My summer at the ELCA churchwide office has been a wonderful learning experience. The smiles and welcoming attitudes of staff made the office, and cube-life, a lot less intimidating. I really appreciated how I was engaged in the work of the World Hunger Program, not only in my assignments, but in the work and conversations of all of the staff.

As a nursing student interested in public health, I was very much in my comfort zone when I began the summer researching the intersection of disease and hunger, focusing on diarrheal disease, tuberculosis, pneumonia, malaria, HIV and AIDS.

Shortly after I started, my focus was expanded to start thinking about food production. I read In Defense of Food by Mark Pollan, and will never buy margarine again!  I was able to travel to Wapato, Washington for an “Ethics of Eating Event.” I have never truly considered where my food came from, or what it cost others and the environment to produce what I was eating. This event as well as further reading, has made me, and very soon all of my friends, family and twitter followers, a much more informed consumer. It is also something I will be able to take back to the hospital; obesity is a growing medical concern, and has very much to do with not only what we eat, but what’s available to us and how it’s produced. It’s not just a health issue, but also a social justice issue.

I truly began seeing the work of Church in Society when I traveled to New Orleans for the Youth Gathering as a part of the Justice Town team. I spent days talking to high school students about youth homelessness as well as criminal detention facilities, two subjects I did not know much about previously. Justice Town allowed me, as well as the visiting youth, to see how the ELCA is truly involved in all levels of social justice work, from the education we were doing on the spot – sharing stories of relief and development – to the advocacy postcards that we asked youth to fill out before they left. I continued to see the work of the church when I traveled to Domestic Hunger Grant recipient sites in Racine and Milwaukee. It was a beautiful reminder that the ELCA acts as God’s hands by facilitating even more of His work.

In August, I was able to bring my research on disease and hunger to the Toolkit Creative Retreat at Lake Chautauqua Lutheran Center in New York. There I was able to work with an amazing group of people to develop education material focused on the malicious cycle of poverty, hunger and disease.

Throughout my journey this summer, I have made many friends, heard many stories, have had my eyes opened to the injustices in today’s world, and have seen how we, carrying out God’s work on earth, can be the change.

Rachel Zeman

A lot of what I hear about climate change involves catastrophic statements about what will happen. Sea levels will rise, plunging cities and coastlines under water. Desertification will increase, causing human migration and wars over water. Severity and frequency of storms will increase, causing countless forms of destruction. And of course, the poorest, who have the fewest resources for adaptation, will suffer the most.

It’s all very scary, but it is also often tempered by future verb tenses and debate over the predictions’ plausibility. Even though the weather here in Chicago has been unusual this summer, it may just be a natural fluctuation. Besides, even if the climate is changing, Manhattan isn’t under water yet. It’s a slow process and no one can really predict how bad it will be. We have time.

Or perhaps not. Manhattan may not be under water, but Italy and Switzerland are moving. It seems the border between the two countries, established in 1861, was set along the ridge of a glacier. Now the glacier is melting, and so the line is moving. Climate change – happening right now – is changing the defined territories of two countries. 

Luckily, this particular case is not catastrophic, which I’m guessing is why I didn’t run across it as a front page headline. As reported by Discovery News, “Since the affected demarcation line runs through uninhabited peaks 13,000 feet above sea level, the measure would not force changes in citizenship.” In addition, it’s not happening on a highly valuable bit of land, and both countries have functional governments. So the politicians on both sides have very reasonably agreed to redraw the border, and have set in place a plan to deal with future changes. It would appear to be no big deal.

The understated reporting of this story (or did I just miss it?) surprises me. The issues and implications here are so potentially explosive. If it’s happening in Europe, where else? Where else in the world might climate change affect one country’s border with another? What happens to citizens living along the line? What happens when that line runs over an oil field, or a valuable rain forest, or a sacred burial ground? What happens when the countries involved do not have stable economies and rational governance? And even hate each other?

For now, the threat of climate-related issues do not appear to be obvious or imminent enough to compete with other problems. But as the climate change debates continue, I wonder what constitutes a winning argument. This particular border example – with so few consequences – isn’t enough.  How much drama will it take to really get our attention?

-Nancy Michaelis

How was Chicago?

This is the number one question I have gotten over the last 12 days since I made the long drive back to Florida, spent 4 days at home, and then drove back up to begin classes for the last time at the University of Florida this week.

