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ELCA World Hunger

Time for some honesty, folks.

Climate change is an issue I have generally shied away from in the past.
Climate change is an issue I’ve been comfortable with not having firm convictions about.
Climate change is something I once thought was untrue. A trustworthy and reputable professor in the biology department at a local community college convinced me of this during a summer class I took.

One awesome aspect of the work I participate in and observe at ELCA World Hunger is that coupled with educating me, it also pushes and stretches me to internalize what I’ve learned about an issue, articulate a position, and then hold to those beliefs. Climate change is one of those issues. I’ve learned through conversations with my colleagues, interaction with many of our resources, like the Hunger and Climate Change Connections Toolkit, reading numerous blog posts, observing the serious care with which this organization approaches its commitment to environmental stewardship, and most recently, through preparation for intentional engagement with people attending the South Carolina and North Dakota Glocal Mission Gatherings on the topic of climate change and its relation to hunger and poverty.

My conclusion is not something radical or new. It’s old news to many of you who’ve been here longer than me. It’s simply this: climate change is happening and is impacting the most vulnerable people in the world. Those who are poorest and most vulnerable have the fewest resources to adapt and cope, and are at the greatest risk of suffering and hunger. This issue that seems to be unrelated to hunger actually is, in a very real way.

My favorite plenary session from the Urbana09 student missions conference (I hope you are not getting tired of reading about this!) was an address from Denise-Margaret Thompson on the evening focused on the environment. Denise-Margaret Thompson is a professor at the University of Trinidad and Tobago. Her work has focused on technology innovation, entrepreneurship and economic development. Hearing her passionate and compelling assertions about climate change was the beginning of a journey away from my reservations about the issue, and an excellent primer for all that I’ve learned at ELCA World Hunger.

Here are some of her remarks:

“This issue of climate change and the environment disproportionately affects the poorest, most vulnerable, and disenfranchised in our world who have no voice and had nothing to do with it in the first place.”

“Sustainability, climate change and the environment is not a new issue. It’s an old issue. But it will require each of us doing what we’re called to do to care for the earth.”

“The informed, deliberate, careful Christian worldview is too often absent because not enough of us have followed Jesus into this neighborhood.”

And my favorite: “Education is derived from the Latin educo, ‘I lead out.’ Nothing more succinctly describes our role in our societies today.”

Until recently, climate change is something I have been hesitant to “lead out” on. But that has changed. And even if I’m way behind the times are haven’t said much new in this post, I hope my honesty contributes something, and maybe encourages you to think about matters of injustice you might be hesitant to lead out on.

Julie Reishus

Examining World Hunger at Mar-Lu-Ridge

This is the second in a series of posts highlighting hunger-related activities happening at ELCA Outdoor Ministry locations with the help of Education/Advocacy grants from ELCA World Hunger. Today’s post comes from Mar-Lu-Ridge in Jefferson, Maryland.

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As I write this, we are receiving the first rains in 4 weeks. Our temperatures in Maryland have been as high as 100 degrees, but all is well and our campers have happily watered our new garden every day. The idea for our Garden of Hope sprang from our summer curriculum, Keeping the Earth, and from our desire to involve our campers in hands-on activities as they learn more about how food grows and eventually ends up on their plates. Playing in the dirt seemed like the perfect fit. Funding from the ELCA World Hunger’s Education/Advocacy grant allowed us to establish a garden in our day camp area. We installed a 7.5 foot high deer fence, so that any veggies grown could make it to the local soup kitchens, not into the bellies of our resident deer population. Despite the heat and lack of rain, we have some tomatoes, beans, cucumbers and squash coming on the vine. While our harvest will be small this first season, our campers have had the chance to plant, tend and learn about their food. We encourage them to take these lessons home, and help their families establish similar gardens. Painting boards to decorate the garden is another favorite activity – it’s looking good!

