Everyday, we open the newspaper, turn on the TV and listen to the radio only to hear the same discouraging news about the state of our economy. Plummeting stocks, bailouts, unemployment, and stimulus plans are constant reminders of the amounts of monetary wealth that people throughout our country have lost. However, while Americans stay focused on the news that affects them directly, the developing world is struggling daily to address basic needs like food, medicine, and water. While Americans toil and worry about the state of their personal incomes, the world's poor live with the stark reality of simply, hunger. They don't have enough money to buy basic food staples. In some countries, desperate mothers have told us they are giving their children warm water to briefly interrupt the rumbling hunger pangs.

Because of this global economic crisis, Compassion International has had to focus more and more on food distribution efforts in order to ensure Compassion children have their basic needs met. For most of the past 50 years, however, the world food production has outpaced world population growth, so Compassion's efforts aren't about creating the much needed food. It's about making sure the much needed food gets to our children who need it the most.

No child can learn on an empty stomach and no child should have to sit in a classroom, ravaged by guilt because they ate while their family is starving. That is the reality of our mission right now. Of the more than 6.7 billion people on the planet, one in seven will go to bed hungry each day. The children are particularly vulnerable as malnutrition impedes their developmental needs and threatens their very existence. For example, one child dies from hunger-related causes every seven seconds. This means that over 12,000 children die per day just due to hunger alone, and more than six million children die every year from malnutrition. FULL POST

At the end of last year, in the poorest, most densely-populated slum in Goma, the provincial capital of east DRC, seven poor men and women sat, lay or mingled around a small room in Kahembe Health Center.

Kahembe health centre, Goma, where World Vision is providing medicines and helping the centre provide free care to all. Photo by Horeb Bulambo. ©2009 World Vision International

Between them they owed US$500 for medical treatment. They were not imprisoned, as such, because there were neither bars on the window nor lock on the door, but they had been told they could not leave until they had settled their debt.

"Here, we treat people first and ask questions later," said Dr Josias Songya, the director of the health centre, which serves a community of more than 100,000.

The number of people seeking treatment had doubled since the war intensified at the end of October 2008. FULL POST

World Vision says children in India face more obstacles than film depicts
"Don't just be entertained; do something"

Seattle, February 18, 2009--As the award-winning movie Slumdog Millionaire competes in 10 Academy Award categories this Sunday, international aid agency World Vision urges Americans to learn more about how poverty affects children in India, and do something about it.

"More than 26 million children, or the populations of greater Los Angeles and Chicago combined, live in India's slums," said Jayakumar Christian, World Vision's national director in India. "It's not enough to watch India's poverty on screen; we need to get involved and get our hands dirty." FULL POST