Oh how I wish sometimes that the answer was a simple, “awesome”, but it was so much more. I’m still processing all of the experiences I had and things I learned and dealing with not being near those I grew so close to in the nearly 3 months I spent in the Windy City, but the short answer is that it truly was “awesome” and everything I could have dreamed of.

My heart was broken and torn apart for the injustices that are going on around the corner and around the world. I had days where I felt so small in the face of them, that there was nothing that could be done, the problems were just too big. And yet, here I was, interning for a program that doesn’t give up in the face of the big challenges. I worked on projects that matter. Things I wrote or planned were or will be used to spread the message of ELCA World Hunger and the everyday injustices that are sometimes so uncomfortable to face. I’m so thankful for the opportunities I had. To see the light bulb of a high school student go off as they realize the power they have to advocate or donate whatever change they have. To work with other 20-somethings who genuinely have a passion for being educated and making changes in this world a reality. To see funds in action as we visited with our Domestic Hunger Grantees. It all gave me such hope for what the future holds. To see people who are, everyday, in the their own ways sharing what they have with those in need, realizing that they are already richly blessed.

My time in Chicago was definitely that of growth and learning and new experiences. New city – a whole different culture than cities of the south. New people – I didn’t know a single person when I moved. New routine – 8am-4:30pm in an office is very different from the “routine” of college life where everyday is something else. But all of those were challenges to be faced and overcome to see the world in a new way.

Challenge yourself to try new things and change up the routine a bit. Maybe you too will have a whole new outlook on the world and it’s people. Seeing things from new perspectives is the only way we are going to appreciate where we all come from enough to make real changes together.

My life verse from the summer:

Psalm 82:3-4 –

Give justice to the weak and the orphan;

Maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute.

Rescue the week and the needy;

Deliver them from the hand of the wicked.

Peace,

Jessie Fairfax

My sandals have new soles—and it took a village!

I can’t thank my local shoe repair man. How he pays the rent is a mystery, when each time I offer him a pair of shoes to fix, he sneers at me and thrusts them back, yelling (he doesn’t hear well) “No! No good!”

My well-loved and well-worn Mexican sandals are the most recent shoes he spurned. They were too cheap; I could buy three new pairs for the price he’d charge me; I should throw them away; etc, etc. But then I came to Holden Village.

If you’ve ever visited this Lutheran retreat center tucked in the mountains of central Washington, you know that it’s a place that values creative re-use. Clothing, furniture, and books shift endlessly from use to use, owner to owner. From the boxes of extra, free men’s, women’s and children’s clothing, a friend fished a pair of flip flops. He detached the soles, used glue and clamps to attach them to my sandals, and now I am walking with the confidence of a woman who knows her next step won’t be her shoes’ last.

Remember the mantra, “reduce, reuse, recycle?” Reducing—making and buying less—is straightforward if unpopular. Recycling is getting easier as more businesses and communities go “green.” But when a man trained to repair shoes won’t do so, you know that fixing, repurposing, or sharing things is a lost art.

Let’s try to change this. Check your closet for an item that needs hemming, or a new button, or a new sole, or a new plug. Fix it yourself, or find someone who can help you. For creative inspiration, get a copy of the hip do-it-yourself magazine, Ready Made.

Stand up for reuse, that forgotten second “R!”

I was amused – and not really in good way – last weekend by the large, chain grocery store near my house. I was there picking up a couple of things when I saw a “Locally Grown” sign over a pile of tomatoes. It being tomato season here in Illinois, I walked over to see if it said where, exactly, these tomatoes were from. I wondered if it was a nearby farm, as a friend of mine recently discovered was the case at her grocery store (of this same chain) in Washington state. Imagine my surprise when the little stickers on the tomatoes said “Mexico”! A closer look at the “Locally Grown” sign included small print that said “Products of Canada, US, and Mexico.” Quite a generous definition of local!

I find cause for hope and concern in this. First, the fact that a national grocery store chain even has signs proclaiming their food was locally grown shows an encouraging level of public concern about where our food comes from. To me, it seems to indicate some level of critical mass has been reached that the grocery store sees spending time and money on this form of advertising as a worthwhile investment. That’s good news!

The perhaps less good news is that phrases like “locally grown” don’t mean much if our locale is expanded to include whatever supply chain the store already has in place.  And if people take the sign at it’s (biggest) word and buy it, assuming that “locally grown” means somewhere that most people would recognize as near-ish. Then it’s really just a trick to keep everything the same.

