Why Food?

Following is a post entitled "Why Food?" from one of our clients at One Village Group - Hope Encounter, South Sudan. We have been working with Hope Encounter for two months helping them with Marketing, Branding, and Communications training.

We also designed, built, and launched their blog page for them last week. You can see their new blog at HopeEncounter.org to learn more about their ministry.

We chose this particular article to share with you because it highlights the heart and the work of their ministry - showing the love of Christ to the neediest of children.

It also serves as a good example of the types of missions we work with at One Village Group.

In South Sudan, 70 percent of adults cannot read or write, roughly 84 percent of girls over the age of 15 are illiterate, and over 2.8 million children (40% of childhood population) have no school to attend.

The work of Hope Encounter is critical to the future of South Sudan and the children they serve.

Why Food?

Hope Christian School - Wau, South Sudan

The biggest expense we have at our Schools is food.

Why food, when we are a school?

During the spring semester of 2024, six year old twin sisters were coming to school at our Wau campus. One day one of them stopped coming. After a few weeks of asking the little girl who was coming, “Where is your sister?” the little girl finally responded, “We have no food, so she died”.

It was at this point we decided we would make sure each child in our schools will receive at least one meal per day – a meal from Hope Encounter. It may only be a bowl of porridge, but it is far more than many of them had before.

This is not an isolated case, it is the world we live and work in every day. Starvation and death are very real to us. Are all our children starving? NO. But many are, and many others are on the brink.

Learning Without Food...

Proper nutrition is essential for young children as it directly impacts their ability to learn and develop cognitive skills. During early childhood, the brain is growing rapidly, forming neural connections that shape a child's current and future learning abilities.

Without adequate nutrition, children may experience fatigue, difficulty focusing, and delayed cognitive development, all of which hinder their ability to absorb and retain new information in school or at home.

By ensuring our young children receive at least some food, we give them a much stronger foundation for academic and social success, setting them up for a lifetime of learning and achievement.

Compassion Like Christ

But beyond the technical aspects of food and its role in educating children, we feel that feeding our children is the right thing to do! It is what Jesus would expect and demand if He were standing with us in one of our classrooms.

Our Witness

Most importantly, when non-Christian and Muslim villagers see us feeding their children, at no cost, it serves as a witness to who we are. We are Hope CHRISTIAN Schools.

As James teaches us in James 2:26, our faith without deeds is dead. We have chosen to use feeding children to show our faith to everyone!

Because of this witness, our newly planted Churches on Sunday are filling up! Everyone wants to know about the kind of God who will feed a stranger's child – their child.

Please join us in our witness to our children and their parents.