As your plane approaches the airstrip in St. Maarten – a small island 186 miles east of Puerto Rico – you get a clear view of luxury hotels with outdoor pools and gazebos overlooking the blue waters of the Caribbean Sea.
In case you haven’t already noticed, prices at the grocery store have been going up in the last few months. Food prices worldwide are on the rise this year for a number of reasons, including natural disasters in Russia, Argentina, and Australia, droughts in China, and sky-rocketing oil prices resulting from recent conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa.
Since education paves a path out of poverty, we’re glad to help poor children make the most of their time in school. Especially when just getting to school is half the battle. Take the kids in rural Aripiaco, Guyana, for instance. Fr. Javier Correa recently took a few of us up river by speedboat to visit the elementary school there.
The 30th annual World Food Day is coming this Saturday, and there will be good news as well as bad news to reflect on as we turn our attention to global hunger. The good news is that the number of hungry people in the world has fallen by nearly 100 million from last year’s all-time high of 1.02 billion. The bad news is that this leaves us with 925 million people still hungry.
Last year, we met a Zambian woman named Christine who had gone from riches to rags because of AIDS. Once the owner of three houses, she sold all her properties in desperation and used the money to pay a medicine man to cure her. In the end, she was left with no money, no friends or family to support her, and a worsening illness.
Some kids will invent almost any excuse to stay home from school. But 10-year-old Bruce Mwansa has a legitimate reason for his imperfect attendance. In fact, no one would blame him if he didn’t show up at all.