Last week, in preparation for World Food Day, we ran four important reminders for CRS supporters.

1. Every day is World Food Day. CRS supporters are invovled daily in the fight against hunger.
2. You’re moved by compassion and respond with expertise.
3. There are many meaningful ways to help fight hunger.
4. You’re already there. Before hunger disasters strike, your support puts experts on the ground to help reduce the impact of drought, famine, floods and other causes of food shortages.

Thanks for supporting CRS, loving the poorest of the poor, and making every day World Food Day.

Mussie Sala stands amid healthy corn stalks he irrigates through a CRS-supported water project at his small farm plot in the village of Ija Aneni in eastern Ethiopia. Photo by David Snyder for CRS

CRS beneficiary Mussie Sala stands amid healthy corn stalks he irrigates through a CRS-supported water project at his small farm plot in the village of Ija Aneni in eastern Ethiopia. Though other farmers are suffering from an ongoing drought in this region, Sala says his corn and other crops are doing well because of his access to water.

The drought in East Africa has forced 13 million people to seek food aid. Many face malnutrition and even starvation.

As we noted here, you can have an effective role in solving massive emergencies such as this drought.

Here’s an equally important fact: As a CRS supporter, you were sparing lives before the rest of the world noticed the disaster existed.

Mussie Sala and many more like him are able to survive in the midst of the worst East Africa drought in decades. You supported well drilling, irrigation and other water projects. So they have crops and their livestock has water.

You help put CRS to work all over the world to end hunger. Always. Not only during emergencies. In fact, just about anywhere disaster strikes, you’re a first responder. Because you’re already there.

Thank you for helping CRS make every day World Food Day.

A friend cares for a woman injured in the Haiti earthquake. CRS delivered food, clothing and medical supplies donated from Catholics in the Dominican Republic to Port-au-Prince’s oldest hospital, St. Francois de Sales. Photo by Sara A. Fajardo/CRS

World Food Day, October 16, will remind us of how many people in the world face daily, grinding hunger.

Taken in one glance, the problems can overwhelm. Can I possibly bring meaningful help to a problem of this magnitude?

Yes, in lots of ways, actually. All of them offer the opportunity to deliver maximum help for a single person, family or parish or community. And they’re all acts of faith:

Prayer

Food Fast: A hunger retreat.

Fair Trade: Coffee, craft, chocolate.

Advocacy Legisative action.

Operation Rice Bowl: Lenten reflection.

Footsteps in Faith: Monthly donors.

Suzy Razafindrafara is a rice farmer who switched to the system of rice intensification. She now sees more bountiful harvests from a smaller quantity of seeds than traditional farming methods provide. Photo by Sara A. Fajardo/CRS

Hunger. The word carries a full range of emotional responses. When we see or hear about people who face hunger, we are moved by compassion to help.

The depth of CRS supporters’ compassion shows in how we approach solutions to hunger. We respond with expertise.

One fascinating response to food production is Suzy Razafindrafara’s story about rice production in Madagascar.

When one of the world’s three biggest staple crops was threatened in Africa, CRS joined the fight to save the crop and farmers who grow it with the Great Lakes Cassava Initiative.

By applying the best available thinking and technology to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, CRS supporters’ response matches their compassion for a world in need.

You can help right now.

CRS delivered tons of World Food Program rice – supplied by the US Agency for International Development — to Haitians over several days at a camp for displaced Haitians in Port au Prince, Haiti. Photo by Lane Hartill/CRS

Officially, it’s Sunday, October 16. But for the Church and CRS supporters, every day is World Food Day.

CRS and its partners are feeding more than 1 million people affected by the drought.

Well drilling in Ethiopia helped thousands of families face this year’s killer drought with little or no need for food assistance.

In Haiti, CRS provided food and supplies to Port-au-Prince the next day. One month after the quake, we’d fed 500,000 Haitians.

In Afghanistan, CRS supporters battle hunger by helping women start businesses.

Through CRS, you bring hope to a world in need by bringing food to the poorest and most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters?

You can help right now.

“The Roadmap for U.S. Leadership to End Global Hunger is a comprehensive strategy that encompasses the spectrum of anti-hunger efforts, from food and interventions to agricultural programs that help small-scale farmers. It was authored by six of the leading U.S. international humanitarian organizations and has been endorsed by more than 30 aid agencies.”

That’s an excerpt from a guest column by George McGovern and Tony Hall, published in the Des Moines Register. See the full story here.

ReliefWeb notes this story on a World Food Program voucher operation in Burkina Faso. CRS is a partner in the operation:

WFP today launched its first food voucher operation in Africa, deploying a new tool to address hunger in an urban environment where food is available, but beyond the reach of many because of the impact of high food prices.
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Lane Bunkers, CRS’ country representative for Ethiopia, shares the impact of the global economic crisis on the destitute and dying.

