Remember Africa? Starvation Continues
Friday, January 23, A.D. 2004

More than 1.7 million people in the east African nation of Eritrea are facing severe food shortages in the aftermath of a prolonged drought and in the midst of lingering tension with neighboring Ethiopia. Last year the nation was able to produce just 210,000 tons of food against its consumption requirement of 612,000 tons. Without international aid, tens of thousands of Eritreans face serious hunger, even starvation.

ACT (Action by Churches Together) partners, including Lutheran World Service/Eritrea, Norwegian Church Aid, and Dutch Inter-Church Aid are working to provide nearly 100,000 Eritreans with emergency food, clean water, shelter, and replacement livestock to help ward off the impending crisis. In response to an emergency appeal from ACT, Week of Compassion is providing a grant of $6000 from the Compassion Response Fund.

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CWS received the unsolicited note below from an Iranian child who recently received a health kit from the first air shipment of humanitarian aid CWS made in response to the December earthquake. Because of the generosity of Disciples, WOC was able to cover the cost of the airlift, which includes medicine and medical supplies for 100,000 people and 5,000 health kits.

Hello
A greeting like the warmest regards as sun, to those men and women whom I don't know at all not even their names. I'm a girl who only has mum, dad, an aunt and an uncle, I lost all my relatives, I'm so alone. You all unknown guys who gave everything to me, I thank you really and hope you all be very happy and successful in life.

Asal Habib

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Other responses this week from WOC include grants via CWS and ACT for refugee assistance appeals in Guinea and Mozambique, an appeal in support of interfaith cyclone recovery efforts in American Samoa, and an appeal from church partners in the Philippines in response to the recent floods and mudslides. WOC's support of the ACT Rapid Response Fund also allowed Disciples to support church partners responding to violent storms in South Africa and Swaziland and a bitter winter storm in Nepal.

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