Nothing is more uplifting than seeing the smiling face of a hungry child receiving a nutritious meal, or a mother with tears of joy in her eyes because she knows she’ll be able to feed her family with the bag of food staples she just received.

During a recent trip to Guatemala and Honduras, a couple of our staff members were able to capture some moments like these with photos. Below are a few of the many grateful faces they saw while visiting feeding programs we support in Central America.

We are able to feed needy people such as these because of the continuing support of American Christians. Click here to learn more about the feeding programs we support around the world and how you can help.

Cross supports education and microenterprise programs that promote development.

There is an old saying that goes: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” The second part of that saying is the goal of much of the work we do to help the poor here at Cross.

However, during staff devotions this morning we were reminded of how important the first part is, as well. Our newest projects officer recently returned from Central America. It was his first time visiting some of the projects we support there, and he was struck by the impact of our elderly feeding programs — those meeting an immediate need rather than supporting development.

Cross also meets the poor’s more immediate needs through feeding programs for the sick, elderly, and vulnerable children.

“These programs provide palliative care to deal with the effects of poverty. As we minister to the more immediate needs of these people, we are expressing the love of Christ in a very real way,” he explained. “Yes, it is important to teach people how to fish, so to speak, but what about the people who are too old or sick or unable to learn how to fish? Should we just forget about them?”

It is clear from Matthew 18:14 — “Even so it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.” — that every person is important to God.

Giving an elderly woman a daily meal is just as meaningful in God’s eyes as supporting a scholarship or microenterprise program. Both are meeting important needs of the poor and, in the process, sharing the gospel of Christ with them.

Click here to learn more about what Cross is doing to meet both the immediate and long-term needs of the poor in Latin America.

First the good news: ten African countries are only half as poor as they were two decades ago.

Young children in sub-Saharan Africa face an uphill battle for survival against poverty, hunger, and infectious diseases.

Now the bad news: child mortality rates have actually gone up, rather than down, in six sub-Saharan nations. Sub-Saharan Africa holds the unfortunate distinction of being the only region in the world that has seen an increase in the mortality rate of children under age 5. That’s according to the U.N. Millennium Development Goals Report Card released on Tuesday.

What makes this report particularly relevant to us at Cross International is that most of our work in Africa is in the sub-Saharan region. One of the six countries listed in the child-mortality report is Zambia, where Cross is providing food and education for impoverished children, home-based care for the chronically ill, and safe, accessible water for remote villages.

Waterborne illnesses and other infectious diseases are leading causes of child deaths in Zambia, while HIV remains a major threat, directly and indirectly, to the health of children. In many cases, lives can be saved by simple improvements in home sanitation and by educating HIV-infected mothers to bottle-feed their infants. Good nutrition and alternative water sources also play a big role, and children must be kept in school because they are the producers of tomorrow’s wealth, which will in turn provide the food, medical care, and healthier way of life that Zambia needs. Cross is promoting all these developments through partnerships with local Christian ministries that understand Zambia’s struggles and know how to make a difference, one family at a time, one village at a time.

Ask a boy who his hero is, and chances are good he’ll name an athlete, rock star, actor, or even a comic book character. But 10-year-old Joshua, who lives at the Cross-sponsored Kondanani Village in Malawi, is no ordinary boy. His hero is a charismatic Zambian preacher he watches on TV, and he’s already started to emulate him.

Joshua, 10, weighed only 2 lbs. when he came to Kondanani as an infant.

When Joshua first came to Kondanani as an orphaned infant, he weighed only two pounds. Today he is a healthy, outspoken boy who loves telling other children about Jesus and inviting them to receive him into their heart. Once a week, he also helps out with evangelistic outreaches in the local village, where they do drama presentations, music, teaching, and prayer.

Joshua’s zeal for ministry shows. He took the initiative, without any suggestion from the adults, to organize a group of friends to sing worship songs. Despite their young age, the boys are as polished as a church choir. They sing loud and joyfully, with perfectly coordinated dance moves and harmonies.