CRS provides food to the 17 centers run by the Missionaries of Charity in Ethiopia. This food support enables the Sisters to feed 40,000 of Ethiopia’s neediest each year. Photo by Debbie DeVoe/CRS

In the five months that my family and I have made our home in Ethiopia, I have visited the Missionaries of Charity’s Home for the Destitute and Dying in the capital of Addis Ababa on numerous occasions. Each time I visit, I experience the same two feelings.

The first feeling is joy, which comes over me as soon as I am greeted by Sister Janeke and Sister Amrit. With their infectious smiles and constant good nature, you can’t help but feel a sense of contented calm in their presence. After a volley of inquiries about each other’s health and families, the sisters often call over Sister Catalina, who is from Romania. I lived there from 1997 to 1999, so I greet her in my rusty Romanian, and we share a laugh in her native language. Even though I am very aware that people are dying all around the Sisters, I cherish this moment of levity and celebration before we move further into the center. 
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Debbie DeVoe, CRS regional information officer in East Africa, reports on the devastating impact of drought and high food prices in Kenya.

Although food is available in local shops, many Kenyans simply can’t afford to buy any. CRS vouchers are enabling the neediest families to purchase two to three weeks worth of supplies.. Photo by Debbie DeVoe/CRS

Finally, food and fuel prices are starting to drop across the globe. But in many countries these price drops have yet to reach the average person trying to survive during these hard times. And in East Africa, where drought is desiccating fields across the region, some families have no food stocks left and no idea where their next meal will come from.

This was the case last week for Virginia Nzyoka and her household of 12. Virginia, at 28 years old, lives with her husband and their five children. She also takes care of four young relatives who are now orphans, as well as her disabled grandfather.
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Photojournalist David Snyder is reporting from Haiti for CRS. In his first post from Gonaives, he notes the sheer devastation brought by recent storms and the help that’s finding it’s way to the people who need it most.

Gonaives, Haiti: I was traveling with CRS in Asia through early September and saw the news headlines on September 8 about Hurricane Ike, and its effect on Haiti. Now, less than three weeks later, I am in Haiti to see CRS efforts in the wake of the storm, which devastated the island nation. Particularly hard hit was the northern city of Gonaives. It is not my first time here. In 2004, Hurricane Jeanne also devastated Gonaives, and I was here with CRS to document that response as well. From what I have seen so far, Ike has been far more devastating. The entire city is covered in deep mud – more than 2.5 million cubic meters of it – dumped into the city by the hillsides that surround it on three sides, all of which have been completely deforested. Everywhere, people are working with simple tools to clean their homes out, filling the already narrow streets with mountains of black mud. One UN staff member estimates that it would take 200 trucks, working seven days a week, a full year to remove all of the mud from the city. And there are nowhere near that many trucks here.

The Cathedral in the port city of Gonaives, Haiti is currently sheltering up to 200 people in its upper level. Mud and waters from hurricane Ike flooded the church, but the upper level managed to stay dry. Photo by Greg Elder/CRS

I went out today to see a CRS food distribution at the Missionaries of Charity compound. CRS has been working through the sisters there, as well as through partner Caritas Haiti, to distribute family ration kits of staples like rice, beans, sugar, dried fish, and bottled water. Today’s distribution reached 500 families – about 2,500 people – part of the 1,500 such kits CRS has delivered so far. Over the years I have seen many such distributions, and I am always amazed by how much organization goes into each one. Beneficiaries are always pre-registered, selected through assessments to affected communities. Once registered, a family member – usually a woman – is given a paper coupon and told to arrive at the distribution site on a given day. When she arrives – like today, for example, at the Missionaries of Charity compound – she is let in with a small group. Their names are called in turn, and each beneficiary turns in a coupon before receiving rations, sometimes moving from station to station to receive different elements of the overall kit. As one group receives their ration, another is let into the compound, and the process repeats itself – for seven hours, today. It sounds simple. But in the midst of the anxiety, frustration, and anger that often follow disasters, such organization is essential not only to make sure those most in need are reached quickly and effectively, but also for security. Everyone must see that the process is fair and equal, that no one who is not registered is receiving food, and that those who are receiving food are in fact the most needy members of the community. It is delicate and tiring work, particularly in the heat and devastation of Haiti today.

I will head out this week to see other CRS projects. Emergencies like this have their own sort of energy, and things often take shape very quickly as needs arise or priorities shift. Right now, those priorities are food and water. CRS also plans some cash-for-work projects next week, helping locals earn money they can use to buy what they need, and bring some semblance of normality back to their lives after the trauma of the past few weeks.