According to the World Health Organization, in 2008 there were 247 million cases of malaria and nearly one million deaths—mostly among African children. In Africa, a child dies every 45 seconds of malaria, and the disease accounts for 20 percent of all childhood deaths there.

April 25 is World Malaria Day.  On this day devoted to addressing one of the most widespread fatal diseases of our time, we know that bed nets are one of several important tools to combat this disease.  Bed nets are important and the most publicized form of prevention, but that’s one of many aspects of combating this far-reaching epidemic.  It’s also about education, safe drinking water, and a global cooperation of people and organizations working together with affected communities to halt this disease.

The ELCA is part of an inter-Lutheran effort to combat malaria: the Lutheran Malaria Initiative.  As this work gains momentum, consider what you can do to support it.  Learn how youth are getting involved.

Like hunger, whether you understand malaria on an academic level or by virtue of experience with the disease, a communal gut reaction is needed to the widespread devastation this epidemic continues to cause.  As one of the body of Christ suffers, so do we all.  As one of the body of Christ has AIDS or malaria, so do we all. 

Those who have the ability to act have the responsibility to act.  Whether malaria, AIDS, hunger, and countless other justice issues in the world that disproportionately affect people living in poverty, let us step forward boldly as a public church whose witness is visible in endless acts of human connection and meaningful systems of change.

-Aaron Cooper is writer-editor for ELCA World Hunger

A woman in Cambodia raises chickens through a project supported by ELCA World Hunger. Credit: Rachel Cook/LWF.

This Easter season, as we give thanks for the resurrection of Jesus Christ and a chance to be born anew, let us recommit ourselves to God’s call for us to love and serve our neighbors both near and far.

One of our global neighbors whom we support through ELCA World Hunger lives in Bangladesh.  And because of a custom many of us take part in at Easter—painting Easter eggs—I am reminded of her story, which will appear in the summer issue of LifeLines newsletter due out in late April. Here’s a sneak preview:

“Lipi Bergum lives in Bangladesh in a small hut with her husband, two children and elderly mother-in-law. With no land of their own, Lipi’s family used to get by on what meager pay her husband—a day laborer for nearby farmers—could earn. They often struggled, especially in the rainy season.

During the rainy season in northwest Bangladesh, when rice fields traditionally lie dormant, there is no work or wages for farm laborers. Day laborers and their families are often reduced to begging or worse—going hungry. For a long time, that was the reality Lipi and her family faced.

That changed when Lipi joined a local Farmer Field School run by RDRS, a long-established rural development organization supported by ELCA World Hunger.  RDRS understood her situation and gave her some ideas. Before long, with the help of a microloan, Lipi built a little shed on the family’s homestead and began raising a flock of 200 chickens to generate income.”

Lipi’s chickens yield countless eggs, and because of these chickens Lipi and her family no longer go hungry during the rainy season.  When you or the children in your life collected those Easter baskets, reflect on the importance of eggs not only for nourishment but for the life-saving difference chickens and eggs make in other parts of the world.

If you didn’t get around to buying that special Easter gift for someone you care about, consider giving 10 chicks for $10 or another truly meaningful gift and putting a special gift notice in someone’s post-Easter card or upcoming birthday or special-occasion card.

Hallelujah!  He is risen!  He is risen indeed, hallelujah!

-Aaron Cooper is writer-editor for ELCA World Hunger

Today, my daughter will be welcomed into the kingdom of God at her baptism.  She will set out on her own faith journey and one day discern her vocation.  What will she be?  What will she do?  At almost five months, there are many years ahead before these become conscious decisions bound by a series of choices.  Today is only the beginning.

Those of us who strive for justice in an often unjust world are at a different point in our vocations with countless life decisions already under the belt and hopefully many more to come.  Do we ever stop and take stock of our own journey, that which we Christians embark upon often in infancy?  How are we doing?

