Mother Joan and her dedicated order of sisters have not only set up a great feeding program at these dumps in Naga City but also oversee an orphanage for abused and abandoned children that in many cases would have died in the dumps, on the streets or in gutters if not for Mother Joan and her order of Amazing and dedicated Nuns.

CHRF CEO, Colonel V. Doner, visits Mother Joan at her Orphanage in Naga City, Philippines.

In 2011 Children’s Hunger Relief Fund responded to Mother Joan’s need for help after the orphanage was damaged after the Typhoons that washed across most of the Philippines. Thankfully we are happy to report Mother Joan and her band of nuns are back to full operation and are on their way of saving more lives in 2012. Thanks to the many CHRF donors we were able to stretch the value of your gifts and provide Mother Joan with six million dollars worth of aid and medicine!

Recently, a team of CHRF executives went to visit Mother Joan in Naga City where she currently is running the orphanage and local feeding program for hundreds of children.

CHRF CEO, Colonel V. Doner, feeding children at Mother Joan's feeding project in the Philippines.

When asked about the project after the recent visit, a long time CHRF board member responded, “Our first stop was to the Garbage Dump outside Naga City, where a town has emerged filled with people who barely make $2 a day. Here, Mother Joan reaches out to the children, offering them food, medicines, vitamins, and other aid so as to demonstrate the love of God. She is an amazing woman and a great role model for not only her Order of nuns (Sisters for the Poor), not just for the entire local community but is an amazing role model for the world! It’s an honor and a blessing to be able to work with and support such great people do great things for others. We wouldn’t be able to do it without the amazing support of our CHRF Staff and Donors.”

Ken McGrath, Gifts-In-Kind Coordinator for CHRF greets a happy Mother Joan in the Philippines.

No matter what your involvement, reading the blog, exploring the CHRF website, praying for the children, or donating to the cause, we Thank You for your support and interest in the cause to alleviate hunger around the world! Continuing on the same mission CHRF has dedicated itself to since 1975, Changing the World One Child at a Time!

Why this project? In a country where an estimated 60% of female orphans will grow up to be prostitutes and when 70% of orphaned boys turn into criminals Children’s Hunger Relief Fund will not idly stand by without seeing something done to help these innocent young orphaned children!

Many of the precious children are often abandoned because their parents have fallen into alcoholism, death or have been arrested and confined to jail.

It is sometimes hard to put into perspective, and especially into words, what a difference our CHRF Donors make in the lives of beautiful children from around the world. We have included a letter that was written to CHRF on behalf of our donors from a young girl whom we support in Trasnistria.

Because of Donors like YOU, this little girl, Rita, not only has a safe home to live in, food to eat, the means and necessary resources to attend school but most importantly of all a foster family who LOVES her.

Our Darling Girl Rita!

We have included her letter in this blog in order to share with our readers only a peak at the happiness, joy, love and peace that you help provide all over the world.

Dear CHRF Family,

This is Rita writing to you. It is summer now and I don’t go to school. But it is interesting to stay at home too. I have a little niece. Her name is Polina. I love her so much! When I play with her, she always smiles and laughs, though she is four and a half months only.

Also we have a little kitten. Somebody beat it and abandoned. My mother found it and brought it home. We called him Shrek first, but now we call him Marsik. He is so cute.

And a little bit earlier some boys gave my mom a little owl. It was bitten by dogs. The boys found it and gave to my mom. She nursed it and now it lives in the attic because it would be hard for it to live in a cage. Mom says when it gets stronger we will free it. But I don’t want because no one of my friends has an owl but I have.

This year I will go to another school. My mom hopes that it will be better for me there. Thank you for everything you do for me.

With love,
Rita.

Rita & Other Orphans like her are able to attend schools because of CHRF Donors!

From all of us here at Children’s Hunger Relief Fund, thank you for partnering with us to help beautiful young innocent children like Rita find a safe home in not only Transnistria but all over the world!

If you have browsed the CHRF blog and/or webpage you will have no doubt seen all of the projects that CHRF supports and works with in countries like Haiti (where we have worked to help re-build houses and feed thousands of children), in the Dominican Republic and in Mexico where we provide education, shelter, food and medical attention in the most dangerous city in the world, Juarez Mexico (EL Paso Times).

What you might not have noticed is all of the other work that CHRF supports on a daily basis south of our US Border! For example, our work in Costa Rica where CHRF supports a feeding program to help feed children off of the streets. Or where one of our Board Members is leading the effort in creating self sufficient programs and projects that hope to lead to creating many more jobs for the local community.

Or our work in Nicaragua where CHRF board Member Mario Aviles is constantly running around to our different feeding and school projects to check on the children!

Every year CHRF is pleased to hear from Mr. Aviles about the many children that have been so touched and transformed by the generosity and support of our CHRF Donors for the past 15 years! (For More information on our work in Nicaragua please visit http://chrf.org/nicaragua.html).

