This is the ninth in a series of posts highlighting hunger-related activities that happened at ELCA Outdoor Ministry locations over the summer with the help of Education/Advocacy grants from ELCA World Hunger. The following is from Carol Joy Holling  Camp in Ashland, Nebraska. It was written the last week of July.

—————————————-

We are in the final week of camp here at Carol Joy Holling and the garden supported by an ELCA World Hunger Education/Advocacy grant is flourishing! Campers and staff have picked tomatoes, radishes, lettuce, zucchini, and a variety of squash. All the food continues to go to Table Grace Ministries in Omaha; an organization that teaches low income and single parent families how to cook and shop wisely.

The Hunger Garden is located at a central place on site that campers pass everyday to and from their activities. It’s an exciting place where everyone feels that they are doing something beyond our camp. The greatest experience is that many of our campers come without ever digging in the dirt or seeing where vegetables come from. This is a new experience!

Wednesdays’ focus is “Created for Community” and the Hunger Garden certainly brings the theme alive. Campers learn that “community” is much greater that just the camp – it extends out to many – many who we may never meet.

After the campers and staff leave for the summer the garden will continue to give. Members of American Lutheran Church in Ashland will come out on a regular basis to make sure nothing goes to waste. This is a great partnership with the local congregation.

Pastor Brad
Director/Programs, NLOM

Go in Peace. Remember the Poor.

Yesterday, at the end of our church service, the worship assistant sent us out with “Go in Peace. Remember the Poor.” More commonly, I hear, “Go in Peace. Serve the Lord,” so the poignant statement hit me a little more clearly. Instead of just saying serve the Lord, it gave a way to do so. Ever since yesterday morning, I have been thinking about what this means to me.

During my undergraduate years of study I completed a number of projects and papers on issues surrounding the Middle East and Islamic-Christian relations. The topics fascinated me. I think what caught my interest the most was my own need for peace and my inability to fully digest how we become so at odds with each other when we are continually summoned to peaceful ways. So I dove into the topics to learn more. It was, and is, enlightening. So today, when I think about going in peace, I think about our call to act peaceably to others. Our neighbors with whom we may have disputes, those we agree to disagree with, those who are a different color, religion or race than us, and those who seek to provoke anger or violence. We can respond in peace. My favorite Old Testament passage comes from Isaiah 2:3-5…

“³ Many peoples will come and say,

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
to the temple of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us his ways,
so that we may walk in his paths.”
The law will go out from Zion,
the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
⁴ He will judge between the nations
and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war anymore.

⁵ Come, descendants of Jacob,
let us walk in the light of the LORD.”

I love the imagery of nation not taking up sword against nation, disputes being settled and resources being used to produce food instead of weapons. This makes me think about how peace can lead to food; to a decrease in poverty.

“Remember the Poor,” the worship assistant said.

I think it is rather easy to forget the poor when we, ourselves, struggle daily to pay our bills and make ends meet. Sometimes, it is hard to remember the poor when we see the same man with an “out of work” sign standing by the traffic light month after month. It is easy to wonder why he has not gotten some kind of work yet. So this is when I remember the work of ELCA World Hunger. This probably sounds like a marketing plug, but it is true. When I do my best to remember the poor I remember the projects we support around the world, the goats that change lives, the school meal programs we advocate for and the food desert I visited as a World Hunger intern two summers ago. “Poor” is such a general category that encompasses so many life experiences. So often, we think of those in our immediate sight, people on the street corners asking for money, and so often we forget those just beyond our vision. Families like those with a roof over their head but not enough food to go around the table. The little kids I saw walking to school a couple of weeks ago wearing shorts in the snow…those who can only afford winter gloves if they come from the clothing bank…those with beautiful hearts, positive attitudes, undying faiths and empty pocketbooks. Likewise, those with sad hearts, negative attitudes, dying faiths and pocketbooks which stream unendingly.  There are many types of “Poor.”

Who will you remember this Christmas? How will your peaceful call decrease poverty? How can we, as Christians, “Go in Peace. Remember the Poor,” this season?

~Lana Lile

Do we really worship the Market and not God, as I asked in last week’s post?

After rereading Harvey Cox’s seminal essay, “The Market as God,” I thought I’d watch my own actions this week and see. Is my life all about the Market, with a little lip service given to God, or is God at the center, and the Market at the fringes?

