Thoughts on Food Fight

We are past the honeymoon period of being in
Africa. The realization that this is for the next 4.5 months is beginning to
sink in. The blog below, Food Fight,
was written by Jon Melo, one of my teammates. It expresses so much what we have
been dealing with over the past month. How and do we feed more people on a
budget made for five? In Mexico we went through a simplicity week, we did
everything simply and got back to Jesus’ commandments. In regards to what this
blog is about we ate a lot less and we have already begun to do that here. The
past few weeks in Nsoko, the menu has consisted of cereal for breakfast, PB
& J at lunch, a cup of rice, 1 or 2 cans beans, 1 or 2 cans of veggies (for
the group not per person) and meat every other night for dinner. It sure makes
shopping easier and gets us back within our budget, but what to we do about the
kids and teenagers literally knocking at our door asking to eat with us?

Overwhelmed by injustice we fight for what should be a right of
every human being. The right to eat!

Over the past few weeks our team has really been dealing with
what we should do about the hunger in the community we live amongst. We eat 3
meals a day; the kids around us eat 1. Maybe 2 if they’re lucky! We have a
variety of foods to choose from when deciding what to eat for the week; they
get porridge. Most nights there are at least a couple kids that hang around the
house hoping to eat with us, and we have to say no.

We didn’t come to Swaziland to feed an entire community, but
what do you do. AIM and Children’s Hope Chest are doing the best they can to
get food for the Care Points so these people can eat, but it’s so hard to watch
kids run around with pot bellies because they aren’t getting the food they
really need! Our minds are exhausted from thinking about this ever present
problem. Jesus commands us to feed the hungry, but we just don’t know where to
even start. Our budget was made to feed 5, not 500!

I’ve had 3 good meals a day for as long as I can remember, I
have no clue what that kind of life is like. We come and preach that God
provides, but I’ve never really been put in a position of starvation and been
told to trust God! Maybe we’re just struggling to relate with what they’re
going through because we’re broken. The thing is, we keep coming back to the
issue, and we have to live in it for the next 5 months. How do we live like
Jesus in this? Do we pray over a sack of rice and start passing it out?

Hope is a hard thing to keep when you live in a country that
should be renamed Oppression. If we begin to think about how big the problem is
here, we rapidly become overwhelmed. The whole thing is about people, and if we
take our eyes off of the people and try to focus on fixing the bigger picture,
nothing will ever change. Our God is greater than hunger, it’s about His
Kingdom. This is reality, how does it change? People die because they don’t
have anything to eat!!!

The question we’re fighting with is, What Would Jesus Do? Will
sharing a little food over the next 5 months really make a difference? It
doesn’t change the situation; it just brushes it under the rug for a while.
Will that even help some of these people, or will it make them worse off once
we leave because they decided to depend on us for food?

I guess the only solution is Jesus. In the words of Blair, one
of our leaders, “People just need Jesus, man.” We raised enough support to be able to come here, not to feed a country.
So, what now?…

Your comments and thoughts on this blog will be greatly
appreciated. Please pray for us.

If you didn’t catch it, the ‘pot bellies’
comment are about the kids with Kwashiorkor. A quick lesson from my nutrition
classes, Kwashiorkor is roughly translated to mean “the disease the first child
gets when the second is born”. It’s a malnutrition disease in which the kids
aren’t getting enough protein. Proteins do many things in our bodies one of
them being to transport fat out of our livers. The reason the kids have swollen
bellies is because their liver is swollen, they have a “fatty liver”. The liver
is the main way that toxins are transported out of our body, in other words if
it’s not functioning – not good!

Like Jon said prayers and comments are much
appreciated. Thanks!

It seems weird to ask for prayers for myself
after posting this blog but many of you ask to be updated on prayer
requests. Please continue to pray for
our team to grow with each other. Also some of us have been dealing with some “seasonal
allergies” as we would call them in the states. Please pray for those to end.
Thanks everyone!

In Christ,

Katie