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 Catholics. Click here to learn more about the feeding programs we support around the world and how you can help.

Sr. Irene Clare Duval

Sr. Irene Clare Duval knew she wanted to be a nun since she was 8 years old, but it wasn’t until she was 48 that she joined the Compassionate Franciscan Sisters of the Poor (formerly the Missionaries of the Poor – Sisters). During the four decades in between she served in the U.S. military, went to college, and worked for the New York City police department as a drug chemist.

Once she had finally paid off her college loans, Sr. Irene joined an order and two years later was sent to Haiti — her birthplace — to minister to a desperately poor community in the mountains of southern Haiti. The people of Viloux quite literally had nothing until she came.

Sr. Irene started a school feeding program that provides meals to 121 children, most of whom were going days without food before she arrived. She opened up the local government school to more children by hiring additional teachers and launched a dispensary, doling out medicine and care to families who had nowhere to turn when they got sick. With our help and support from generous Catholics, she has been able to keep these vital programs running.

“People are always coming to me with some need. I’m able to help because of the varied experiences I’ve had,” Sr. Irene said. “I think that was God’s plan, why he had me wait so long to become a nun.”

One thing Sr. Irene has learned over her life is the importance of prayer. She says it is especially helpful when she makes the trip from her home to Viloux each week to minister to the people. She takes the tap-tap — an overcrowded public bus — then walks the last hour-and-a-half through rocky roads winding up the mountains.

“Prayer is my lifeline,” she explained. “Over and over, I’ve seen how powerful prayer is.” Through her strong faith in God and rich life experiences Sr. Irene works diligently to help Haiti’s poor, despite the challenges.

Click here to read more about Sr. Irene and her life-saving work in Viloux, Haiti.

With the help of Cross Catholic, Christine has turned her life around after losing everything she had.

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.

At the time of our meeting, Cross Catholic was providing nutritional support and counseling for Christine through a local home-based care program. The support, in combination with antiretroviral (ARV) medication, had effected a dramatic change in her life and restored her declining health to where she was able to function.

Just last month, we met Christine again – this time at her brand new home that we provided through the help of the same local ministry. We were delighted to find that Christine was raising chickens on her new property and that she was utilizing all the available space outside to grow her own food. The chickens will provide a steady income that will enable her to support herself and her one child who is now living with her.

Christine’s new house.

Christine’s work ethic is setting a good example for her neighbors, all of whom have also received their homes from Cross Catholic. The temptation for these families to give in to despair is great, but Christine wasted no time in making the most of her situation. She is no longer a victim, but an overcomer. Instead of weeping over her past, she is looking toward the future with new hope, as she plans for her family’s welfare.

Christine represents exactly the kind of success the home-based care program aims to achieve in the lives of poor Zambian families traumatized by the AIDS pandemic.

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.

Bruce Mwansa, 10, would not be able to go to school without the help of Cross Catholic.

At home, Bruce’s only parental figure is his blind, elderly grandfather. His grandmother is dead, his father ran off long ago, and his mother has been incapable of taking care of her ten children since she succumbed to mental illness. The house is empty and dilapidated, and the garden has become a dried out field of dirt. They are so poor that they eat only one meal a day, which they get by begging in the streets.

Bruce’s blind grandfather (center) expressed his thanks to Cross Catholic for helping the motivated young boy get the education he desires.

That’s why Bruce misses so much school – his family needs him to beg. But despite the hardships of his home life, he still manages to attend class twice a week, so he can be with his friends and get an education that many others do not have.

In the poorest parts of Zambia, it’s not uncommon for children to opt out of school altogether. But those who do go are there because they want to be, and they are willing to walk several miles each morning to get there, because they know how important an education is to their future.

Unlike Zambia’s public schools, enrollment at Bruce’s school is one hundred percent free and includes all supplies. Cross Catholic provides the small salaries of the teachers, so they don’t have to pass on the cost to the students, who have nothing to give. The school is the children’s only hope of escaping squalor and hunger and achieving better lives.

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 Catholics doing what they can to meet the nutritional needs of the poor around the world. Cross International Catholic Outreach is blessed to be working alongside a number of fantastic ministries, such as the Franciscan Sisters’ Dagama Home in Zambia and the Las Mercedies Nutrition Center in Honduras, that are bringing both physical and spiritual nourishment to the hungry on a daily basis. Click here to see our complete list of Cross Catholic feeding programs, and get involved today!

