Most parishioners are familiar with the Catholic Relief Services’ Rice Bowl program because of the little cardboard boxes for change donations, the ones that appear in churches and dinner tables all across the country during Lent. But where exactly do these donations go?
Advocates of the Rice Bowl
program visited the University of Notre Dame on Tuesday, February 4 – the day before Lent. The event was sponsored by the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend and the CRS chapter at Notre Dame. Speakers provided information on the Rice Bowl program in general and its benefits in one country in particular.
Photos by Kasia BalsbaughNative Sierra Leonean Doreen Kargbo presents about the work that Catholic Relief Services is doing in her country at the University of Notre Dame on Tuesday, March 4.
The presentation gave an overview of CRS and the program’s 50-year history. It was founded in 1975 when a group of Catholics in Allentown, Pennsylvania, heard about a severe drought in the normally verdant Sahel region of Africa and decided to help. Since then, Catholic Relief Services has expanded its relief efforts to several other countries and continents, raising $350 million for those in poverty. Today, the money given to CRS helps communities around the world, including local communities, as 25 percent of donations stay in the diocese in which they were donated.
The presentation shared a story from Moussa Bangre, who is in the leadership in CRS and had been a child in Africa during the drought that sparked CRS’ formation. He remembered the days of the drought, living with no electricity or running water, when people resorted to eating crickets and leaves off trees because crops couldn’t grow.
“We weren’t going to school because we wanted to learn but because we wanted to eat!” Bangre said. “Life was simply survival.”
Students from the University of Notre Dame add their intentions to a prayer map on the Catholic Relief Services website.
Doreen Kargbo works for CRS in her native country of Sierra Leone. She briefly described Sierra Leone as a small coastal country on the western shore of Africa, with natural beauty galore in the form of mountains, a peninsula, and beaches. “I bet that if you visit Sierra Leone, you wouldn’t want to come back,” Kargbo said.
But Sierra Leone has had its share of hardships. It was a British colony, gaining its independence in 1961. During the 1990s, the country was wracked with a bloody civil war. And in 2014, the Ebola outbreak was so deadly that, in Kargbo’s words, it set back whatever rebuilding had been happening after the civil war. Difficulties continue in many of Sierra Leone’s poorer communities today. For example, just like in Bangre’s childhood, many students who now attend school in the country only do so for the free meal that CRS helps provide.
As Kargbo explained, CRS works with local services already on the ground, providing training and facilitating so locals can take better advantage of what they already have. This includes, for instance, providing transportation to existing hospitals, teaching people to clean up puddles of water so mosquitos can’t breed and spread malaria, or, since Sierra Leone is beginning to lose its peninsula, planting trees and giving talks about caring for the country’s environment.
The goal, Kargbo said, is for training to spread and continue without CRS staff in the area. She shared one anecdote where they had had a small group with young men who were living peacefully and respectfully alongside the women in their lives. When revisiting the area, CRS staff noticed that these messages from a group of 20 men had spread much farther. One man mentioned to Kargbo how, inspired by the small group’s message, he had exhorted a friend to stop physically abusing the friend’s wife.
Kargbo herself has been working for CRS for a year and a half. She grew up in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, and said she had not fully realized the extent of poverty in some areas of her country until working with CRS.
“Most often, I have two very strong emotions,” Kargbo said. “The very first one is shame – shame that maybe I’ve not been very grateful for what I have received from God. And the second emotion that comes often is wanting to do more: How can I help?”
Beth Knobbe, a senior trainer with CRS, spoke briefly after Kargbo’s presentation. In light of the U.S. government’s recent pausing of several humanitarian aid programs, Knobbe urged “the need to retell the story … because the story is people like Doreen, young men and women who we are able to invest in, who then can invest in their communities, and that these are real people and real lives. It is the work of the Church. It is the work that God calls us to – to not only feed the hungry but give them the skills and tools and resources they need to feed themselves.”
Knobbe, Kargbo, and the CRS student ambassadors encouraged audience members to incorporate CRS Rice Bowl into their Lenten almsgiving, as well as in their prayer this season (the CRS website has a prayer map on which people can share intentions).
“Your brother, your sister, is not necessarily the person sitting next to you,” Kargbo told the audience at Notre Dame. “It could be the person on the other side of the world that you never get to meet.”
The post CRS Rice Bowl: Stories from an Impacted Country appeared first on Today's Catholic. ...read more read less
