Dearly Beloved,
This Sunday, we will collect our special offering for One Great Hour of Sharing (OGHS), which supports the disaster, refugee, and development ministries of the United Church of Christ. A major focus for OGHS this year is hunger.
May the message below inspire our generosity as we reach out to help ensure food security for our neighbors in need.
With love and peace,
Thandiwe
Holistic Security Through One Great Hour of Sharing
Hunger is defined as a condition in which a person does not have the physical or financial capability to meet basic nutritional needs—for a sustained period.
What, then, does the opposite of hunger look like?
For Maribel and her family in the Carazo region of Nicaragua, it looks like a holistic food security program called CIEETS. Through a CWS local partnership with Growing Hope Globally, the CIEETS program provides training in diversity farming that teaches families to grow many different crops, so that one bad harvest or failed planting season doesn’t have a devastating impact on their livelihoods. Additionally, a diversified diet leads to better overall nutrition.
“Thank God we are part of the CIEETS project,” Maribel says. “Thanks to the Pastor of the Nazarene Church, the CIEETS program came to my community and my family life. I praised and blessed His name.”
In addition to crop diversification, the CIEETS program also assists with water safety, irrigation, sanitation, and hygiene – all of which helps strengthen food security throughout the area. For communities like Maribel’s, this is especially important because there are low levels of coverage in basic services. For Maribel’s family, these aspects of the program have included learning to farm with irrigation, as well as the replacement of a latrine that had reached the end of its useful life. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and hurricanes Eta
and Iota in 2020, it has been exceptionally difficult for Maribel’s husband to find work. This means that the skills Maribel developed and the support her family has received have been even more critical throughout this time. “We learned how to produce with irrigation. Anything we harvest is welcome, this is the basis of our livelihood,” she says.
One Great Hour of Sharing supports programs like CIEETS, helping Maribel’s family, plus 290 other families from her region, create sustainable farming and safe water and hygiene practices for their community. Programs like this address the root causes of food insecurity and bring real and sustainable change—one community at a time, all over the world. In Maribel’s words, “May the Lord increase the blessings on the CIEETS project, and on each of the brothers and sisters and their families who dedicate resources to our support, we also tell them those good things come from above and hands that give, never they will come back empty.”
Holistic security for entire communities is one way your giving hands will never come back empty. The need has never been greater. The opportunity is now. It’s time to share.
“So let us not grow weary of doing what is right,
for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up.
So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all.”—Galatians 6:9–10
