Jehu and Really Expensive Gas

I paid $4.29 per gallon for gas last week and I was ticked. In fact, I moaned and griped to myself the entire time I was pumping the gas.

We have been sponsoring Jehu (above) through Compassion International for the past few years and in January I was able to meet Jehu and his mother. The kid is a stud. He is confident, good looking, smart, and polite. He looked me in the eyes and told me how much he loved his Mom, Jesus, and football (soccer). He told me he wanted to grow up and be an engineer so he could build better roads and bridges for Port-Au-Prince and all of Haiti (if you have ever been to Haiti you realize the need for this type of dream). He thanked me for sponsoring him (my oldest son is actually his sponsor) and he promised me he would keep studying, keep going to church, and keep obeying his mother. He smiled and and you could see an entire world of hope in him.

However, Jehu had no idea that in a few short months he would have more right to be ticked about my $4.29 a gallon gas than I ever do.

I spent most of my life in a naive state of bliss. I just figured what happened in my world stayed in my world. A trip to Uganda in 1997 changed that for me and I realized how interconnected the entire world really is. You see, our high gas prices are a pain for us but the reality is I still fill my car up and drive off upset but with a full tank of gas and usually a Mountain Dew to go with it. The reality is that the rising cost of oil is crippling the poorest of the poor throughout the world and forcing families to go to bed hungry every night. That truth makes my frustration about the price of unleaded just plain ridiculous.

In Haiti, Jehu’s home, the price of rice went up 78% in less than a month earlier this year. In Ethiopia, the cost of buying the ingredients for their staple food, injeera, doubled in the last few months. In Bangladesh, 90% of the children Compassion serves are being directly affected by rising food prices.

Haiti is almost entirely dependent on imported food items and when the price of oil increases, so does the cost of feeding their families. Compassion Haiti is estimating that it will take 2-6 million dollars over the next few years to keep the Compassion children and their families fed to avoid malnutrition.

We are in a global food crisis and there does not seem to be an end in sight. It is time for us to take action. We do not live in a vacuum. What we do affects Jehu.

What should we do? I am a practical person so I can’t help but to give you practical advice.

PRAY – Compassion has set aside today to fast and pray for those being affected by the food crisis. Visit the Day of Prayer site for Compassion and see how you can join thousands of others praying for this crisis.

LESS – Just do less of everything. Drive less. Consume less. Eat less. Spend less. Our excessiveness only prolongs issues in developing nations. When you do less of everything you will find yourself with more to give to those in need.

GIVE – One of the sobering realities of this crisis is that these countries being affected by the crisis will need millions upon millions of dollars to feed these families over the next few years. Compassion has been, and always will be, committed to long-term holistic child development but there is also a time for immediate response to an immediate need. Unless we feed our children and their families, malnutrition will run rampant. So, Compassion has set up a Global Food Crisis Fund to address immediate food needs and to purchase farming equipment in countries where this will help alleviate some of the issue. Here is what your giving can do for a child:

$13 will feed 1 child for a month
$78 will feed a family of 6 for a month
$520 will feed 40 children for 1 month
$3,250 will feed 250 children for 1 month

BE CREATIVE – Discover ways to give beyond what you are already doing. Be creative in how you spread the word about this crisis and what we can be doing to help. Last month my family decided to start “Rice For Dinner” where we have just rice and water for dinner once a week so we can focus on what is going on with other families involved in this crisis. At that dinner we talk about and pray for a specific country being hurt by the crisis. I create an information and prayer guide and we spend the entire meal talking and learning about that country. At the end of the meal each of our 4 kids pray for something very specific regarding the country. We take the money we would have spent on that meal (average of what it costs for us to eat out is about $30) and we give it directly to the Compassion Global Food Crisis Fund. Right now almost 20 families are doing “Rice For Dinner” all over the US and if you want the weekly info and prayer guides, email me at bseay@us.ci.org

We can’t ignore Jehu. We can’t ignore our role in this crisis. And we can’t ignore our ability to do something about it.

Here is a video from Compassion’s President, Wess Stafford, talking about the Global Food Crisis.

~ by brianseay on June 24, 2008.