Mission Reports reports 2008

Help Feed Hungry Children in This Time of Crisis

Child enjoying hot meal at Bosco Food Kitchen.

December 22, 2008 -- Gracie Mae holds her shivering baby in her thin arms as they stand outside the Bosco Food Kitchen, waiting for it to open. A small threadbare blanket is all that shields the little child from the biting cold.

Help Children and Families This Christmas

Help Families have a hot meal this Christmas.

November 11, 2008 -- No jolly Santa will visit the Crenshaw family this year. Christmas will be like any other day. The children will bundle up in several layers of old clothes to stay warm and listen to a few songs on the radio.

Help Feed the Hungry this Thanksgiving

Help Families have a hot Thanksgiving Meal at Bosco Food Kitchen.

October 21, 2008 -- Hunger crosses all ages, from little toddlers needing booster seats to elders who walk with canes needing help to a chair. The line of hungry poor coming in the door never seems to end and when we tally up the numbers, we find we are serving 1,000 more meals a month than we did a year ago.

Shelter a Family in Need

September 30, 2008 -- This is the community of Vredenburgh, lost in the backwoods so deeply that most Alabamans have never heard of it. Miles from the nearest town, it is home to about 200 families who face terrible hardships of poverty, joblessness and despair.

Hunger Has a Face

A child eats at Bosco Food Kitchen in Selma.

September 8, 2008 -- Hunger has a face. It is the face of an elder who lives in a backwoods shack surviving too many days on cornbread because that’s all she has. It is the face of a child drinking sugar water because his grandmother’s monthly check can’t stretch to buy food they need to survive.

Rebuilding After Hurricane Katrina

August 25, 2008 -- Terrance Shaw turned three years old on August 29, 2005. No one could have imagined his birthday would mark the worst disaster ever to strike his hometown. Hurricane Katrina pummeled New Orleans that day.

Help Feed Hungry Children

Boy enjoying meal at Bosco Food Kitchen.

July 25, 2008 -- I imagine many of the children who came to Jesus for a blessing looked much like the children who come to Bosco Food Kitchen. Many have experienced more grief than we will ever know.

Troubled Economy Affecting Edmundite Missions

One of the little ones picked up for preschool in Vredenburgh.

June 30, 2008 -- Our troubled economy is sending shock waves through the country. While sitting here writing this letter, I am fighting an uphill battle to feed, clothe and aid the rural poor. Now more than ever, I face huge challenges as food, supplies and fuel prices skyrocket and the needy sink deeper into poverty and despair...

No Child Should Suffer Hunger

Robertson children in front of their dilapidated house.

June 6, 2008 -- It breaks my heart to see a child go hungry. You won’t see them if you are traveling along the interstate highways. You won’t see them when you drive two-lane county roadways. You have to get off main roads and back into the fields and woods...

Hunger Doesn't Take a Break

May 14, 2008 -- As I worry about hungry schoolchildren and neighbors, Mary Gayle, our Bosco Food Kitchen cook, knocks nervously at my office door. I can tell she doesn’t want to come in. I know if she is asking for help it’s big trouble, because she has been making do on a tight budget for over 20 years...

Please Help Feed Hungry Children in Rural Alabama

April 22, 2008 -- I just got back from the Selma Food Bank. I had gone to see what food was on hand for our feeding programs for the very poor. I could scarcely believe my eyes. There was no meat, no beans, no rice, no vegetables. I could see it was the worst shortage in years.

Preschool in Vredenburgh

April 2, 2008 -- “Is it time? Is it time for school?” Tyesha Franklin asks her mother at least 10 times each morning. The three-year-old loves Edmundite Missions’ preschool in her small isolated community of Vredenburgh. She hops, skips and runs to the van when it arrives to pick her up. “She cries on the days there’s no school,” said her mother, Marisa.

Violent Tornados in Alabama

Boy looking for things to save in Tornado rubbel.

March 11, 2008 -- "I don’t know how we survived. Only God knows,” said Geraldine Hanson, as she showed me her mother's devastated trailer, shattered by one of nine violent tornadoes that crashed through Alabama during the last two and a half weeks.