This weekend, many Americans will express thanks for their freedom as they celebrate Independence Day. The idea of freedom means different things to different people: freedom from want, freedom from oppression, freedom to succeed, freedom to say and do as we please.

Seeing children thrive in places like Mozambique is proof that Christians can make a difference in lives around the world.

As Christians, we understand freedom in a very exciting way. Ephesians 3:12 says, “In him and through faith in him we may approach God with freedom and confidence.” That means God allows us to come to him directly through prayer—we are free to talk to him, share our lives with him, and worship him with not fear, but joy.

Sadly, many people in our world aren’t free in this sense. About 78 million people don’t have access to the Bible in their native language, and about 1.2 billion people have never heard the gospel. What are we as Christians to do about this? Can we do anything at all?

Here’s a story that can help us take heart: In the Tete Cathedral Parish in northern Mozambique, orphans and vulnerable children often have no choice but to beg in the streets, hoping for a meal. Elisa, who lives in Tete, lost her father as a child, and her mother often couldn’t provide enough food for her and her five siblings.

“Our suffering started,” Elisa said. “Some days we had nothing to eat. Sometimes our mother went to her family to ask for food. Other days we went to our friends’ house. To silence the stomach we drank water and slept without food.”

Thankfully, someone came to her aid: the Tete Center, a day center supported by Cross International Catholic Outreach that provides orphans and vulnerable children with meals, clothing, school supplies, and help with medical expenses. A sister from the Tete Center saw the need in Elisa’s family and invited her and her younger sisters to attend the center. Life has improved greatly since enrolling at the center, she says. In a letter she wrote to Cross Catholic, she described the hope she found at the Tete Center: “Our life changed, and we are not suffering so much anymore. We study and hope for a better future.”

God calls us to use our freedom to give in his name, to offer of ourselves when no one else will. Thanks to gifts from caring American Catholics, children like Prince and Princess experience God’s love through us. Galatians 5:13 says, “You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love.” God calls us to use our freedom for good, for serving each other in his name. He reminds us that we can’t understand freedom only in the sense of what we aren’t forced to do; he asks us to think of freedom in terms of what we are at liberty to do for others.

Click here to read about how you can serve others in God’s name through orphanages and other programs supported by Cross International Catholic Outreach.

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 Catholic is that most of our work in Africa is in the sub-Saharan region. Two of the six countries listed in the child-mortality report are Zambia and Kenya, where we are providing food, health care, housing, and education to the poorest of the poor.

Waterborne illnesses and other infectious diseases are leading causes of child deaths in sub-Saharan Africa, 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 plays a vital role in fending off disease, 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 their society needs. Cross Catholic is promoting all these developments through partnerships with local Catholic clergy and laypeople who understand Africa’s struggles and know how to make a difference, one family at a time, one village at a time.

Click here for a complete list of all our current Africa projects that you can get involved in today!

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.

In honor of World AIDS Day, Pope Benedict XVI recently gave a talk at St. Peter’s Square:

“The Church never ceases to strive to combat AIDS through her institutions and personnel dedicated to that task. I call upon everyone to make their contribution, with prayer and tangible assistance, so that people affected by the HIV virus may experience the presence of the Lord Who offers comfort and hope. Finally, I trust that, by increasing and coordinating efforts, we may manage to halt and eradicate this disease.”

Cross Catholic provides AIDS education for poor school children in Uganda.

A lot has changed since the first World AIDS Day on Dec. 1, 1988, thanks to the development of antiretroviral drugs and increased awareness of the dangers of promiscuity. But much work remains to be done, especially in Africa, and we at Cross Catholic are humbled to be a part of the ongoing efforts to fight the disease.

Last year, a full 72 percent of new HIV cases worldwide were in Sub-Saharan Africa. It has also been reported that half of all maternal deaths in Botswana and South Africa are due to HIV. Numbers like these tell us that the AIDS threat to the African people is still very real and very serious.

One way we are reaching out to AIDS victims is through the Mbikko Integrated Development project in Uganda, where Catholics are using education to transform a rural community plagued by prostitution, poverty, and disease. Counselors go into classrooms and have one-on-one talks with children to teach them at a young age how to protect themselves from sexual exploitation and to abstain from sex until marriage. They integrate Bible lessons into their teachings to provide a solid moral foundation for promoting a monogamous lifestyle.

