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Hopeful Story, January 25, 2015

  We like to criticize the government, but you have to commend it for encouraging charitable giving by refunding 33% of what you donate and, in the case of World Renew’s Healthy Babies, Healthy Moms campaign, matching every donation 3:1.
  On Monday night, twenty-three persons came together at the invitation of Evelyn and Judi to hear more about this campaign and its focus on maternal and child health programs in Bangladesh and Malawi. We learned that 350,000 pregnant women die annually because of poor hygiene, lack of trained volunteers and superstitious beliefs that blame infant illness and death on demonic activity, like bewitching.
  We were also led through an exercise that helped us to understand the negative power of poverty. It involved sets of difficult questions that yielded very different consequences depending on the decisions we made. Here is a sampling:
  • If your family was hungry would you eat any remaining grain or save it for the next planting season? 
  • If saving the grain resulted in more hunger for your family, would you let your children search through piles of compost for anything edible or would you warn them away from all the germs? 
  • If a wealthier (comparatively) person in the village offered to buy your teenaged daughter, eliminating one mouth to feed while injecting money into the family budget, would you accept this offer even if you might never see your child again? 
  By way of video, we were also introduced to a midwife whose training had given her the confidence to facilitate the birth or insist on hospital care if things did not look well for the pregnant mom. Seeing the difference she made strongly motivated us to financially support World Renew’s current campaign.
  The deacons will be holding a special offering for the Healthy Babies, Healthy Moms program on Sunday, February 8. Those who attended this event invite you to join them in doing something significant so that women in Bangladesh and Malawi will be better “gatekeepers” for the health of their families and less likely to die from birth-related complications.
- Pastor Peter

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