Easy Street

During our years of living in West Africa I saw sights firsthand that most people only see via some type of media. A baby dying in my arms not from meningitis, malaria, typhoid or any other prevalent disease, but from simple common diarrhea from drinking dirty water. A village family boiling shrub brush roots to make a soup to feed their children. Children with swollen stomachs. A visitor might mistakenly think these children were well fed because he/she would not know that one of the symptoms of the hunger related disease called kwashiorkor is a bloated belly.

To the villagers to whom we ministered, we were wealthy. We had the only western style house with a metal roof for three hours in any direction. Our vehicle was the only one around except for the ones assigned to the gendarmerie office at our rural government office and the French Catholic priest who lived near us. We slept in beds with mattresses while the villagers slept on elephant grass mats. We ate three meals a day while most villagers ate one meal each day.

If the villagers had known the expression “living on Easy Street,” they would have certainly told us that we were living on Easy Street.

Our family was unquestionably living on Easy Street compared to the abject poverty of our village friends and colleagues. But we actually did live on a street named Easy Street in Yazoo City, Mississippi in 1979. First Baptist Church of Yazoo City had a home on Easy Street that that they used for workers on furlough. Our family lived on Easy Street for four months of furlough before we took a leave of absence for me to pursue a graduate degree in agriculture at Mississippi State University.

While many people fret about an OLED TV or 5G networks or buying a vacation house or another new vehicle, so many people right now are suffering because they do not have the basics of life: food, clothing and shelter. And many of these peoples’ kids cannot even go to school because they are in displaced persons’ camps or refugee camps. We can help.

There are a lot of organizations out there asking for your contributions to help these impoverished people, but most of those organizations use a large portion of your donation to pay for their administration and fundraising expenses. Southern Baptists pay for these administrative costs through faithful congregants’ regular tithes and offerings that they give each week in their local churches all across the USA. Therefore, you can be sure that your gifts to Send Relief, Southern Baptists’ hunger relief, disaster relief and community development organization, will be used entirely to help people in need around the world.

October 11 is Global Hunger Sunday.

Send Relief website: https://www.sendrelief.org/