Real People with Real Names

A child dies of hunger every five seconds. It is a statistic. It is why Christian Relief Fund is here. But those children exist somewhere. And they have names. I was always concerned about them but never took it personally until I started knowing their names and where they live. What I have discovered is that those statistics are the representations of real people with real names.

Children die daily in Barwessa, Kenya. There is hardly any food, and if you did find some—the price of it has tripled in the last year. There is no water. Oh, you can find some—but it is polluted and you would have to walk fifteen to twenty miles to get it. And when you finally spend the day carrying a small container of water, what you really have is water that may kill you because of the parasites. But if you don’t drink it, you will die. But if you drink it, you will die.

My first day at work, I was trying to get a sponsor for a little girl named “Maurine.” But she starved to death before I could help her. Her name is never really far from me anymore. It’s not that a child dies of hunger every five seconds. It’s that Maurine died.

Christian Relief Fund began when Baxter Loe, our founder, didn’t get support to John Abraham of India in time. He starved to death. His name was “John Abraham.”

Amarillo, where I live, has been in a drought for the last six months. It is terrible. Crops have failed. Houses have burned down. It is tragic. Yet, we still don’t starve to death. In Barwessa, their drought has been twice that long, and they do starve to death.

And if the lack of food doesn’t get them, the disease probably will. There is a new AIDS orphan every 14 seconds. About 3000 die of malaria every day. And they have names.

I’m headed to Kenya to help bring relief from the hunger and give medical attention. About twenty people are going with me. Many of them are in the health industry. Pray for us. We have names. And we will be learning the names of a lot of people. We hope that we will have names to tell you who lived because we got there in time rather than died because we didn’t. If I have internet resources, I’ll be sharing with you some stories.

Pray for the drought there. For some reason, it is not getting that much attention and is one of the most terrible disasters in our world. One of my Kenyan friends told me that he expects things to start looking orange there. Yes, there is always hope.