Marcos Ramirez had always supported his wife and four children with the money he made from working in the coffee fields near their rural village in Guatemala. But when there was no more work to be done, Marcos couldn’t find a new job, and his family began to go hungry, sometimes surviving on nothing more than tortillas with salt. At one point, his infant daughter Elvera weighed only two pounds, a dangerously low weight even for a newborn.

Cross shipments funded by compassionate American Catholics provide malnourished children like Elvera with the food they need to regain their health and grow into thriving toddlers.

Thankfully, Esperanza de Vida — a local Christian outreach supported by Cross International Catholic Outreach — learned about Marcos’ situation and intervened. The first thing they did was take Elvera to an emergency feeding center and nurse her back to health for a month, to save her from what would have been a certain and painful death from starvation. Then they built a new house for Elvera’s family and provided them with free daily meals.

With the help of generous American Catholics, Cross Catholic has shipped more than $7 million in food, medicine, clothes, and other supplies to Esperanza de Vida, to bring relief to desperately poor families and severely malnourished children such as Elvera in the garbage dumps and remote areas of Guatemala.

Shipping humanitarian goods sends a tangible message of God’s love to someone who may never have read the Bible or stepped inside a church. While your support helped feed the bodies of the hungry, their hearts were also edified by the knowledge that a Christian cared enough to step out and do something about their need.

Or as one of our ministry partners in Guatemala put it: “When people visit and see the terrible poverty of the people we help, they ask: ‘Why does this exist?’  My answer is that it’s an opportunity for us to love. God has left the job for us to do — to be his hands on earth, to be the good Samaritan.”

About an hour outside Cusco, Peru sits Hogar Mercedes de Jesus Molina, a rural orphanage for 19 girls run by the Marianita Sisters. The sisters also run a feeding center, providing nutritious meals five days a week for about 90 needy children from the surrounding neighborhood.

Here’s a shot of a few of the girls at Hogar Mercedes who were tending vegetables in one of their two greenhouses

To feed all those kids, the sisters get in-kind food donations such as rice, canned fish, dried meat, beans and vegetable oil from the local authorities; and the girls grow vegetables including peas, tomatoes, lettuce, and beans. The sisters also raise ducks and chickens. What they didn’t have were cows to provide daily milk for all the children. So late last year, Cross International Catholic Outreach bought them two cows.

Well, they just e-mailed us a delightful pdf Christmas card with a photo of all the girls. In the body of their e-mail they announced that one of the cows, Reinita (Little Queen), will deliver a calf soon! As Claudio, our project officer, put it when he read the news: “Our gifts keep on giving…”

Click here to learn more about our work in Latin America.

Back in the 1980s, constant media coverage made “famine” a virtual synonym for “Ethiopia.” But the root issues were never entirely resolved, and now a new drought is underway, and many families in rural villages are reliving the nightmare.

Borana Primary School feeding program, run by the Spiritan Fathers, provides daily nutritious meals to poor Ethiopians.

The combination of dry weather, high food prices, and inadequate farming techniques has forced the Ethiopian government to send out a plea for emergency aid for 6.2 million people – a number that might soon rise as desperate families sell their livestock to satisfy their immediate hunger.

Ethiopia is a very ancient country with Christian roots going back to New Testament times. It also has a large Muslim population as well as surviving remnants of indigenous African religions – but famine doesn’t discriminate.

Please pray for our Cross Catholic ministry partners on the ground in Ethiopia, as they struggle to serve the poor during this strenuous time. With help from our generous supporters, we are doing our part to bring relief to needy families whose lives are difficult even in good weather.

For example, our Borana Primary School feeding program, run by the Spiritan Fathers, provides daily nutritious meals to poor Ethiopian children in a rural area where food is often scarce. The lunches are protecting hundreds of children from the terrible effects of malnutrition – such as stunted growth, weakened immunity, distended bellies, and even death – while also giving poor families a financial incentive to send their kids to Catholic schools instead of keeping them at home to work. The program also enhances the religious outreach of the Spiritan Fathers, by helping them demonstrate the mercy and love of Christ.

Click here to learn more about our Borana Primary School feeding program.

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.

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.

Here at Cross Catholic, World Food Day is a 365-day-a-year event, as we fulfill our ongoing responsibility to deliver nutritious meals to starving families in developing nations as quickly and efficiently as possible, through Catholic school feeding programs and other great ministries.

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.