Mr. Aviles is also continuing to work hard creating a successful micro-loan program in Nicaragua to help members of the local community become self sufficient (just like in Costa Rica).

Beautiful Girls in Nicaragua Enjoying their Meals!

Perhaps most interesting of all is our work in Honduras where recently CHRF CEO Colonel V. Doner and CFO Kathleen McCall accompanied a valuable shipment of medicine down to the country so that the supplies could be used for the sick. Mr. Doner was asked to speak to the Congress of Honduras where the country expressed their deep gratitude and Mrs. McCall had a private meeting with Honduras’ First Lady.

CHRF CEO & CFO inspect shipment of Medical Supplies in Honduras.

With multiple feeding projects to provide hungry children with food, with multiple schools to provide children with an education, with multiple micro-loan projects to help create jobs all of our CHRF activities in countries like Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic are all very exciting!

Without the help and generosity of our CHRF donors NONE of these great projects could have been made possible!

Last month CHRF posted a blog about the things our donors have helped make happen over the decades we have been working together, providing millions of children tens of millions of meals, providing countless villages millions of cups of water, making emergency trips to places like Afghanistan, Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia. This list of GOOD DEEDS goes on and on, and as CHRF celebrates our 37th Birthday this year we have our Donors to thank for making all of the Miracles around the world possible! 

This week we have received a thank you letter from one of our orphanages and feeding centers in Uganda and wanted to pass on the thanks and gratitude to where it’s deserved, YOU, our Donors! 

The letter is from Isaac the orphanages director in Uganda who feeds over 100 children: 

“Thank you so much for your support towards our orphanage! It was wonderful to have a Christmas party at the orphanage.  We want to share our gratitude with those who contributed to the party and made our kids smile because A cake and some good diets.

We want to let you know that your current support has helped us to buy some mattresses and 10 bed sheets for the orphans. We also bought 100 kgs of posho children to start eating in the beginning of January in this year 2012, your continuing support has done good and brought hope in our orphanage.

We pray that God bless you so much and large your income and blessings this year.” 

It’s CHRF Donors that make Miracles like this possible all around the world every day! We are incredibly excited to be your partner in helping feeding the hungry and starving children of the world! 

Many of the cases in Haiti have been due to the Cholera outbreak in rural villages throughout the county. It’s amazing that Haiti still hurts from the devastation of the earthquake nearly 2 years later (Cholera is most often caused by dirty and unsanitary water).

A Haitian Mother Takes her Child to the life-saving clinic.

We have included the story of Madeline, a little girl that was saved with the help of CHRF this last year!
“Thanks to CHRF we were able to save Madeline, a precious six year old girl who recently lost her mother. Madeline’s father, Andre, tried desperately to save his daughter, but she was continuing to slip away from him. Her weight had plummeted to 25 pounds and her skeleton body began to swell. Knowing that Madeline was on the edge of death, Andre carried her eight hours to our local clinic. Because of CHRF’s support, we were able to look Andre in the eyes, take his dying daughter in our arms, and promise we would do everything possible to save her. After 11 months, Madeline recently returned to the loving arms and grateful heart of Andre.”

Another child saved! Another Family Strengthened!

Thanks in part to the many thousands of CHRF Donors and partners now thousands of Haitians men, women and children have received the urgent medical attention that they needed to get on the quick road to recovery.

Not only is CHRF helping Haiti with medical attention but we are also helping the rebuilding process of the country through our brink making machines and many feeding projects!

For more information please visit our website at www.chrf.org

We hope you will join us next year as we continue fighting for the lives of children around the world, one child at a time.

Because of our donors and supporters, our brave international relief team was willing to risk their lives in order to make life saving meal deliveries in isolated and forgotten corners of Ethiopia and Somalia. Thanks to the generosity of our CHRF donors we were able to deliver over 1,000,000 meals in that region alone!

Around the world we have opened new Samaritan Centers (orphanages) in order to provide a safe place where children can learn and grow strong. Just this month CHRF was responsible for opening a brand new Samaritan Center in Afghanistan for 75 children!

CHRF has numerous feeding programs around the world as well as many micro-enterprise loan projects.

CHRF has had the opportunity to build many new clean water wells so that the people of isolated villages will no longer have to walk miles and miles in order to simply find some water that will not get them sick.

We at Children’s Hunger Relief Fund are so blessed to be working with our great project partners all around the world and in over two dozen countries. Our work would no be possible without the generosity and compassion of our donors, because of this and our great feeling of thanks, We Wish You A Merry Christmas!

Please stay tuned in next year as we have just received exciting new developments about our projects in Afghanistan and Haiti!

Stopping Traffic International is dedicated to working towards the prevention of sexual trafficking as well as helping with the recovery process for victims of the horrendous crime. Stopping Traffic International also seeks to educate the public about these atrocious crimes on a local, national and international platform.

Because of Monte’s experiences in the field where he has met, mourned and wept with victims of sexual trafficking in countries such as Ethiopia, South Africa, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines and many more the organization has a unique, in depth and personal relationship fighting the problem around the world.