Because it was the end of the month, I spent last weekend checking my balances on various accounts. I updated my Quicken records with recent interest and expenses. I paid my VISA bill and thought about end-of-year donations – how much, to whom?  I wrote an offering check for the church where I would worship Sunday evening. Reading the Sunday New York Times business section reminded me that Cox calls the market omniscient, a source of “comprehensive wisdom that in the past only the gods have known.” And there I was seeking, through reports from Times business writers, to know the Market’s mood and direction. Poor God! There is no religion page anymore—not in the Times, not in my hometown newspaper.

Cox says that the Market is also omnipresent, making decisions that used to be private. I like to think that trying to live simply shelters me from this aspect of the Market, but  the certified letter I received from a lawyer on Friday had a different message. It informed me that in mid-2011, after the estate is settled, I will receive a few thousand dollars from an elderly friend who recently died.

This made me uncomfortable. I was a friend, not a paid attendant!  With no spouse or children, he wanted to distribute his estate among a dozen friends and cousins whose company he enjoyed. But does this legacy somehow commodify our long friendship, assigning it a price tag, as Cox might say?

The commodification of labor turned up Wednesday night, when an midweek Advent event tackled the subject of time—what it means to us, how we use it, how we feel about our schedules. The last time I punched a time card, I was 20 and weighing asparagus in a freezer plant. In the 90s, a company I wrote for made a big deal of removing its punch clocks to demonstrate its confidence in its employees. It was news to me that the new incarnation of the punch clock is the “electronic time card.” At this Advent supper, folks complained about having every moment of their work day  monitored virtually: start time, end time, break time, break length, even the length of customer service phone calls, all measured by software lurking on their computers.

One woman worked for a prominent shipping company. Guess who is demanding the World On Time, as the slogan says? Not some murky “they.” We’re the ones insisting on those electronic time cards, every time we check the status of a package or the value of its company’s stock.

While there has always been a place to trade, says Cox, today we elevate the Market above everything else. We abide by the Market’s rules, not God’s, and our whole system—like those electronic time cards—is designed to enforce them. A short week’s worth of observation confirmed that I am completely tangled up in that system.

What to do? Perhaps revisit the powerful tools God has given us to keep the Market—previously called Mammon—from consuming us. Tools like Sabbath, a radical practice most of us have abandoned. Suppose tired Christians decided to observe an economic Sabbath and not purchase anything on Sunday, so as not to stoke consumer expectations that trap folks into Sunday work shifts. Could we let the World On Time be the World As Is, the World As Appreciated, instead?

Watching myself interact with the Market is a tentative first step in a different economic direction. In coming weeks, the Advent gathering I’m part of will explore Christian practices of Sabbath and jubilee. Harvey Cox wants the Church to recognize the Market for the idol it is so it can provide some serious alternatives. Fair trade, socially responsible investing—these are nice places to start, but how can Christians go deeper? Sabbath may hold a powerful key. Stay tuned.

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity: A Journal

Tomorrow is the 22nd World AIDS Day, a day to raise awareness and fight the stigma of HIV and AIDS (see also the very informative aids.gov Web page).  As I have written earlier,

AIDS and hunger are closely intertwined.  AIDS is rapidly spreading in the most impoverished areas of the world—places where education, women’s and children’s rights, and peace are hard to come by.  Many areas, especially Sub-Saharan Africa, are trapped in a vicious cycle in which the symptoms of poverty facilitate the spread of the disease while the lives and productivity lost to the pandemic further impoverish vulnerable communities.  Moreover, AIDS is especially devastating to hungry persons.  Malnourished persons cannot take anti-retroviral drugs—an empty stomach cannot handle the powerful medicine.  In the absence of drugs and adequate nutrition, HIV develops into AIDS more quickly.  Once a person has AIDS, more food is needed to fight the illness and counteract weight loss.

On the flip side, when someone is given the food and drugs that are essential to effectively addressing the disease the results are miraculous.

This year, take some time to watch the Lazarus Effect and learn more about HIV and AIDS and the amazing transformations that can happen if someone is simply given access to life saving drugs (drugs that cost less 40 cents a day!).   After watching, do something about it: learn more, share the film with a friend, give.

David Creech

This is the eighth in a series of posts highlighting hunger-related activities that happened over the summer at ELCA Outdoor Ministry locations with the help of Education/Advocacy grants from ELCA World Hunger. The following is from Agape Kure Beach in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina.