In Zambia, we are working with the Franciscans’ Itimpi Community Health Care project to visit AIDS patients and other chronically ill people in their homes and provide medication, food, baby formula (HIV-infected mothers can’t breastfeed), and other care.

As we commemorate this year’s World AIDS Day, you can demonstrate Christ’s love in a powerful way by giving to one of our projects in Africa. Get involved today!

“There are three ways to get AIDS: From your mom, from blood, and from unprotected sex. I got it from my mom,” said 12-year-old Farah, matter-of-factly—over the radio airwaves. Farah is an orphaned resident of The Rainbow House, an orphanage we support for AIDS affected children in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. An only child, her mother died when she was 4. She is very open about her HIV positive status and was recently interviewed on a Haitian radio station for an awareness campaign.

Twelve-year-old Farah teaches peers about AIDS, helping banish the negative stereotypes in Haiti surrounding the disease.

In addition to providing shelter to 42 AIDS orphans and children who suffer from the disease, The Rainbow House has an innovative outreach program whose goal is to educate the community about AIDS. Their hope is to eliminate the negative stereotypes and unfounded fears that cause people to shun or mistreat children like Farah — the innocent victims of the AIDS pandemic.

The Rainbow House’s myth-busting community awareness program has won recognition by the United Nations as a “Best Practice” model for other organizations to emulate. For nearly a year we’ve been working with The Rainbow House and a few other partners, including Medishare and Espwa Orphanage, to roll out a similar approach on a larger scale throughout Haiti under a $4.8 million, three-year grant awarded to us under the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

In the meantime, the gift of life goes on for Farah and the other AIDS-affected orphans at The Rainbow House, where they find acceptance and encouragement, as well as the medicine, nutrition and care they need to live full, healthy lives.

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. The United Nations World Food Program estimates that nearly four million Kenyans are in urgent need of food right now. The water shortage has also intensified local ethnic conflicts as various tribes compete for bits of land that haven’t yet turned to dust.

Poor Kenyan children depend on the support of our donors for education, medical care, and nutrition

The bottom line: people are dying, and relief just isn’t coming in fast enough.

Rain is not expected to return until October. But when the rain comes, it will hit hard, and the Kenyans will have a new problem to worry about – floods – thanks to a forecasted El Nino weather pattern.

Cross Catholic has several ongoing projects in Kenya. One of our commitments is to cover education costs for poor children to attend Catholic schools, such as St. Joseph Freinademetz Primary School in Ruai, about 30 miles from the center of Nairobi. We also provide care for chronically ill patients suffering from HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, through the Riara Health Project.

The priests, nuns, and other dedicated workers involved in these important outreaches need our prayers to help them through this difficult time. We believe God can take evil circumstances, no matter how bad, and use them for his good purposes. May this crisis become opportunity for the poor to receive Christ’s love!

Check out this video interview with Fikansa Chanda, the program manager of the Itimpi Community Health Care program in Zambia. He is so thankful for the Cross Catholic donors who are helping to provide food, medicine, and health care for HIV/AIDS patients and other victims of chronic illness.

More video footage from Zambia to come later this week!

One thing we’ve learned from doing AIDS relief in developing nations is that you can’t just build a clinic or send medicine and then wait for the problem to go away. Medical treatment is vital, but it’s not the whole solution. There are deeply-ingrained attitudes and perspectives that need to change – attitudes toward AIDS victims, their families, and even chronically ill people in general.

Mike Henry, a Cross Catholic project officer, recently returned from Haiti, where he met with our ministry partners to talk about how they can better serve the needs of HIV/AIDS victims. One of those ministries is Rainbow House, a shelter for children infected with HIV or orphaned by AIDS. We are helping them relocate to a new, larger facility on an eight-acre tract of land.

Rainbow House in Haiti provides shelter and care for HIV/AIDS infected and affected children

Mike described to us the stigma that AIDS carries in Haitian culture. The disease is often blamed on black magic, and those who catch it are looked down upon and isolated from society, to suffer and die alone. Ignorance about the disease leads to fears that you can catch it by breathing the same air or touching the belongings of someone who has it, or by being bitten by a mosquito. AIDS orphans are abandoned in hospitals or left to fend for themselves on the streets.