Children Of The World

STI plans to protect and rehabilitate the victimized children they have already met and whom have begged for their help. That’s why Mr. Wilson decided to work closely in South Africa where he has returned countless times to do all that he can help and where:

1 in every 4 women is in an abusive relationship.

Every 8 minutes a child is abused.

Every six days a woman is killed by her partner.

Every 24 minutes a child is raped.

And most shocking of all, where a woman born locally has a better chance of being raped than learning to read.

It’s these types of shocking statistics and the stories that follow them that have motivated our friends at Stopping Traffic International to do everything within their power to stop these horrific crimes.

Chairman Wilson & Brant Doner, CHRF Field Reporter, investigate the Trafficking Epidemic in the Philippines.

Please join CHRF in our battle against sexual trafficking.

For More information regarding Stopping Human Trafficking please visit their website:

http://stoppinghumantrafficking.com/home

Just days ago we received a note from a CHRF Sponsored Orphanage in Uganda. The note reads:

“Dear Children’s Hunger Relief Fund,
The children were out of food. Desperate and hungry we did not know what to do next or who to turn to for help. Then we received CHRF generous gift! It will be used only for food to stock the storehouse which was completely empty before we received your good news.
Thank you so much for the gift. We have purchased 80 kilograms of food, a box of soap, one tin of cooking oil, firewood, 2 Kilograms of meat, a few fish. Before we received your donation the children had nothing to live off of! Thank you so much for your generosity and help. God Bless You.”

A special Thank You to CHRF & Gabi, one of our project coordinators.

To express the gratitude felt from thousands of children around the world, we have chosen this one story from Uganda, but in reality, there are hundreds and thousands of children and their families who are so grateful and thankful for your support through Children’s Hunger Relief Fund!

New food to stock the Storehouse for Thanksgiving!

Happy Holidays!
THE CHRF Team.

Somali Children Protecting Their New Supply of Food!

With frequent and malicious kidnappings of Aid & Relief workers in the Somali Region, an uncooperative government and hundreds of thousands of people driven into chaos and frustration by starvation, these delivery trips were anything but easy.

“We had a few scares and some real close calls.” Tells our Emergency Relief Team Leader who has been traveling in and out of the Somali Region for months now, desperately searching for a way to get as many meals to the starving people in the region who need it most.

“We had to have at least a dozen body guards with us at all times to protect the food from thieves and protect us from kidnapping and being held ransom which is happening all over this region.”

The need is great, but thanks to our CHRF Emergency Relief Team and our CHRF Donors we have achieved our goals of providing the children and their families with over 1,000,000 meals! Now with our team going into the Somali Region again soon we will far surpass our goal and continue to help providing food for children and their families where NO OTHER relief Agencies have been able to help.

A Beautiful Somali Boy

“We have located entire villages and hundreds of families who hadn’t been receiving any aid. Thank God we were able to help them. It may only seem like a little bit, a donation of 5,10,20 or a 100 dollars, but when you are here, providing meals that only cost 10-30 cents, you can realize the impact and incredible amount of support and hope for life that you have given these people. I am blessed and so grateful to be able to provide these thousands of children and their families with the help and generous support that CHRF Donors have volunteered from the love and compassion of their hearts.”

For making these combined deliveries of over 1,000,000 meals possible, we THANK YOU!

How do you put into words the plea on a woman’s face when she desperately wants some attention for her dying child? How to explain that there’s a system of cards and a process? That all the other hundreds of mothers sitting and waiting in the scorching sun have done their waiting and it’s now their turn to have their gaunt, sick and skeletal child attended to? You need to wait yours. How do you, when waiting any longer may be a wait too long? How do you describe the particular smell that emanates from the ill and starving?

It’s a distinct odor – one of poverty, one of desperation, one of hopelessness, one of imminent death. And yet these mothers DO not resign their hope on behalf of their little ones, little ones that spend all their time desperately suckling at withered, turned to dust breasts. And neither will we, regardless of the sometimes futility of it, the never ending journey of suffering and starvation. We’ve been a team in this you and us, for many, many years and still the job needs doing. There is no end. No giving up.

The motivation pure, the commitment resolute and the outcome of lifting the veil of suffering and starvation, however slightly, worth every tear, every sacrifice, every hardship.

From the thousands and thousands who call a few rags and plastic bags ‘home’. Those who have mud walls and a grass roof to call home but no food in their stomachs – for days and days, month after month.

They work the soil, they plant the seed and then they wait. And wait, for rain. This year it hasn’t come. Their hopes die, their animals and livestock die and their children die. It’s brutally hard but it’s real and happening every single day. The facts and figures are there in the media for the reading, to be glossed over and filed away into some recess of the brain but they’re not simply numbers, they’re Enyabebe, Anybat, Gifiti. Children and people with hopes, hurts, desires, fears, dignity, dreams.

Keep them in your hearts, remember them in your prayers and whatever you do, do not give up on them.