—————————————-

Worms. Food Waste. Campers.  You might be thinking, “Wow, what a mess!” or maybe even “Ewww, gross!”   It may be a little messy, but at Camp Agape we have been teaching campers about how to reduce our carbon footprints and world hunger by combining worms and food waste!  For the last two years, Camp Agape has been vermiposting (composting with worms).  Volunteers built vermiposting pits outside our dining hall and extra worms (red wigglers) were bought to start the process.  

After each meal campers separate their waste into two tubs: worm-friendly and trash.  Examples of waste that worms can eat include: fruit or vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, newspaper, and other organic waste.  Our campers and guests catch on very quickly not only to what foods can be composted but just how much food waste they create.  Campers also take part in maintaining the vermiposting bins: adding food waste,  shredding extra newspaper to cover the composting materials, and using water from our rain barrels to make sure there is plenty of moisture in the bins.  The more aware campers are of their waste, the more likely they are to think twice when piling up their plates with unnecessary, large serving sizes! 

Once they get into the habit of it, campers and guests find vermiposting easy to do, but often stop vermiposting when they leave simply because they don’t have vermiposting bins at home.  This summer with the help of the ELCA World Hunger Education/Advocacy grant we received, we were able to provide campers with the materials needed to take what they learned at camp about vermiposting home with them.  Campers in our SIT (Staff In Training) – Servant and Nature! Camp programs made their own vermiposting bins.  Camp Agape’s naturalist, Mir Youngquist-Thurow, led the sessions on how to create the bins, compost at home, and why composting can be so beneficial in our world.  We hope that campers will not only use their bins at home to continue vermiposting but also as a tool to teach their family, friends, and neighbors. 

Alissa Oleson
Program Director

Thanksgiving, Black Friday, the first Sunday of Advent: it’s a busy week.

At Thanksgiving, we celebrate our national creation myth. The sacred festival of Black Friday kicks off the high season of commerce and consumerism—unless you’re a devotee of its alternative celebration, Buy Nothing Day.

The first Sunday of Advent invites us to prepare ourselves to receive Christ through four weeks of quiet reflection, prayer and meditation. Too bad so many of us are going to ignore the invitation and simply squeeze an Advent candle and a verse of “O Come O Come Emanuel” into this season’s commercial demands.

I’d like to suggest an Advent discipline for us: noticing, as we participate in “the holidays,” all the ways in which act as if the world’s real god is not God but The Market. And all the ways in which we serve that Market, consciously or unconsciously.

These ideas are drawn from a powerful essay written by theologian Harvey Cox in 1999 called “The Market as God.” (For the whole article, click here)

While we have always had markets and bazaars and trading posts, says Cox, “The Market was never God, because there were other centers of value and meaning.” But today The Market is “the Supreme Deity, the only true God, whose reign must now be universally accepted and who allows for no rivals.”

Like God, The Market is omnipotent in its ability to commodify creation. It’s the reverse of transubstantiation. Instead of making ordinary bread and wine into vehicles of the holy, The Market, says Cox, “things that have been held sacred transmute into interchangeable items for sale.” Like land, or human body parts, or our labor.

We believe The Market has “a comprehensive wisdom that in the past only the gods have known.” Omniscient, it determines our needs, our worth, our pay, the cost of everything. Through reports from Wall Street, we seek to know whether “The Market is ‘apprehensive,’ ‘relieved,’ ‘nervous,’ or even at times ‘jubilant’” and respond by buying or selling. And like the God “unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid,” The Market seeks to know us in order to convert our hopes and fears, gifts and weaknesses into products and services for sale.

When it succeeds in knowing us, The Market becomes omnipresent, making decisions in areas of life that used to be personal, like child rearing, or marriage, or dating. It respects no limits. In religion, “The Creator appoints human beings as stewards and gardeners but, as it were, retains title to the earth,” says Cox. The Market says that the earth belongs to people with money who can buy anything they choose. “In the chapel of The Market…the First Commandment is ‘There is never enough.’”

The Market is omnipotent, too. Governments that seek to establish policies that contradict it are punished by The Market’s global priests.

Cox’s conclusion: for “all the religions of the world, however they may differ from one another, the religion of The Market has become the most formidable rival, the more so because it is rarely recognized as a religion.” Too many religious practitioners, says Cox, are “content to become its acolytes or to be absorbed into its pantheon, much as the old Nordic deities, after putting up a game fight, eventually settled for a diminished but secure status as Christian saints.”