Twirling the compost tumbler has become a daily activity for our campers in the mountain-top section of our property. There is no good soil for a garden here, but these campers see the garden when they hike to Area 3 each week for a sleep-out. Lessons about composting are taught in Nature each week as well. The coolest thing that is happening in this area of camp is the daily opportunity to contribute a quarter to ELCA World Hunger when they visit the store each day. A running tally is kept, groups try to outdo each other, and when the weekly total is announced, they are all amazed at what they have done. So far this summer, we have raised $200 in quarters!

As we learn to care for our brothers and sisters in need, we remember one of our summer verses: “I have come that you might have life – life in all is abundance.” John 10:10b

Sarah Lefler
Director of Operations
Mar-Lu-Ridge

Grant recipient provides fresh fruit from an old orchard

I pulled up to Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Bellevue, Washington last Thursday excited for what I could not yet see. As Pastor Gary Dalenius walked me out to the back of the building, I realized that this place was just waiting to surprise me. Out I walked to a garden filled with pumpkins, beans and beautiful flowers destined for the altar. Beyond the garden a large orchard, true to its farm ancestry, fills the lawn with old trees growing quince, apples, pears, nuts (for the squirrels!) and plums.

Janet and Jan from the Holy Cross Earthkeeping Group

I walked through the garden and orchard of this ELCA World Hunger grant recipient project with parishioners Jan Starr and Janet Farness and Associate Director of the ELCA World Hunger Program, Christopher Carpenter. As we strolled through the grounds we were blessed to sample some of its splendor. The Transparent apples were soft and juicy in my mouth and the beans crunched with flavor. All of this goodness is part of a strategic process that Holy Cross started last summer in which they decided to address local issues of hunger, caring for creation and homelessness.

Bellevue is a community lush with Microsoft employees and beautiful homes, but amidst this land of plenty lives hunger and need. So the church’s Earthkeeping Affinity Group came up with the idea to take advantage of the large plot of Creation in their backyard to provide food to the community. Twenty-seven community garden plots are now full of flowers and food. Community members attend to their plots of 50 or 100 square feet and harvest fruits and vegetables for their tables. On top of that, as Jan pointed out, “gardens always produce more than you need.” As a result, about 500 pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables have been delivered to the local Hopelink food bank since their first vegetables ripened in April.

Spring pruning in June

This project has truly been a blessing of relationship building. The vast majority of gardeners do not attend Holy Cross, instead they were contacted because they were wait-listed for another garden in the area. The local food bank also suggested some individuals and now they are able to grow their own fresh fare. It has been a blessing for the church to be able to open its land to new immigrants from Iran, as well as for the opportunity to teach a three day Earth Camp for four to six year old kids this summer. Working with local expert gardening societies, Jan and Janet expressed how their advice has helped to keep their grounds organic and help to bring the fruit trees slowly back to bounty. Work parties in the orchard have included volunteers recommended to the church by the City of Bellevue while neighbors across the fence often offer the gardeners a cool drink on hot days. “When everybody’s working in the orchard, everybody’s the same,” explained Janet.

Ramatollah with the first crop of radishes

Putting together the garden plots was no small task. The lot’s glacial soil posed a substantial need for tilling and top soil. Thanks to a $2,000 offering from the congregation, the donation of some tractor time and a whole bunch of helping hands, food production at Holy Cross is a reality today. Through this process Jan and Janet told us how they felt more and more that they were part of a larger movement. In nearby Seattle, the mayor has announced 2010 as The Year of Urban Agriculture, across the street at a neighboring church planting has begun in the parking strips, an ELCA World Hunger grant aided the process and demand for fresh, local food seems to be on the rise.

As one person offered during the visit, “the spirit blows and look what happens!”

Is your congregation interested in getting involved? Have you been considering growing food or offering community garden plots? Please email hunger@elca.org with any questions and to learn more about our grant opportunities. Also, Jan and Janet offer this encouragement to congregations: “Grow For It!”

~Lana Lile

Choices

In my very first Hunger Rumblings post, I gave quick shout-outs to three different formative experiences that had huge effects on my passion for seeking justice, with a promise to follow up with more descriptive information in later blogs. I’ve already covered veganism pretty extensively, but I was reminded of another topic I promised to explore more as I read this post from Dan Ruth on LWR’s blog a couple days ago.

