Slender Wires: 1,000,000,000 People

During our recent trip to Franschhoek (see my last post "The Winelands") Robin and I enjoyed some of the best meals we have had in a long time. Franschhoek is considered the gourmet capital of South Africa and 8 0r 10 of the 100 best restaurants in the country are in this one small village and the surrounding wineries.

Robin and I have always enjoyed good food and one nice thing about living in South Africa is that eating out is quite reasonable. Even at the best restaurants the prices are a lot cheaper than equivalent restaurants in the US or Europe. And now with the dollar-Rand exchange rate at something over 10 it is a great deal. So we were able to enjoy some wonderful meals at several excellent restaurants during our 3 days in Franschhoek.

Part of the purpose of our trip was to get away from the realities and seemingly never ending needs associated with the work we are doing here in South Africa. Getting away from time to time is quite necessary if one is going to be able to sustain this type of work. In this regard the trip was a success as we were able to get away from phone, internet, emails, people begging at the gate and all the other daily demands that are a regular part of our life here.

However, even as we were enjoying our escape and especially several wonderful restaurants there was one thing I couldn't seem to get away from. It was the title of this post which was also the headline on the second section of the Sunday Independent newspaper on January 4th this year. I couldn't seem to get the number one billion out of my mind. You see as the article explained, that is the number of people that will go hungry in 2009. And this has nothing, or at least very little to do with the worlds current economic crisis.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organizations makes annual estimates of the number of people who will go hungry and is predicting the number to go over one billion for the first time in history. This is despite a second record worldwide harvest in as many years and contradicts the undertaking of world leaders in 2000 to cut in half the number of hungry by the year 2015. The biggest factor in the increasing rates of hunger is the increase in food prices so that more and more of the worlds poor are unable to afford adequate nutrition even if it is available. The Sunday Independent article points out that although "At a special summit in June last year, rich governments pledged $12.3 billion to tackle the food crisis, but so far they have handed over only $1 billion of it, as they have scrambled to provide trillions to bail out failing banks."

I am thankful that I am one of the privileged and becoming few that can afford food. Certainly I am among the privileged elite who can afford to eat in a restaurant. I am not saying that I should have to give up eating as much or even eating out (as I said it is not really a food shortage). But I am convicted that I need to be more intentional about helping in some way to meet the growing hunger in the world.

Robin serving meals to children after school

Two Tunics name comes from Luke 3:11 where John the baptist says "let him who has two tunics share with him who has none and let him who has food do likewise". One of the things we are doing as Two Tunics is giving nutritional support to vulnerable and hungry children. We have established a partnership with Food 4 Africa through which we are providing a nutritional porridge food supplement daily to over 500 children at community based day care and after school feeding projects. We also provide healthy daily snacks (peanut butter, brown bread, milk, fruit etc.) to children at several of the creches (pre-schools) we support. Two Tunics is about sharing and I am proud to a part of this work that is doing something small in the area of the world's hungry children.