who
received food from Project Hope last year needed it
only once that year. Maybe someone in the family had lost a job,
or the car needed emergency repairs, but for whatever
reason, they found themselves in a crisis where they
experienced hunger. Relief efforts, while not impacting
cycles of hunger, are a necessary first step to help people
begin to rebuild their lives or see them through a crisis.
Just like Milly, Agathe, Project Hope, and my inquiring
friends in Ethiopia, we each have a role in our efforts to
eliminate hunger. We give, we pray, we raise our voices
through advocacy, we speak out in righteous indignation that
hunger exists in an abundant world. We act, we learn, and we
pray again. We cannot know the names and faces of all those
who hunger today, nor those of all who join us as partners in this
ministry we share, yet as people of faith, we are
confident and hopeful, secure in our knowledge that God
loves and calls us all by name.
On an Ethiopian hillside, I
was put on the spot and asked to consider my life choices in
a new way. In a relationship, conversations like this can
happen. When we walk with those with whom we are in
ministry, when we make a mutual commitment to work together
to eliminate hunger, we are stronger, and our efforts are
the better for it. I am grateful for all our partners in
this transformational ministry — prayers, givers, doers,
believers, all — and grateful to God for this privilege of
being in this ministry together.
Kathryn Sime is director for ELCA World Hunger Appeal and
Disaster Response.
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