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.

Our project officers must travel to incredibly remote places to reach some of the projects we support—but they’re well worth the effort. Take the Chikankata catchment area in Zambia, for example. That’s where our ministry partner is spearheading the Chikankata Water Project to give wells, latrines, and health training to each of 35 villages.

Villagers cleared and widened a footpath by hand to make way for a borehole-drilling rig so they could finally get clean, safe, water in this remote area of Zambia.

Getting there, however, is quite an ordeal. The 80-mile drive to the Chikankata mission is the easy part. Reaching the remote villages from there is another story. Villagers don’t own cars, so there are no roads. But they cleared and widened footpaths by hand to make a “road” of sorts into each village so a borehole-drilling rig could be driven in. Driving a car over these hand-hewn roads “is like riding on an old wooden roller coaster, only worse,” said Tony Mator, a staff member who just returned from visiting the project.

But the end result will be worth every lurch, when thousands of people will no longer risk dying of cholera or other water-related diseases. Nor will they have to spend their days hauling water from far-away sources. They will be able to draw clean, safe water out of their own village well.

It can be humiliating to be treated as a charity case—the object of someone else’s pity and justification for their pride. Not being able to feed your family can be enough of a blow to your self esteem; but having food (or a house, or other basic need) provided in the wrong spirit can be almost as crushing.

Poor Filipino families participate in the solution to their housing problem by helping construct the homes provided to them.

That is why Cross International takes care to maintain the dignity of the poor. Rather than take a “Santa Claus” approach, we lend behind-the-scenes support to local churches and ministries already serving poor communities. A needy family is helped by a pastor in their own neighborhood, for example. This not only builds up a family’s self worth and sense of community, it builds up the local church as well.

Whenever possible, we also require the poor to be part of their own solution. For instance:

• Side-by-side with local Filipino Christians, poor families in Manila help build and paint the homes they receive through Gawad Kalinga.
• Villagers in Zambia collect rocks and sand to make cement for much-needed wells and latrines through the Chikankata Water Project.
• And disenfranchised Haitian families living in the Dominican Republic are asked to pay a token amount toward their children’s education at Light Community School.

As Christians, we are instructed to treat others—including the very poor—as we would want to be treated (Luke 6:31). More than that, in humility we are to consider them better than ourselves. (Philippians 2:3). It is with such humility that Cross International strives to honor the poor by helping them in Jesus’ name, and with his love.

Earlier this week, the U.N. and other international groups observed World Water Day as a time to raise awareness about the plight of those who lack access to clean water. It’s hard to believe that in this day and age, many families in developing nations still don’t have plumbing in their homes and must resort to traveling long distances to fetch water from parasite-infested streams and other questionable sources.

Waterborne illnesses are one of the world’s leading causes of disease and death, because so many families have no choice but to risk the dangers of using contaminated water.

Unsafe water has far-reaching consequences. In fact, waterborne illnesses are one of the world’s leading causes of disease and death, because so many families have no choice but to risk the dangers of using contaminated water. One result is that an estimated 2 million people, most of them young children, die each year from severe diarrhea. Other common waterborne illnesses include malaria, cholera, and typhoid.

Here at Cross, we’re doing our part to improve clean water access in developing nations by building wells for poor villagers. These wells offer a safe alternative to polluted rivers and open cisterns, and their convenient location spares children from having to spend hours each day fetching water in large plastic buckets instead of going to school.

Clean water is a basic necessity that no one should have to do without. It is needed for drinking, bathing, farming, and for maintaining even a tolerable standard of living. Click here to find out how you can bring radical transformation to a poor community by providing a simple well.

For many people, St. Patrick’s Day is a time to wear green, eat corned beef and cabbage, and have a night out with friends. But behind all the merrymaking is a story of a 4th century missionary whose life exemplified the kind of self-sacrificial love we strive to emulate here at Cross.

A stained-glass depiction of the missionary Patrick, who converted Ireland to Christianity and is remembered on St. Patrick’s Day.

Before Patrick came to Ireland voluntarily as a preacher of the gospel, he came in shackles as a slave. This injustice could have embittered Patrick toward the Irish people, who had kidnapped him from his homeland in Britain. But after escaping on a boat and vowing never again to set foot in Ireland, God gave Patrick a supernatural compassion for his pagan captors who desperately needed Christ.

It’s easy to have compassion on a friend, or on those who suffer by no fault of their own. But Cross International aims to do more than this, because when we come across people who do not share our values or faith and who have made choices that have worsened their situation, Christ’s radical love compels us to show mercy. We are called not only to serve those who are kind, hard-working, intelligent, and attractive, but also those who are rough around the edges, difficult to look at, and unlikely to thank us for our help.

The question isn’t whether the needy deserve our compassion, but whether Christ deserves our obedience. When Cross provides water wells to poor villages in developing nations, we don’t discriminate over who can drink from them. Instead, we give to everyone as if we were giving to Christ himself. Our house-repair project in Vietnam has been hugely popular with local communities, and a great witness to the gospel, precisely because we reach out to everyone regardless of what church they attend or whether they have any faith at all. That kind of love is what brings people into the doors of Christian churches, eager to discover the reason why we do what we do.

Anthony Watson and Gift Munkombwe from the Chikankata Clean Water Project took some time to thank our Cross donors for their support. Cross helps to provide wells, latrines, rubbish pits, and hygienic dish racks, plus health education, for impoverished rural communities in Zambia. Check out this new video report from Anthony and Gift on the great progress that has been made: