Arizona residents Pete and Ila Diepersloot leave for Niamey, Niger, on Monday to spend three months providing food assistance to West Africans struggling to survive chronic drought and food shortages. The couple is volunteering their time and experience to the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee (www.crwrc.org) as International Relief Managers in six communities, reaching more than 28,000 people with food and work that will sustain them until the next harvest.
“It’s a privilege to spend some of our retirement years doing disaster response work with CRWRC,” Ila Diepersloot says. “We’re excited to go to Niger because we love doing this kind of work: we always get back more than we give.”
By collaborating with CRWRC’s Nigerien partners, with funding from the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, the Diepersloots will manage the distribution of six-month food supplies to 4,000 families in urban and rural communities. The provision ensures that at-risk families will have enough to eat through the harvest in late in 2012.
The Diepersloots say that the program involves layers of intervention. “Food For Work” activities provide participants who are able to work with community projects in exchange for food, such as road repair, clearing communal land, or easing access to local markets. Residents whose health is too fragile for work can purchase food at subsidized prices, and those who are unable to afford the subsidized food price receive free rations.
“We will also distribute improved seed varieties to help families increase crop development and diversity,” Pete Diepersloot says. “It’s a challenge to confront and analyze a broad spectrum of issues that need to be resolved in order to provide real assistance and services among a diverse group of people.”
Poor harvests due to chronic drought over the last 30 years have left half of Niger’s population vulnerable to food crises and insecurity. In addition, regional instability is causing hundreds of thousands of refugees to cross the borders from Libya and Mali, putting additional strain on families who are trying to support even more people with less food than usual. In Niger, where 63% live below the poverty line and 34% are below the threshold for extreme poverty, increasing demand for supplies also increases food prices—making it even more difficult for the many families already living in poverty to purchase food.
Please pray for the people of West Africa in the face of this crisis. Pray for good rains across the region and that this six month project will be successful at meeting needs until a new crop can be harvested. Please also prayerfully consider supporting this effort with your financial gifts. For the food portion of the response, donations from Canadians for the West Africa Drought Response will be matched 4:1 by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) through CFGB. Donations outside of Canada will not be matched, but are still urgently needed, particularly to cover some of the non-food needs.
Checks marked “West Africa Drought 2012” can also be sent to:
CRWRC US
2850 Kalamazoo Ave SE
Grand Rapids, MI 49560
Ph: 1-800-55-CRWRC
CRWRC-Canada
3475 Mainway
P.O. Box 5070 STN LCD
Burlington, Ontario, L7R 3Y8
~ by Beth DeGraff, CRWRC Communications