Dan’s remarks focus on the huge privilege of choice. He points out how we have the luxury to choose to devote hours to baking, as well as the luxury to choose convenience and instead throw something in the microwave, doing little to no work for a meal.

He writes, “I have a choice between home-cooked, slow food and microwaved, fast food. Having the option to come home from work and throw a certified organic meat-flavored black-bean patty into the microwave shows how little work I need to do to have a nourished, calorie-filled body. Millions of people around the world spend nearly their entire day, every day, gathering just enough food and water to sustain themselves and their families.”

Like Dan, over the past few years I’ve become a huge lover of cooking. I love perusing recipes, wandering the grocery store aisles and farmers’ market stands for fresh and fun ingredients, spending hours in the kitchen preparing a meal, and then feasting on my careful creation. Dan’s realized how lucky he is to be able to revel in the slowness of bread. I’ve realized how lucky I am to be able to choose healthy food over cheap but nutritionally empty food, to choose from a great variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, and to have so many incredible options available to me that I can be adequately – no, abundantly – nourished even while completely avoiding animal-based foods.

OK, back to that formative experience. I promise it relates! The power I have to choose the way I eat hit me hard when I shared a solidarity meal with 17,000 other people at the Urbana09 student missions conference last December. That night each of the 17,000 of us gathered in St. Louis had a small portion of bread, black beans, and two ounces of water for dinner. I will not soon forget the seemingly endless sea of students eating together in that huge hall, all sharing the same simple meal at the same time, intentionally entering into solidarity with people around the world who have little or no access to essential elements to life. While that night the we had no choice besides bread, beans, and two ounces of water, the rest of our lives are characterized by abundant blessings that allow us the luxury of choice. This realization struck me as I walked past the thousands of trays of bread and black beans at Urbana, and helped spur me on a path of becoming more and more aware of the many in our world who cannot make choices about what they eat, who have no access to educational resources about nutrition, and who actually go hungry every day.

Choices about food are only some of the many choices I have the privilege to make. I have the power of choice about my education, work, where I live, how I spend my time and money, and so much more. Dan leaves his readers with this thought: “what I love about the work of Lutheran World Relief (and ELCA World Hunger) is that access to choice, over the long-term, becomes a reality for many people who have never had that opportunity in the past.” I love that too.

Julie

Movie Monday (the final chapter)

As the dog days of summer wind down (it’s the end of August already–yikes!), I bring you the final installment of the Movie Mondays series.  I hope you had the chance to check out one (or more!) of the titles.  You can find a list of all the films for which we have prepared discussion questions on the hunger education website.  Grab some ‘corn and host some friends, let’s think about how to make the world a better place!  On to our final episode:

Flow: How Did a Handful of Corporations Steal Our Water? 2008 (84 minutes)

This provocative film discusses the “blue gold” known as water—a precious necessity of life that most people in the United States take for granted.  The film investigates the water quality of both tap and bottled water, the accessibility/affordability of clean water in developing countries like Bolivia, and local resistance to water privatization efforts.

For a companion discussion guide, click here.

David Creech

Home is where your heart is, not your stuff

“How was your year?” people at Holden Village ask.

They ask because they know that a year ago this month, I left my job, sold my house, saw my son off to grad school in a new city, and, after a few weeks at Holden, moved what was left of my stuff to a shed on a farm in Washington State.

While my stuff has stayed put, I’ve visited 13 states and 5 countries and stayed in 60 different places (many of them more than once), sometimes for one night, sometimes for a month. I’ve done all of this travel without owning a car and nearly all of it without borrowing one.

Few possessions and no rent or mortgage have made this peripatetic year possible. I’ve traveled unencumbered, and I haven’t missed my stuff. After decades of offering hospitality to others, I’ve enjoyed accepting it from others.

Eventually I will unpack, start a new garden, get a new dog, and be the hostess instead of the wanderer. But first, a few more adventures! And then, where I unpack will look a lot different than the home I packed up. It may be a very tiny home, or a mobile home, or a room in someone else’s place.

