October Focus on Hunger and Cookies for Kids Campaign
Thanksgiving is a time to pause and reflect on the great blessings around us.
Friends,
Thanksgiving is a time to pause and reflect on the great blessings around us: family, friends, and another year of harvest. While we look forward to our Thanksgiving tables stocked with good food, roughly one in nine people in the world will be suffering from chronic undernourishment.* Keeping this in focus, I am calling on all PAOC churches to unite in providing food for some of the most vulnerable children in Bangladesh and Somalia this October.
In Bangladesh, ERDO’s “Cookies for Kids” program delivers high-energy biscuits to almost 7,000 severely under-nourished pre-primary school aged children. The 11 high energy biscuits given to each child for six days of the week results in increased child health, higher school attendance and the ability to concentrate on their lessons, and not empty stomachs. Through a special 4:1 matchthrough the Canadian Government, $3.50 feeds five children with biscuits for one month.
In Somaliland, ERDO is working on a five-month emergency food program to distribute 3,000 tonnes of a high-calorie, high-protein, peanut-based paste called “Plumpy’Nut.” This paste is used to help malnourished children under the age of five at Maternal and Child Health Centres. Through a special Canadian government match, and private donor matching grants, a gift of $10 will become $70 of this life-saving food paste.
Your church can have a significant impact in increasing nutrition and saving malnourished children by supporting these ERDO programs. To promote Cookies for Kids at your church, please see the downloadable resources and a promotional video at www.erdo.ca/cookies. To read more about our emergency food program for children in Somaliland, please visit: www.erdo.ca/plumpynut.
Let us all unite together this October and change the lives of hungry children in Bangladesh and Somaliland.
Blessings,
David Wells
General Superintendent,
The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada
*The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that about 795 million people of the 7.3 billion people in the world, or one in nine, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2014-2016.