Without hesitation, Joshua will tell you what he wants to be when he grows up: a preacher! He is just one example of the many lives saved and nurtured at Kondanani, a Christian orphanage where children are rescued out of squalor, rehabilitated from malnutrition, given a quality education unlike anything else in the country, and best of all touched with the love of Christ.

Click here to learn how you can be a blessing to Joshua and all the other precious children at Kondanani.

Last year, the United Nations projected a rise in world hunger to 1.02 billion people – more than one-seventh of the global population! Statistics on hunger are always rough estimates, and the results can vary greatly from one study to another. But one thing seems clear: the U.N. number is no exaggeration. In fact, it may be too conservative!

The United Nations projected a rise in world hunger to 1.02 billion people!

For starters, the U.N. study only tells us how many people are undernourished; not how many are malnourished. In other words, a person who is eating regularly and getting more than enough calories, but who is too poor to afford the variety of foods necessary to meet basic vitamin and nutrient requirements, would not have been counted as “hungry.”

The definition of hunger was restricted even further by a very low standard for minimum energy needs. The number of calories was based on a “sedentary lifestyle” or what is needed to live a healthy but inactive life. But many poor people work very hard to support themselves and need more food to maintain a healthy energy level.

Whatever the true number of the hungry, it’s encouraging to know that there are many dedicated Christians doing what they can to meet the nutritional needs of the poor around the world. Cross International is blessed to be working alongside a number of fantastic ministries, such as the Moses Project in Ecuador and the Rainbow Network Feeding Program in Nicaragua, that are bringing both physical and spiritual nourishment to the hungry on a daily basis. Click here to see our complete list of Cross International feeding programs, and get involved today!

The following excerpt recently came to us from our ministry partner, Annie Chikhwaza, founder of Kondanani—a wonderful orphanage in Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries:

The wonderful environment orphaned children experience at Kondonani stands in stark contrast to the poverty and hunger that surrounds them.

Our children have no idea what “being needy” means, they went into the village and asked the teacher if the mud hut the people live in was a toilet.

We are now giving our children veggies to give to the children in the village to try and give them an understanding that there are children who do not have enough food; they get only one meal a day and do not have enough clothes to wear, so we have to help them.

They always ask us why the village children have holes in their clothes. What is so amazing is that should our children have stayed in the village they would be in the same situation or be dead because of malnutrition.

Thanks to you, our sponsors, our children’s needs are met.

To learn more about Kondanani, click here.

Though we are an international organization, Cross occasionally finds the opportunity to reach out to those in need in our own community. This month we’ve partnered with two local outreach agencies to distribute 41,000-pounds of Thanksgiving food supplies to hundreds of the poor in Broward County.

On Friday, a few Cross staff members went to a homeless center near Cross headquarters in Pompano Beach, South Florida, where the donated food was being sorted and prepared for other charity groups to pick up and distribute to the poor.

With the help of Broward Outreach Center and Volunteer Broward, the 41,000 pounds of food from Cross will go to homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and the homes of needy families. The food will help meet the increased demand among the county’s destitute, especially during the Thanksgiving and Christmas season.

“This is a huge blessing for us,” said James Whitworth, center director of the Broward Outreach Center. “With the downturn in the economy, donations are down and everyone is scrambling. So when partnerships like this happen it is great blessing, especially for the needy families who depend on us for food.”

Cross is blessed and thankful for the many generous benefactors who make outreach projects like this possible! Visit our website for more information on how you can help the poor through Cross.

Click here to see photos from the food distribution on Friday.

In this line of work we’re constantly inspired by “every day” people who accomplish incredible things because they obeyed God’s call. Here’s a story about one of those inspiring people:

Pastor Javier says grace with the children before their meal. The children quickly learn a routine that includes hygiene, manners, and prayer. While they eat, volunteers tell them Bible stories and teach them about Jesus.

Families of Los Claveles, in Lurin, Peru live in the most humble conditions. Huts made of adobe and straw mingle with shanties made of scraps of cardboard—the only materials available to the very poor. Dozens of skinny stray dogs wander in packs, tearing through garbage strewn alongside the dirt roads. The community has no potable water source, so the children lack good hygiene; and they have most likely all contracted worms from drinking unsafe water.