The stigma brings other complications, too. AIDS patients trying to keep their problem secret don’t want health workers visiting their home. At-risk men, women, and children should be made to feel as comfortable as possible with getting tested and seeking help, but this can’t happen without a change of attitude in their neighbors. That’s why we stress the importance of education.

At Rainbow House, this is done through peer-to-peer workshops and youth events that dispel myths about AIDS, so that communities will learn to accept infected children with love and compassion. Similarly, our Riara Health Project in Kenya invites patients to one-on-one and group teaching sessions on health and nutrition; and our Itimpi Home-Based Care project in Zambia organizes community support groups to curb risky behaviors that lead to the spread of the disease.

The Cross Catholic approach to the AIDS crisis is more than damage control. We aim to change hearts and minds, to bring about a better, healthier future.

“It’s not her fault.  She’s not even a person yet.”

These words from a Haitian boy came as a shock to Fr. Marc. A little girl was misbehaving very badly that day, and Fr. Marc felt that she needed to be corrected. But now he was being told that he could not hold her responsible for her actions, because “a child doesn’t get a soul until they’re 2.”

Fr. Marc (center) has been rescuing orphaned and destitute children in Haiti for more than a decade.

After more than a decade of ministry at the Espwa Village orphanage that we support in Les Cayes, Haiti, this was the first time Fr. Marc heard the troubling superstition that a person is not a person until the age of 2. He worried that this false belief not only allowed parents to excuse their children’s bad behavior, but it also opened the door to child abuse.

It seems that Haiti’s most vulnerable poor – the children – are often the least protected. Wealthier families take in the children of the poor and treat them as virtual slaves, overworked and underfed. It was child abuse that inspired Fr. Marc to start his own school at Espwa, after one of his boys came home bleeding from a severe beating by a teacher with a rawhide whip.

With our ministry’s support, the 650 orphaned and destitute boys (and a few girls) under Fr. Marc’s care get more than food and shelter — they also learn that they are special in God’s eyes. They are introduced to Christ’s love through catechism training and open-air Mass on the orphanage campus, as well as by the example of Fr. Marc himself. His heart for the poor is infectious, and he always puts their needs above his own.

“I sometimes wonder how many children we are saving from a life of slavery,” Fr. Marc said. “I know in my heart that a good percentage of our kids would have no option but to go that route if we were not here.”

Click here to read more about our life-saving work at Espwa Village in Haiti.

One of the most-quoted parts of scripture is the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10. Here we are given a picture of what Christ means when he commands us to “love our neighbor” (Luke 10:27).

This story is especially relevant for charities like ours who grapple with the logistics and practicality of meeting the poor’s many needs around the world. We often touch on this topic during our daily staff devotional time. One question that we come back to again and again is this: What does it mean to truly “love one another” (1 John 4:11), and how do we put it into practice?

Just a few days ago, we were reminded of what “loving one another” really looks when we heard this story from one of the ministries we support in Zambia, the Itimpi home-based healthcare program:

There are hundreds of AIDS orphans like Ingrid who need care. Through the Itimpi home-based healthcare program we are able to help dozens of AIDS orphans like these.

As Carol lay on her deathbed, she had one desire; she wanted to see her beautiful 9-year-old daughter, Ingrid, cared for and educated. Carol soon became another AIDS victim (she had contracted the disease from her husband, who died shortly before her), and Ingrid became another innocent AIDS orphan. Her grandparents, John and Anna, took the child in, but the resources in their overcrowded home were already stretched paper thin. Two of John and Anna’s grown daughters had moved back in after their husbands died, and they were already caring for several of their other orphaned grandchildren. Ingrid’s move to the care of John and Anna was the final blow that brought John to his knees. He came to our mission, his eyes welled up with tears, and told us that he was not able to feed and clothe all the children and his widowed daughters without asking for help. Now with just one more child, much as they loved her, it had become impossible. Thankfully, we were able to reach out to John and his family, our neighbors in Christ. With the support of Cross International, we now give them a monthly stipend in Ingrid’s name to help provide food and necessities for the whole family.