However, being in a hall-full mood today, I think questionable signs may not be all bad. They may serve to further the discussion. I, for one, like to buy local products when I can, but I don’t believe we all should all the time. One reason: those of us in densely populated northern cities would struggle to eat by January. Heck, we wouldn’t get through the summer if we relied solely on local farms as they exist today. So maybe that sign will lead to a conversation about not only what local means, but also what role Mexico should play in our food supply chain. Maybe it can be educational. It certainly gave pause to the produce manager, who asked me why I was taking a picture of the produce sign with my cell phone (which sadly didn’t turn out well enough to post here). He asked out of pure curiosity, but was left rather embarrassed and speechless when I asked him if he considered Mexico local. If nothing else, the sign gave him something to think about. It’s a start.

-Nancy Michaelis

It’s incredible how things go by so quickly…like this internship! I have enjoyed so much the opportunity to tell the story of ELCA World Hunger this summer. It has been fun to constantly work to be “in the know” about issues of hunger and poverty. From creating spaces for high school youth to engage in social justice at the ELCA Youth Gathering in New Orleans to site visits for organizations who receive our domestic hunger grants it has been a busy and full summer. I have really enjoyed keeping everyone up-to-date on our Facebook Cause and have been excited each Monday when I record how many more members or donations have come in to support the work of ELCA World Hunger. It’s amazing to learn what just ten dollars can do, and then see someone donate ten dollars and realize that we can now give a family a small flock of chicks or provide a week of meals to a child orphaned by AIDS.

Sometimes the other interns and I will watch a new documentary or read a surprising statistic and claim that we have become “corrupted”…but in a good way. Bottled water all of a sudden looks like landfills in the middle of the ocean or streams drying up in Michigan, and at the grocery store I check to make sure my chicken is organic and not fed antibiotics. Yvon Chouinard, founder of the outdoor clothing company Patagonia once said, “The more you know the less you need,” and as this summer rolls to an end I find myself seeking to know more while doing my best to consume less.

Above all, the most important thing that I have learned from my experience this summer is that we are all just people. Sure, some of my colleagues have doctoral degrees or years of social justice experience. Others have cried with victims of Hurricane Katrina or eaten dinner with their fellow Malawian Lutherans across the world, and still others meet with Congressmen and women on Capitol Hill, but the most common and important thread between the people who work for ELCA World Hunger, and Church in Society as a whole, is love for their neighbor. We are all just people, we are all just trying to do the right thing – make life a little better for those in need. And together, we believe we can.

Micah 6:8 –
He has showed you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.

In the Spirit,
Lana Lile

You see it in every grocery store, near the back in coolers: plastic-wrapped packages of ground beef. It looks even less appetizing on the front cover of TIME magazine. In the August 31, 2009 issue, article author Bryan Walsh confronts Americans and their demand for cheap food, asking us to truly consider the price we pay.

While it may not be a stretch to consider our food choices as one of the causes of the obesity epidemic, it is much harder for us to connect our food to the unsustainable practice that produces our food: conventional farming. Chemicals and other environmental abuses are now a part of conventional food production, as well as the abundant calories and little nutrients that are a part of the food that we receive. Many of us are so far removed from our food, that we never think about a cow’s living conditions before it ended up in the many packages distributed all over the country, nor the tree that produced the orange many thousands of miles away from the counter you picked the fruit from.

Just to elaborate on how little many of us do know, 1% of cattle are raised organically, free range, eating grass and fertilizing the grass fields with their own waste. The other 99% spend most of their lives crowded in an industrialized feedlot, eating corn grown with subsidies and chemicals, and producing 240 tons of waste per year per 1,000 cattle. Conventional cows take antibiotics for their diet and crowded conditions. This is what the majority of us purchase in the grocery store. Also, have you ever looked at the sticker that finds itself on your produce? The oranges I just bought were shipped all the way from New Zealand. How much gas and energy did that take?

We are challenged not only to think about what we’re eating, but the true cost to the environment and our bodies. We are challenged to be a part of the change. Currently, 99% of farming is done conventionally, and that because that’s where the market is. Vote with your dollar, buy organic, and whenever possible, buy local. While a bit pricer in appearance, try to think of the crop subsidies, ecological damage and health care cost that need to be factored into that cheaper, conventional price. Maybe organic isn’t so pricy after all.

To learn more, read Bryan Walsh’s article The Real Cost of Cheap Food, and he suggests even more sources to check out. The first step to change is to become informed.

Here’s the link to the article: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1917458,00.html

Enjoy!

