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.

On the day of the monthly food distribution at the Haiti Kobonal Mission, you’ll likely see Hermance St. Preux riding up on his donkey. This good-natured 80-something man can’t walk very far on his own—he lost a leg and relies on crutches or his donkey—but he says there are two things he never misses: Mass and food day at the Haiti Kobonal Mission.

St. Preux is thankful for the food he gets each month from the Haiti Kobonal Mission and the house he received last year.

Both places, church and the mission, are three kilometers from his house. Speaking of his house, Hermance says he was blessed to receive a new home from the mission last fall. Before he moved in with one of his sons and two grandchildren, he waited for Father Glenn Meaux, founder of the Haiti Kobonal Mission, to bless it, and it’s been a wonderful experience ever since. Like anyone Hermance’s age, he says he loves his new home because he can sit on the porch and take in the view, and watch the people come and go on the road to town.

Hermance also takes part in the elderly and destitute feeding program Fr. Meaux runs at the mission. Cross Catholic provides funds for 318 elderly and/or destitute people to receive food staples like cornmeal, black beans, cooking oil, and soap once a month from the mission. With his disability, Hermance isn’t able to work, so the food he receives from Fr. Meaux really helps out. The food distribution day is like a social event for these elderly people—they visit, laugh, and sing. Everyone knows everyone, and it’s a time of happiness and hope.

“The way we are working, we have a lot of people and they respect each other—no pushing, no talking bad about each other,” says Philo-Jacques Bernard, the mission’s director. “You can see also in their face they still have hope.”

Click here to read about the work Cross Catholic is doing in Haiti with the help of our donors and how you can join us. You’re one click away from making a big difference!

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.

There is an old saying that goes: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” The second part of that saying is the goal of much of the work we do to help the poor here at Cross Catholic.

However, during staff devotions this morning we were reminded of how important the first part is, as well. Our newest projects officer recently returned from Belize. It was his first time visiting the projects we support there, and he was struck by the impact of the elderly feeding programs — those meeting an immediate need rather than supporting development.

“These programs provide palliative care to deal with the effects of poverty. As we minister to the more immediate needs of these people, we are expressing the love of Christ in a very real way,” he explained. “Yes, it is important to teach people how to fish, so to speak, but what about the people who are too old or sick or unable to learn how to fish? Should we just forget about them?”

It is clear from Matthew 18:14 — “Even so it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.” — that every person is important to God.

Giving an elderly woman a daily meal is just as meaningful in God’s eyes as supporting a scholarship or microenterprise program. Both are meeting important needs of the poor and, in the process, exposing them to Christ.

Click here to learn more about what Cross Catholic is doing to meet both the immediate and long-term needs of the poor in Latin America.

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.”

It is amazing to witness the incredible generosity of our Catholic brothers and sisters in developing countries. For example, Jim Kline, our Africa Projects Officer, recently returned from Ethiopia with a beautifully-woven basket. A very poor, single mom had given it to him. It was one of the very few things she owned, and she’d made it herself—she wove and sold baskets for a living. Her gift represented an enormous amount of time, as well as food and other necessities the sale of that basket would have meant for her family. But she insisted he have it.

Africa Projects Officer, Jim Kline, accepts the generous gift of four cabbages from an impoverished woman who grows them for income.

Another poor Ethiopian woman grew cabbage on a small plot of land to sell in the marketplace. She absolutely insisted Jim take no less than four of her cabbages. Again, that gift represented a generous portion of the only source of income she had, but she gave it out of Christ-like love. Both women were able to earn their livelihood because of Cross Catholic’s support of an income-generation program for marginalized women. It was their way of giving back out of their bounty.

When one elderly man in Haiti was asked why he cooked what little food he got from Cross Catholic-sponsored Kobonal Emergency Survival Program and invited his poor neighbors to come and eat, he explained, “The Bible tells us, what I have I’m supposed to share with my brothers and sisters, even if they don’t share with me…When it’s all said and done, it’s not me giving it to them. It’s God giving it to them, because it was God who gave it to me.”