Let this be a reminder that as the stories of suffering in a seemingly peaceless world fill our collective inboxes and occupy our troubled concern, as we profess our own hunger while working to help those who are truly hungry, may we remember the time when we first set along our own faithful journies.  May we remember that in the face of daunting tasks like ending world hunger or fighting for those with no voice, God calls us to renewal constantly, effortlessly, and steadfastly…to be still.

God calls TO us when our minds are focused elsewhere.  And we remember that we are cleansed in our own baptisms, whether by our faith or by our human ability to start anew.

“Be still and know that I am God.”

What does one billion mean to you?  It’s that next level, the powerful tier above a million that gets our attention.  On the heels of the Academy Awards, the movie “Avatar” has made more than 2.5 billion dollars worldwide—and it’s not done yet.  Ted Turner bestowed a billion-dollar gift on the United Nations a few years back.  We know about the Gates Foundation.  And in the news lately, Tiger Woods has been dubbed the only athlete ever to reach that mark in earnings.  But then there’s the stark reality we learned about in 2009 that the number of people who are chronically hungry in the world has reached one billion.

One billion.  Where do I start?  How can I make a difference?

If you’re like me, you have asked yourself these questions.  It’s a mind-numbing number, one that can make making a difference seem futile.

But we’re the church.  We don’t get to make that decision for ourselves.  We are called to act.  We are called to reach out to our neighbor.  Not acting is not an option.

So if you find that number so incomprehensible that it almost makes you not want to try, set it aside.  I’m not suggesting you ignore the reality of the global picture of hunger but just keep it in perspective.  Lead with your gut for a moment.  Is it okay that thousands and millions and even one billion people are chronically hungry?  Is it okay that one person in your community is sleeping on the streets or walking around without knowing where that next meal will come from? 

If you’ve ever been intensely hungry and you had to wait an hour or two to eat, recall those hunger rumblings and allow that to take over your gut.  It’s that gut reaction that has the potential to circumvent numbers that almost seem made up.  It’s your gut that in a moment of cerebral paralysis can kick into overdrive that instinct, that compassion that has compelled you to read this blog and care about doing something about it.

Follow your gut.

The hungry.  Hungry people. 

If you examine the structure of either of these references, you’ll notice that the primary emphasis is on the condition of being hungry.  In the case of the hungry, the word “people” isn’t even in the realm of consciousness.  “The hungry” serves as a defense mechanism, a way to categorize something that is undesirable and put it on a shelf at a safe distance so that we don’t have to feel a personal connection.  “The hungry” are simply out there…somewhere.  Nameless, faceless, and seemingly not even human or at least not deserving enough of a human reference. 

Photo by Paul Jeffrey/ACT International

Hungry people.  On the scale of objectification, this is better.  At least we are talking about people here, though again the emphasis is not on people but rather the condition of being hungry.  People comes last, and so psychologically our emphasis is still on fixing a condition rather than serving someone just like us—same age, same gender, same station in life relatively speaking—who happened to be born in a community or country where there are extremely limited resources. 

Let’s see if we can do better.  Okay, here’s one more attempt: 

People who are hungry.  Simply put, people come first.  We’re not trying to help feed a nameless breed of beings known as “the hungry” (akin to “the infected”).  We’re not trying to serve our neighbors, the “hungry people”—still defined by their condition rather than their self-identity as human beings.  Rather, we are ministering to people—people who happen to be hungry but are people first nonetheless.  They are Kennedy Symphorian, a skinny 15-year-old boy I met years ago in Tanzania who had HIV and whose non-traditional family eeked out a meager living and survived on assistance from an organization that received support from ELCA World Hunger dollars.  They are the children begging for handouts on the streets of Nicaragua, some of whom work the streets alone during the day while their parent(s) crowd into a tightly packed school bus and ride off to work in a sweatshop.  They are nameless strangers we meet on our streets who browse trash cans for food scraps, approach our rolled-up windows at a stoplight (maybe we look at them, maybe not), sleep on a doorstep in 15-degree weather.  They are us only with fewer resources and a harder way, trying to survive. 