Depressing, isn’t it. But spending Advent observing how we participate in—and through our actions, worship—The Market may help us name it. If we recognize The Market as a competing God, we can more clearly articulate what Christ and Christianity’s non-market God offer us. If we can grasp that gift, perhaps we can respond to it by more resolutely embodying, in our lives, Christ’s values instead of the Market’s values.

If we go on being unconscious about The Market, we’ll give lip service to the idea that we’re all children of God while we treat one another and our planet as commodities with price tags.

Starting today, notice the Market. And see what happens next.

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity

It is snowing at my house. I do not remember having a November snow since I was little. This morning, as I was watching the snow fall I thought back to a book I read as a young girl. It was either from the Little House on the Prairie series or In the Land of the Big Red Apple, but I do not recall which one. In the story, there is a party in the wintertime and all of the kids take plates outside and fill them with a mound of snow. They then cover the snow in sweet molasses. (I remember thinking how neat it was that there was shaved ice back then, too!) I wished that I too, could go to a barn dance and join the other kids in making this homemade treat, yum!

Well, today it is snowing and as I touch the snow I reconsider my will to eat much of it. Left-overs from a snowball in the face, no problem; but willfully consuming an entire plate of it, not so much. I wonder about what is in the frozen water, like dirt, pollution from cities, and other environmental poisons in such a seemly pure white layer of natural beauty. I think it is a bummer that I cannot confidently fill my plate with snow. This reminds me of how important caring for creation is, and how much it can affect even the simplest notions in life; in this case – an old-time sweet winter treat.

~Lana Lile

As the genetically modified food debate continues, I thought I would add my two cents through a bit of an everyday experiment. Yesterday, I went to the grocery store in search of a GMO free meal. I wondered how hard it would be to find these foods, how expensive they would be and what I would discover along the way. A lot of food crops in the United States are genetically modified. Corn, soy, canola and cotton top the list. You may not normally think of cotton in relation to your food, but check many candy bar labels and you’ll find cottonseed oil. I tried my hardest to not buy any foods with ingredients like “malodextrin” (usually a corn product), because I couldn’t guarantee that it didn’t come from a genetically modified plant. Perhaps this sounds a bit overboard, but it was my intention to be thorough!

I started with two main assumptions. 1: Organic foods are not genetically modified. I looked this up through the USDA Organic web site. According to their National Agricultural Library, “Organic food is produced without using most conventional pesticides; fertilizers made with synthetic ingredients or sewage sludge; bioengineering; or ionizing radiation.” 2: Foods in the USA do not require genetically modified ingredients to be labeled as such.

So off I went!

I pulled in to a big chain grocery store, grabbed my reusable shopping bags and headed in. Before I left I decided what I wanted to eat that night. I thought that if I had a goal in mind, I would be better prepared to get serious about my ingredients. I started in the produce aisle. Shopping list here: greens for salad and two pears. Admittedly, this wasn’t that difficult. I grabbed some organic Spring Mix for salad and a couple of organic pears, stopped at the nut display for some organic walnuts (who knew you could buy organic nuts??), checked out the refrigerated salad dressing and moved on. To the non-refrigerated salad dressing aisle I went.

My goal was vinaigrette, either raspberry or balsamic. Admittedly, I had no idea if these were really worth worrying about when it came to GMOs. What I found were ingredient battles like corn syrup vs. evaporated cane juice and salt vs. sea salt. There weren’t any balsamic vinaigrette options with an organic label. I thought that was good, all organic might be boring. I ended up with a roasted hazelnut and extra virgin artisan vinaigrette. I was sold by the sea salt, evaporated cane juice, lack of ingredients I couldn’t pronounce, and blaring capitalized word “VEGAN” on the back label. Although there were those two ominous ingredients that I couldn’t verify…who knows what “natural flavor” means and I can neither confirm nor deny the presence of GMOs in the canola oil. Well, we can’t be perfect.

On to chicken! It took awhile but I finally found the organic chicken. Why, you might ask is this important to my GMO free meal? Well, it’s really more about what the chickens ate than anything else (that and my will to eat meats without added hormones and antibiotics.) The label on this meat said, “100% organic vegetarian fed diet.” Okay, no, I’m not a farmer and yes, I know that chickens are technically omnivores, but in this case my goal of no GMOs continued – none in the chicken feed, none in my chicken!