1 John 3:17 tells us that if we have material possessions and see a brother in need but have no pity on him, the love of God is not in us; and James 2:15-17 says if we see a sister without clothes or food and simply give her good wishes but do nothing to actually help her, our faith is dead.  The people Cross Catholic works to serve—the poorest of the poor—have next to nothing; yet they freely and generously give, not only to their needy neighbors, but also to those of us like Jim, who have more material possessions than they will probably ever own. Catholics in prosperous countries such as the U.S. could benefit from their incredible examples of selflessness.

Cross International Catholic Outreach President Jim Cavnar and several staff members recently returned from a trip to Haiti. During their time in the earthquake-devastated country, they visited several of the ministries we are helping during this time of recovery.

In their first few hours on the ground the staff was struck by the empty streets of Port-au-Prince, which before the earthquake were teaming hundreds of vendors, children, cars, and animals.

Jim Cavnar, president of Cross International Catholic Outreach, surveys the damage in Leogane where nearly all of the houses were destroyed by the quake. Cross Catholic is supporting an IDP camp of about 200 people who lost their homes there.

“It was like being in a ghost town on the set of a Hollywood movie — it was unreal,” Jim said.

Michele Sagarino, vice president of development, added, “The lack of life in the streets and knowing what that means was very hard to process.”

The group from Cross Catholic met with Gladys Thomas, who runs an orphanage and Christian school we support just outside the capital, to survey the damage her ministry sustained. She told them that they’ll have to completely replace one of their buildings and rebuild the tall cement wall that protects their property from trespassers. She also said that her ministry has taken in 20 new children since the earthquake.

Jim and the staff from Cross Catholic also visited an internally displaced persons (IDP) camp we are supporting in Leogane, which was at the epicenter of the deadly earthquake. Despite the extensive destruction, there was hope among the people in camp. They had just received another shipment of rice when the group from Cross Catholic arrived.

With tents and supplies from Cross International Catholic Outreach, Project Medishare was able to set up a makeshift hospital that is helping hundreds of earthquake victims in Port-au-Prince.

After visiting a few other ministries we support, assessing damage, and planning an approach to help, the team from Cross Catholic stopped by Project Medishare’s tent hospital. Jim and the staff were very impressed by the work being done there — work that has been going on since the first day after the quake. Cross Catholic provided tents and supplies to the ministry, which were of great use when the ministry set up makeshift surgical and exam rooms, an infirmary, a lab, and a pharmacy.

Overall the group was impressed by the work we’ve accomplished together with our ministry partners to help those suffering in Haiti. “Our partners are showing tremendous courage and faith in the wake of this disaster,” Jim said. “Though it was difficult to see the suffering, we were glad to also find hope among the people as we met with our partners. We feel blessed to be a part of the recovery efforts that are bringing relief to those hurting in Haiti.”

Click here to learn more about our relief efforts in Haiti.

Now that Lent has begun, Catholics are spending even more time in prayer and fasting in the weeks leading up to Easter, when we will celebrate our Savior’s resurrection.

There’s a tradition that during Lent, we are supposed to give up a particular luxury we enjoy, such as unhealthy foods or even television. But this year, some Christian religious leaders are calling for a slightly different approach: don’t just give something up – give it away. Reach out with your time and talents to others in need.

“Remember all the gifts God has given you,” suggests a recent Catholic Digest article. “Imitate God’s generosity by increasing your offering to your parish and to outside charities, and keep it up throughout the coming year.”

Lent is a great opportunity for believers to bless others while denying themselves. We can turn our thoughts not only to the needs of the neighbor across the street, but also to the poor and downtrodden around the world. Of course, not everyone can personally travel to a faraway land to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, but those of us who stay home have an important role to play in supporting those who go.

At Cross International Catholic Outreach, our mission partners simply could not do what they do without the generous giving of our Catholic donors. Whether you choose to feed orphans at the Impaputo Children’s Center in Mozambique or build houses for poor families in the Philippines, your gifts make a real difference. Check out our online project catalog to see how you can be a blessing in someone’s life today!