A year ago these options were hidden to middle-aged me. Young adults have permission to explore living in groups, teepees, or dorms. The very old are expected to shrink their lives down to a modest apartment or a single room. But the rest of us (in the American middle class, anyway) are stuck. Judged on the size of our house, the exclusivity of our address, our brand of car, we only try to own less or consume less when we “have to”—because the economy has gone south, or our job is toast.

Out here on the house-less, stuff-less fringes, I’m feeling free and having a great time.  Now that the eight place settings of sterling silver that used to whisper “you’re a grownup” are on the farm singing to the alfalfa, I can see lots of perfectly pleasant and responsible ways to be a grownup who owns very little.

How those options are described are critical. If I said, “Come with me to a tiny town in the remote wilderness where you can’t get a cell phone signal, you can’t drive your car, you won’t eat much meat, and you’ll have to share a bathroom,” you might politely refuse. But most people who come to Holden Village are too busy enjoying life in community to miss their car or cell phone.

Likewise, an invitation to downsize dressed up in “have to” language may not be appealing. How I wish we overfed, overweight, overscheduled, overconsuming Americans saw living with less not as deprivation but as freedom. Freedom to consider the question, how else might we live? What might we be able to feel, imagine, or experience if we were not so weighed down by our domiciles and possessions? How might we better love and serve one another?

If there’s a little voice in side you saying “this is too much,” pay attention. Nurture it. Consider it an invitation, and see where it takes you. And send me a postcard when you get there!

Anne Basye, Sustaining Simplicity: A Journal

Fresh fruit, fresh perspective

Blueberries ripening in my front yard.

A few days ago I was standing in my kitchen looking for a snack. Having just gotten back from vacation, there were no fruits or vegetables to be found and I was craving their nutrition. My first reaction was disappointment and my second was the need to add my favorite fruits to the grocery list. Bummed, I found another snack and moved on.

About a half hour later I was reminded to check on the blueberry bushes outside to see whether or not the birds had gotten underneath the netting. Blueberry bushes!!! Just 20 feet from where I stood, craving fresh fruits, are two blueberry bushes full of wonderful, colorful, scrumptious fresh fruit. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. It gets better…

While I was outside checking on the blueberries I noticed that an apple had fallen from one of our apple trees. Although it is a bit early in their season I picked another low slung, reddening apple to check its tartness and enjoy a burst of homegrown fruit. As I picked the apple I realized that it had been awhile since I had pulled nutrition from the earth myself, and realized just how far I had gotten from my food. I had one of those “aha!” moments that happen from time to time as I ate the juicy apple and contemplated not having to go to the grocery store to buy fruit, but instead eating from the earth in my own front yard. Apple trees take time to prune, initial purchase money to buy, other necessary care depending on the year and often much of the low fruit is lost to the neighborhood deer, but I also had a sense of God providing as I picked that apple.

Never have I felt further away from my food than in that moment. The act of picking fruit, however, reminded me of how Creation works to nourish us if we respect and care for its processes.

~Lana Lile

Saturated

Well readers, it took ten weeks, but on Monday of this week I had the overwhelming feeling that I’d reached the point of saturation – that state when no more can be absorbed, when one is full to the maximum possible extent and an increase will produce no further results.

A couple of images came to mind as I thought about how I was feeling: a sopping wet sponge sitting in a puddle of excess water, and a curious chemistry student standing over a glass of water, constantly stirring as she adds more sugar, only to watch it pile at the bottom of the glass because no more could be dissolved into the liquid.

I was full. Full of information, stories, statistics, thoughts, images, connections and questions. Ten and a half weeks ago I started interning at ELCA World Hunger and entered a time of intentionally and fervently raising my awareness of hunger and poverty by seeking out that information, those stories, statistics, thoughts, images, connections and questions. Then, on Monday afternoon as I sat looking at headlines and browsing blog posts, that feeling of saturation took over.

Nothing affected me. I could not process any new information. I longed to be in a large, empty white room or an open field, to listen to loud, numbing music, to run, or to dance. I needed a good wringing out.