Javier Barrionuevo, who pastors a church an hour away from Los Claveles says, “I came here with a friend one day to help him run an errand. While I waited outside, I chatted with a little boy who was playing in the street. He was very dirty. When I began to talk to him about Jesus, the boy asked, ‘What’s Jesus?’ That’s when I felt called to spread the gospel here.”

Pastor Javier acquired a small warehouse-like structure in Los Claveles—a former nightclub—and with help from Cross, equipped it to start a program to feed the many, many malnourished children there. Today it is home of a newly-planted church, Calvary Chapel Vida—The Living Calvary Chapel. He says, “God coordinated everything. In a way, it was already prepared when we got here!”

Today, with support from Cross, Calvary Chapel Vida feeds more than 100 children each day. The church also hosts child and adult Bible studies throughout the week, and holds Sunday School and church worship service on Sundays. It is truly transforming the community for the better.

Pastor knows all about the transforming power of God. He says, “I went through many things in my life. I was abandoned by my father and got into drugs and alcohol. When I hit bottom I turned to God, and he took me out of that. I don’t know how, but I quit drugs. There was a radical change in my lifestyle. I had been a successful businessman. I had money, a car, a good job. But the first thing I did when Christ saved me was to detach myself from material things. I renounced everything and everyone. My ambitions changed and I realized I had felt empty all along.  Nothing fulfills me more now than the smiles of children, and preaching the gospel. Through it all I learned the most important lesson: Walk in faith and trust God.”

CLICK HERE to learn more about Pastor Javier’s outreach in Los Claveles.

A new report from the U.N. confirms what we at Cross have been noticing for some time: a widespread hike in the cost of food in developing nations.

Cross is working through churches, schools, and orphanages to provide daily nutritious meals in Christ’s name to the poorest of the poor

As one U.N. official put it, “The food crisis is not over. We have an anomaly happening where on global, big markets, the prices are down, but for 80 percent of commodities in the developing world, prices are higher today than they were a year ago, and the prices a year ago were double what they were the year before that.”
By U.N. estimates, this translates into 1.2 billion “urgently hungry” people – the highest number ever.

At Cross, we are routinely hearing from our ministry partners, whether in Africa or the Caribbean, that food is just too expensive. The rising costs, combined with a struggling global economy, have made them more dependent than ever on our help. How can they pay more for food when they are actually earning less?

We want to provide all the help we can give, but we can do nothing without the support of our many generous donors. Their faithful giving enables us to continue shipping containers of food to malnourished children and their families around the world. We can’t wait until tomorrow to feed a hungry family that is starving today, and that is why the call is so urgent.

Right now, Cross is working through churches, schools, and orphanages to provide daily nutritious meals in Christ’s name to the poorest of the poor, and you can be a part of it! Click here to find out how.

This Friday is World Food Day, a time for those of us who have been blessed with material prosperity to pray for – and do something about – those who cannot afford to feed themselves or their families.

More than 1 billion people in the world do not get enough to eat.

Here at Cross, we are observing the day by partnering with more than 100 churches across the country to ship nutrient-rich meals to hungry families in developing nations. Among them is St. Michael Evangelical Lutheran Church here in Florida, which is helping us ship containers of Vitafood, nutritionally-balanced meal packets, to the poor in Haiti.

Alec Pridgeon, the president of Stewardship at St. Michael’s, had this to say: “Although we may not be able to bring everyone who is hungry to our table on World Food Day, we can do the next best thing and support Cross in changing lives through God’s love and mercy, not just one life at a time but hundreds or even thousands at a time.”

World hunger is at an all time high, and the current estimate is that more than 1 billion people are not getting enough food to eat. Yet food aid to the world’s poor is at a 20-year low. That makes it more important than ever that we have an event like World Food Day to raise awareness about the terrible effects of malnutrition, which causes weakness, disease, and ultimately death.

In fact, international groups such as the World Health Organization are calling malnutrition the greatest single threat to the world’s health – greater even than the combined dangers of AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis.

We can’t make the hungry wait until tomorrow for the food they need today – and we need your help to succeed! CLICK HERE to learn how you can get involved in our fight against malnutrition.