January | 2017 | Tales of a Nomad

IMG_2972 - Version 3 As I was doing research for a paper I am working on for grad school, I came across some startling statistics about Indonesia. Did you know that according to the World Bank, ONE IN THREE CHILDREN in Indonesia is severely malnourished and will be permanently stunted? When a child is stunted it means that their physical bodies and their brains will never fully develop. Can you imagine receiving so few nutrients that your hair cannot properly pigment? That from year to year in school you can hardly learn anything new because your brain is not developing properly? All because you do not have enough nutrients….

As followers of Jesus that should break our heart. That is not the reality that God has designed for them. These statistics should not just cause us to feel pity, it should move us to ACTION.

Research shows that the window of time to reverse the permanent effects of malnutrition are in the first 2,000 days of the child’s life. That means that by the time children begin school with us in kindergarten, it is too late to reverse the permanent effects. So what do we do? We focus on the mothers. We partner with them so that together we can make a permanent difference in the lives of the students.

At Partners for Compassions we are fighting the one in three. We provide free vitamins to pregnant mothers and young children in the communities where we operate. We work with the mothers through a series of health education initiatives so that they can learn the importance of nutrition and what they should be feeding their children. We walk alongside them as they wrestle with what properly feeding their children means practically. What we have started to do is great—but I believe God has more in store over the next three years.

Would you partner with us as together we wrestle with the effects of malnutrition in Indonesia? Together we will fight the one in three!

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Resources:

“The Double Burden of Malnutrition in Indonesia.” The World Bank. 23 April 2015. Retrieved from http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2015/04/23/the-double-burden-of-malnutrition-in-indonesia. Accessed 20 Jan. 2017.

2016 was quite an adventure! They say pictures are worth a thousand words, so as to save you reading millions of words describing this year, here are my top 10 highlights (in chronological order) in pictures:

1. Having over 40 women come to each of our community health education seminars and graduating our first group of women from the program!