I thought about my blog post for this week and my role in of adding to the noise, the chatter, and the endless sources of information. (I played with the idea of making this a very concise and simple post, but I will leave that for another time. Somehow I am loving the irony of working out my over-saturation through more and more words. Stick with me.)

Ultimately my saturation-induced paralysis and impassivity passed. A different image that came to my mind: the simple figure 1.02 billion. I focused on the single fact that 1.02 billion people are undernourished, and again felt like doing everything possible to learn more and to act against the overwhelming problem of hunger and poverty.

Again with the irony, somehow reading more also helped me wring myself out. I love what Allie said about hope in her blog yesterday. She writes, “I have gained knowledge of the realities of our world. Most importantly, as cheesy as it may sound, I have gained hope. I look back to the first week of the summer when I felt overwhelmed by the reality of hunger in the world and by the work done at ELCA World Hunger. Eleven weeks later, I am still amazed by the work that is being done and by the positive impact it is having, but I also have hope.”

So that’s what I leave you with today. In our often over-saturated lives, remember that 1.02 billion people are hungry, and that we have hope.

Julie

See you later Rumblers!

This Friday will mark my last day interning at ELCA World Hunger, which has led me to reflect on these past eleven weeks. My first week of interning at ELCA World Hunger was overwhelming to say the least. I was inundated with the realities of hunger around the world and the wonderful ways in which this organization is going about alleviating those realities. Every night of that first week I came home exhausted from all the new information and from my own excitement for the way in which ELCA World Hunger approaches its work. This first week gave me great enthusiasm for the projects I would be working on this summer.

While I worked on a variety of projects that dealt with many different root causes and outcomes of hunger, my main projects dealt with the intersection between women and hunger, which is a subject I have become incredibly passionate about. Out of the 1.02 billion people on this planet who are hungry, women are a sub-group that often suffers disproportionately from hunger and poverty. 6 out of 10 of the world’s poorest people are women. Many women are not given a chance to go to school, own land or their own business, are forced to work in unpaid or informal jobs, experience violence and are not treated as equals.

The other part of my work focusing on women dealt with the fact that women can be the answer to alleviating hunger and poverty. When women have the opportunity to earn income, they reinvest 90% in their families, while men invest 30-40%. If women can be treated as equals and given the same opportunities, not only will they benefit, but their families and communities will as well.

While this is only a taste of the work I was involved in this summer, it serves an example of what I have gained from this experience. I have gained passion for anti-hunger and anti-poverty work. I have gained knowledge of the realities of our world. I have gained important skills that will help me in my future social justice work. Most importantly, as cheesy as it may sound, I have gained hope. I look back to the first week of the summer when I felt overwhelmed by the reality of hunger in the world and by the work done at ELCA World Hunger. Eleven weeks later, I am still amazed by the work that is being done and by the positive impact it is having, but I also have hope. I have hope that this organization is providing people with opportunities to lift themselves out of poverty, and that this will have a multiplying effect on their communities. I have hope that this is being done in a manner that upholds human dignity and that sees each and every person on this planet as capable and valuable.

I am very thankful for the experiences I have had this summer. I have whetted my appetite for social justice work, and am excited to see how this experience will contribute to future experiences. I am hopeful that I (and that all of you out there) can play an important role in alleviating hunger and poverty in our world.

Love,
Allie Stehlin

Movie Monday

As the summer draws to a close (Yikes! That went way too fast!), grab a flick and think about how you can make the world a better place!  Today’s recommendation:

King Corn, 2007 (90 minutes)

Two recent college graduates move to a rural farming community in Iowa and work with local farmers to grow one acre of corn using conventional farming methods. Their intent is to trace their corn from farming to end use, but they find that is impossible given the current food production system. The filmmakers embark on a journey through this food system and shed light on farm subsidies, genetically modified seeds, the farm program and modern-day farming. After watching this film, you might find yourself reading food labels in search of the ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup or other corn products that you never imagined would make their way into your diet.

For a discussion guide on the film, click here.  Other films and discussion guides are available on the hunger education Web site, www.elca.org/hunger/education.

David Creech