September 2020 - Feeding and Public Health Update
Dear Friends of Sports Outreach,
Greetings in the name of Christ from your partners at Sports Outreach!
And THANK YOU so much for your interest in and support!
Our mission revolves around sports ministry. We do sports programs with children and young people living in poverty. BUT… we cannot simply do our sports programs and ignore the physical needs of those we serve!
In Matthew 25, Jesus discusses feeding the hungry and thirsty and visiting the sick. He states, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” This month, I’d like to update you on our feeding and public health work. These two initiatives enable us to show children and their families the Gospel of Jesus in very concrete ways.
Feeding
With the Covid lockdowns, it has not been possible to do our “normal” daily feeding programs in Uganda and Kenya. These programs provide several hundred meals a day to kids, either before or after school and sports activities. But we’ve certainly had many opportunities to help provide emergency food for literally hundreds of needy families.
In Kenya, El Salvador and Uganda, we’ve been able to provide food for 1700 families (10,500 people). Altogether, we’ve provided over 440,000 meals! Our international staff have shared with us numerous accounts of people weeping with joy and overcome with thankfulness that we have helped them in such a practical way in this unusually difficult time.
Here is a wonderful story that shows how God has connected people across the US and El Salvador to provide additional food to 700 more families in the next two months! For years, SOI El Salvador has provided exercise and PE training at the Vito Guarato Orphanage for the Disabled. One of the Board members there knows an El Salvadoran businessman in the US who wants to donate literally thousands of pounds of beans to feed poor families impacted by the Covid lockdown. The Board member connected SOI El Salvador as one of the agencies who could help distribute a portion of this gift. It has a matching component – agencies have to provide the same number of pounds of other food – rice, sugar, oil, etc. as the beans.
So in the months of August and September, Humberto and his staff will be distributing almost three TONS of food to 700 needy families! If you’d like to help provide for the matching food supplies, or to help with our feeding programs in general, please visit https://www.sportsoutreach.net/feeding
Public Health
Our coaches in Uganda, Kenya and El Salvador regularly provide health training to children in the sports programs. In slums and rural areas, very simple knowledge that we take for granted about water safety, hand washing, brushing teeth and the like can significantly improve the health of children. While we have not been able to do trainings like this in the past few months, it will continue to be an important part of our overall “off the field” work, and even more so with the Covid situation.
Additionally, part of the long-term vision of our leaders in Uganda is to provide basic medical services to people in the communities surrounding our ministry centers in Kampala and Gulu. We are well on the way to achieving this, with a clinic building complete in Gulu and one in Kampala almost ready to begin construction.
Many people who have participated in medical missions with Sports Outreach short-term mission teams can attest to the great blessing even the most basic medical services can provide to people who live far from towns or cities and have no reasonable access to any medical providers. Each of these clinics will be able to treat several hundred patients a month, for only a few dollars per patient.
Will you consider helping us take the next steps to open and operate the clinics? We’re looking for a group of people who are passionate about providing medical care to the neediest people who might come together to provide the financial resources to operate these two clinics. The monthly operating cost will be between $2000 and $2500 a month for each one. You can learn more (including detailed operating proposals) at https://www.sportsoutreach.net/public-health . Please email info@sportsoutreach.net if you’d like to join us in this effort to get our clinics up and running.
Blessings,
Ben Moomaw