Next, brown sugar. Although I already had sugar at home, I wanted to make sure that every little part of my meal had been scrutinized. So, for my candied walnuts, I thought I should start comparing sugars. Once again, I ran into the issue of my limited knowledge…are GMOs an issue with sugar? I decided not to take any chances. I bought an organic store brand of light brown sugar that clearly said on the label, “…made from organic sugar cane grown without the use of synthetic pesticides or genetic modification.” Bingo! Two more ingredients and I would be ready to start cooking; bread (or rolls) and gorgonzola cheese.

I thought bread was going to be tough. Rumors abound about GM wheat crops. So I searched high and low to find some super organic bread. It had all sorts of reassuring ingredients, down to the organic soybean oil (and that one is rather important as 89% of soybean crops in the US are genetically modified). So far, however, all of my online research claims that there is no genetically modified wheat currently being grown for sale anywhere in the world. Very good to know!

Last, but not least was the cheese. I ended up with Amish blue cheese. Yum!

Dinner!

What did I learn? First off, that there are a lot of ingredients in the food that we commonly eat. I ended up with foods containing fewer ingredients nearly all of which I could pronounce. Second, there were unexpected ingredients that I didn’t anticipate having to think about. For instance, I didn’t anticipate the need to check out the soybean oil in bread. Third, I noticed that sea salt, organic cane sugar and vegan labels were common place on much of the food I bought, whether or not it was labeled “organic.” Also, the organic brown sugar I used to candy the walnuts smelled rich like molasses, amazing! While it took me longer to shop, as I read the labels so thoroughly, and was more expensive than conventionally grown foods, for me, it was worth it.

In the end I had a very scrumptious dinner that also felt great to eat. It was full of color, somewhat low on the food chain and involved all of the food groups.

And that is my experience shopping for a GMO free dinner. Also, if you haven’t deduced my meal yet it was a lovely mixed green salad with blue cheese, pear slices, candied walnuts, chicken and a slice of bread with a little extra blue cheese on top.

Thanks for reading!

~Lana

This is the seventh in a series of posts highlighting hunger-related activities that happened over the summer at ELCA Outdoor Ministry locations with the help of Education/Advocacy grants from ELCA World Hunger. This post is from Mt. Cross Ministries in Felton, California.

——————————–

As we started incorporating hunger awareness activities into our Day Camp program, the activities have fit right in with our daily Bible encounter time, but especially on the day that we talk about Jesus feeding the 5000. As we read the story together, you can see on the faces of the campers who haven’t heard the story that they, like the disciples, are surprised. They concentrate on what would have prevented 5000+ people from eating (not enough food, not enough time to feed a crowd that large, etc.).  5000 is a big number! The surprise in the story is not just that Jesus was able to feed so many with so little, but that a child was the one that had the food. Adults who have heard the story many times tend to forget that it was a child who helped, but this is significant for children to hear. Too many times our children are told that they have no impact or cannot help, but we can all help to feed those who are hungry. Hearing that a child was the one who provided what he had helps kids think about how they can help others using what they have. Not only does this story empower kids to help feed others, but it encourages them to problem solve as well. In the story the disciples faced issues of food distribution and time, as we do today on a larger scale. Encouraging our children to help think of ways to help with these issues makes sense, because they, like all of us, make food choices that impact others.

In one activity we have the kids from Day Camp represent the world. They are divided into groups by how much they would have. When they see how many of their group would not have enough to eat, statistics become real for them. Activities like this change hunger from an abstract problem affecting people across the world to something that they can help to solve.

Each week our Day Campers have been planting vegetable seeds to take home and to give away. Like those seeds, I am hopeful that the seeds that we have planted in these children this summer will take root and help them to grow into faithful adults who have a positive impact on the world.

Mariel Spengler
Director of Day Camp Ministries
Mt. Cross Ministries

This started as a thought, turned into a blog idea and ended as a poem. These were my Saturday afternoon thoughts as I interacted with one of our most precious resources…

It’s raining all around me. I can hear it on the windows and I felt it as I walked through the streets of town this afternoon.

It seems as though water abounds.

The ocean is near, a creek runs behind my house and the river is not a half mile away.

It seems as though water abounds.

I washed my hands, dirty from building a fire for Autumn warmth. The tap provided an unending stream.

It seems as though water abounds.

A memory returns. A colleague suggesting that we often are not truthful with ourselves as we try to conserve and accompany and aid.

It reminds me that for many, clean water does not abound.

~Lana Lile