Feeding Programs
Those of us that were not raised in a third world situation can never understand the depth of meaning that food has. In abject poverty, families struggle just to have enough food to survive. Food becomes the commodity of trade, the symbol of hope, the source of survival, and the target of covetousness. Everything in your life revolves around food and the lack there of. Every relationship, every interaction, every motive, and most thoughts throughout the day are dictated by food. The availability of food in your family becomes part of your identity. It determines where you fall in the community social structure. It is everything. The typical westerner just sees food as a physical object and hunger as simply a physical state. We will never understand.
That mentality leads us to do what we can to deal with hunger and starvation in the populations with which we work. Our Lord spoke much about hunger and feeding the poor during His time on earth. We are mandated to help to feed the hungry as part of our Christian mandate. There is currently enough food produced to feed every person on earth a 2000-calorie per day diet. We want to do our part to make sure that the people that live in our neighborhood are not starving to death.
We have two main feeding programs: Senior Citizens Feeding and School Feedings.
Senior Citizens
New Vision had a burden for the elderly people in the Montrouis community. Joy Reeves had a vision for providing hot meals for senior citizens, a Meals on Wheels type system. In Haiti, there are no government social programs to help provide for the elderly citizens, such as Medicare or Medicaid. It is the family’s responsibility to provide for the elderly members, however, most families are struggling to provide for themselves.
People in the community made suggestions to the ministry about who needed the most help. New Vision did assessments on their physical health, support system and living conditions to see who qualified. Currently there are 30 senior citizens enrolled in the program. The food is cooked and delivered by women in the Women’s Ministry. They get paid weekly to come and cook for the program.
School Feeding Program
Hungry, malnourished kids can’t learn. New Vision has partnered with Operation Hope out of Lubbock, Texas, and together developed a feeding program for the 1,500 kids that are in the schools New Vision supports. Each child in the sponsored schools receives a healthy meal each day. For most of the kids, it is their only meal of the day.
Periodically, New Vision receives shipments of food from groups in the U.S. This food is used in the feeding program for more flexibility in the variety of food we are able to provide.
If you want to participate in this program, you can get involved in a food drive or give directly to Operation Hope by going to their website: operationhopeusa.org.