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This story and photos located at: http://www.pcusa.org/pcnews/2007/07448.htm
07448 July 23, 2007
Food for the hungry
Presbyterians in Congo provide sustenance to the neediest
by Toya Richards Hill Presbyterian News Service
TSHIKAJI, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO - For three days 14-year-old Ilunga carried his starving sister on his back in search of the Presbyterians he heard were helping orphans.
"She was pretty much dead by the time she got here," said Nancy Haninger, a nurse and Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) mission co-worker who helps run a malnutrition rehabilitation center in the village of Tshikaji.
"She was unconscious. ... Pure bones," she said. Ilunga had walked from a distant village some 40 miles with Ngandu, who was seven.
The two only made it after a local schoolteacher spotted them an hour outside of Tshikaji. At first the teacher passed the children by, but then God spoke to his heart and he went back to help them, Haninger said.
Ngandu was severely dehydrated and had active tuberculosis, among other things. But she was still alive. The young girl was taken to the nearby hospital, where she stayed for several weeks, and over time her health returned.
Ilunga and Ngandu beat malnutrition, and even death, in the Democratic Republic of Congo thanks to perseverance and a large dose of help. Yet unfortunately many more just like them aren't as lucky.
In a country where war has been a constant, jobs are nearly nonexistent and poverty is at an epic proportion, getting enough food to eat can be nearly impossible. Add to that the fact that many of the country's children, the most vulnerable of the population, are orphaned and you've got an even more devastating picture.
The Presbyterian Church in Congo, which has existed for decades, has made food and nutrition one of its top priorities.
Both the Presbyterian Community of Congo (CPC) and the Presbyterian Community of Kinshasa (CPK) have active feeding and nutrition programs, and support also comes from various avenues within the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), including International Health Ministries, Presbyterian Disaster Assistance and Presbyterian Women.
Individual PC(USA) congregations even lend their support, including Myers Park Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, NC, which in 2006 provided funds for the malnutrition rehabilitation center in Tshikaji, said Haninger.
Visit a feeding center in Congo and you'll find children in various stages of malnutrition, some more severe than others. And you'll also see angst-ridden mothers, aunts and other caretakers doing what they can to restore their little ones to good health.
Sometimes moms show up with twins and triplets trying to breastfeed them all, said Haninger, who lives and serves in Tshikaji with her physician husband, Mike. Or you'll have situations like a two-month-old baby brought in by its aunt after the baby's mother died in childbirth, she said.
"These are daily things that show up," Haninger said, adding that the next closest feeding center to hers is a two-hour walk.
Children at the rehabilitation center in Tshikaji, led by Congolese health workers with consultation from Haninger, eat five times a day with food cooked on site. Meals include hot cereal made with powder ground from the leaves of the nutrient-rich Moringa tree, peanuts and fruit, beans and rice, greens and fish.
The children are weighed each day to check their progress, and the adults that accompany them, mainly women, receive basic public health instruction on things such as hygiene and hand washing.
The most severe cases of malnutrition live on site, with the rest coming and going for day feeding. Overall, children remain in the program for two to three months, Haninger said.
"Our desire is to send the kids home and never have them come back again, she said.
In Kinshasa, the Presbyterian Church there manages more than 15 nutrition centers, according to Dr. Jacques Makamba Badibanga, medical director for the CPK. Their cure rate, he said, is more than 90 percent.
"It's a very well-managed feeding program," said Larry Streshley, a Congo-based PC(USA) mission co-worker who works closely with the CPK and the CPC on health care issues.
Most agree one of the key factors in helping turn the tide of malnutrition in Congo lies in one of their own natural resources - the leafy Moringa tree. A tropical tree that spreads tall and wide, the Moringa has become well known for its nutritional value.
Once its leaves are washed, dried and ground, the powder produced, which is rich in such things as iron, calcium and protein, can be mixed with practically anything. Most feeding centers mix Moringa power into the cereal served to the children, and the CPK has developed a cookie made with Moringa powder that it sells.
"One strategy we have been given by God is Moringa," said Haninger, a certified nurse-midwife and a facilitator of the Moringa tree project in Tshikaji.
Haninger has helped distribute thousands of Moringa trees and seeds free of charge in villages in her area, and hardly a home can be passed without seeing one of the trees anchored nearby.
Collaborative efforts among the three Presbyterian-run Moringa projects - in Kinshasa, Tshikaji and Mbuji-Mayi - has led to greater awareness, and future work includes even more education and training on such things as uses, misconceptions and cultivation techniques, Haninger said.
"We've already been doing massive networking," she said. Yet, "we really have a lot of work to do."
More information on Haninger's Moringa tree project and ways to give are included in Nancy and Mike Haninger's most recent Mission Connections' letter.
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