We cannot afford to talk about people in any way less than the dignified manner all souls should be afforded.  We are all people first and foremost.  We are Christians, Muslims, writers, janitors, men, women, fast-food workers, nurses, crossing guards, students, tailors…we are who we are, defined by our humanity and our relationship to God. 

Let’s put people first instead of resorting to comfortable, overused phrases that define people by their condition.  Maybe next time you encounter “the other”—that perfect stranger who asks you for money because she probably really needs it—you’ll ask her name and be able to talk about the time you met Rhonda rather than “some homeless woman.”

On Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago, a man lingered on a street corner, examining a trash bin for items worthy of rescue.  He wore long sleeves and slacks—items that had seen their better days—even though the June air approached 75 degrees.  While pondering whether or not to approach him, give him a few bucks, or just walk by, I studied his face.  An unexpected peace emanated from his eyes.  Not a frantic or dejected survival instinct—no, that was not what was at work.  Clearly something unusual guided this man’s approach to the work of the moment.

I forgot about this man within a few minutes, days (for sure), and after a week I doubt I thought about that encounter.  A few weeks later, I walked the streets of St. Louis during the ELCA Youth Gathering.  One night, I saw the same man doing the same thing on a street corner not unlike the one where I’d met him in Chicago.  I confronted him, unable to determine how this was possible.  Was he the most ambitious traveling homeless man in the country?  Did he migrate from big city to big city when he’d seen all he cared to see?

“I saw you in Chicago a few weeks ago,” I said.

“No, sir.  You must be mistaken,” he replied.

“No, I’m sure I’m not,” I said.  There was no mistake.  “It was definitely you.  Downtown Chicago.”

The man studied my face, a slight grin on his face though his eyes conveyed utter surprise.  That evening, he was wearing a cap.  He removed it and motioned down his body as if to say ‘have a good look.’  “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said, smiling.  “Have a good night.”

I didn’t offer to help the man that night, just as I hadn’t a few weeks before.  It wasn’t my place.  Something much bigger was at work, something I only understood weeks or even months later.

I don’t recall when I have felt a stronger presence of God on earth, embodied in a man who carried his cross with no shame, sleeping wherever he probably could, living by the grace of God.  But that’s just the thing.  One can believe it was an ordinary man, and that built on my certainty that the two were not look-alikes, this homeless man happened to garner a way to St. Louis from Chicago.  Not only that, but I happened to encounter him of all people in both cities, weeks apart.

When we’re called to act, we must act.  But why is it that those in a position to offer help assume that is what is needed?  I realized only later that the reason I didn’t offer to help the man was that he was not the one who needed something.

I was.

-Aaron Cooper is Writer-Editor for ELCA World Hunger

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (fao.org) is planning a few key events this fall:

• World Food Day: October 16
• The State of Food Insecurity in the World report (October)
• World Summit on Food Security: Rome, Nov. 16–18

We recognize World Food Day on October 16, an event “designed to increase awareness, understanding, and informed year-around action to alleviate hunger.” (worldfooddayusa.org).  This event is observed on this date in recognition of the founding of the FAO in 1945.  It is an opportunity to bring hunger to the forefront as we learn and educate others about hunger in the context of today’s world and economy.

Also this month the FAO is to publish an updated “The State of Food Insecurity in the World” report based on its June predictions that the number of people who are hungry in the world has risen by 105 million in 2009, bringing the total to 1.02 billion malnourished people in the world.

Finally, in Rome, Nov. 16–18, FAO will host the World Summit on Food Security to determine a strategy to address the increased state of global food insecurity.  FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf proposed the summit, noting “The silent hunger crisis—affecting one sixth of all of humanity—poses a serious risk for world peace and security.  We urgently need to forge a broad consensus on the total and rapid eradication of hunger in the world.”

-Aaron Cooper is Writer-Editor for ELCA World Hunger