Our project officers must travel to incredibly remote places to reach some of the projects we support—but they’re well worth the effort. For instance, Claudio, who covers Latin American projects, describes his recent journey to a boarding school in the mountains of Arequipa, Peru. After a long flight, he rode a crowded bus for 12 hours until it literally reached the end of the road.
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.
What if Einstein never went to school but made a living running a hot dog stand instead of formulating new ways to ponder creation that earned him the Nobel Prize for Physics? Sound preposterous? Not so much, if he’d lived in Haiti, where a college education is about as attainable as a moonwalk.
Tuesday I traveled into Kenya’s Great Rift Valley. The trip was long as the roads were typical of what one sees outside most city limits…the last five miles on tracks that picked through the arid landscape. This area has been severely affected by an ongoing drought.
When an Islamic primary school invites a Catholic teacher to speak to its students, you know there’s got to be an incredibly compelling reason. In Uganda, that reason is AIDS prevention.
Please remember to keep our Kenyan ministry partners and their communities in your prayers. The situation there is truly dire. A severe drought is sweeping across the eastern African nation, crippling its agriculture-based economy and leaving entire villages without water.