Recently I jumped on one of our biggest national bandwagons: I rented a self-storage unit.

As a person who tries to live simply, I’m a little ashamed to be among the one in ten American households with a storage unit. But my place had to emptied before I went to the closing and signed it over to the new owners, and I had no new home address. Into the storage unit everything went, along with my $120 monthly rent. No wonder the U.S. self-storage business takes in more than $22 billion a year. Even the recession can’t slow demand for storage!

Compare that to South Africa, where, a leader of the Lutheran Communion in Southern Africa told me, the fastest-growing industry is the funeral industry, driven by the HIV and AIDS pandemic. During the same decade that the U.S. self-storage business was exploding, the annual number of registered deaths in South Africa rose by 91 percent.

One country stores stuff; the other stores people. What would the world feel like if the money spent on our extra stuff were spent on keeping others out of coffins?

I love the idea of voting with your dollar; the simplicity of saying yes or no to a company’s products and practices based on consumer demand. In today’s American society so much is driven by supply and demand. I originally wanted to provide readers with a list of companies that are socially and environmentally responsible. The list would give you the power to make informed shopping decisions that help to make a positive impact for producers, manufacturers and suppliers of quality products as well as a greater impact on the larger supply chain and idea of trade. My plan was to do some research, talk to friends and get the low down myself. Instead, I was shopping at Greenheart, a local Chicago fair trade shop, when my boyfriend pointed out a book to me – The Better World Shopping Guide. Bingo, someone had already done the research! So I give to you a link to the book’s contents and a small preview of what can be found inside. From groceries to cell phones and shoes, happy shopping!

The Top Ten Best Companies
*as listed by The Better World Shopping Guide

1. Seventh Generation
2. Working Assets
3. Eden Foods
4. Organic Valley
5. Clif Bar
6. Honest Tea
7. Patagonia
8. Tom’s of Maine
9. Ben & Jerry’s
10. Aveda

~Post by Lana~

The following was submitted by Brooke Ells at Flathead Lutheran Bible Camp. The camp, with  the support of grant money from ELCA World Hunger, is involving kids in the fight against hunger.

In the past few weeks we’ve harvested lettuce, spinach, kale, onions, and a variety of herbs at Flathead Lutheran Bible Camp in northwest Montana. These fresh vegetables have made welcome appearances on our daily salad bar and outdoor BBQs. We anticipate tomatoes and corn in the coming weeks, which will be donated to local food pantries as a way of acting upon our summer theme, “Love to Serve.” Campers continue to enjoy the garden through educational activities, watering, weeding, harvesting, and eating.  And they continue to be curious as they observe two methods of composting waste from the Camp’s kitchen.

We have been adding more biblical and theological connections to our 6^th and 7^th grade garden scavenger hunt. Following activities at each station we use Bible passages to explore why environmental and social impacts of food production matter for our faith. In order to talk about stewardship and sustainability we read from Leviticus 25: “The land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants. Throughout the country that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land.

Just as God provided for the Israelites, so God continues to provide for us through the miracle and transformation of seeds to plants to flowers to nourishing fruits. After a relay race that represents food miles and food transport, we discuss our buying power as consumers, and our ability to make a difference through growing our own foods or buying local foods. As Luke 12 tells us, “‘Beware and be on your guard against every form of greed; for not even when one has an abundance does life consist of his possessions. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’”

Finally, in the garden we talk about how our faith is like the parts of a plant. Roots keep us grounded, stems function as our support systems, flowers are our gifts or talents, and fruits are given away in service or nourishment for others. Just as plants need sunlight, so we need a life-giving, transcendent God. Just as plants need water, so we need a cleansing, energizing, ever-present Holy Spirit. And just as seeds are transformed in soil, so we are transformed in Christ’s powerful message of forgiveness.

Campers continue to send letters to their senators and representatives weekly, allowing 8^th and 9^th grade campers to take action on behalf of those who experience hunger and poverty. Campers inspire us as they write with passion and conviction for their peers or themselves, who are in need of discounted or free school lunches. We hope to see effective changes made to the Child Nutrition Act this fall, including more accessible discounted meals, healthier school meals, and additions of breakfast and summer discounted meals.  At the end of each week, campers are each given a list of places they can serve in their home towns.

Many thanks to the ELCA and to all who continue to support the ministry at Flathead Lutheran Bible Camp. Your thoughts and encouragement on our behalf keep us energized and renewed for service to children.

Brooke Ells