Stressed and Stuck - World Renew

MALAWI – We all experience stress. When I am back in the US, I see my brother or sister-in-law rushing from work to pick up the kids from school to take them to doctor’s appointments – all this while work is calling them with questions! At the end of the night, they are exhausted. They don’t understand why and they are kicking themselves because they feel inadequate.

We all know stress. We all know that when we are stressed, our minds are preoccupied with that particular challenge and figuring out how to it. When stressed, our brain has less bandwidth to think about or plan for other things like what to cook for dinner.

Now, think about an unemployed mother worried about feeding her kids. Every time she asks her husband for money to buy food, her husband gets mad at her because he doesn’t have any money; their relationship is strained and stressed. Mom does not have the mental bandwidth to start the vegetable garden that the agriculture worker is asking her to start. This mother can only think about feeding her children. She remembers hearing about El Niño, and how she should be planting crops the “conservation agriculture” way, but she can’t concentrate during the village training. This mother is too overwhelmed to try something new.

When the village health worker tells her that her youngest child seems to be malnourished and tries to show her what food she should feed her children and how often, she really tries to pay attention. But she is so overwhelmed with all the things she needs to do that she doesn’t even know where to start. This mother is stressed. This mother feels stuck.

This is where World Renew comes in. We are the people trying to encourage families to start gardens so that they have more access to food to feed their family. We are the people training volunteer mothers to visit homes that have malnourished children and to advise the parents on what they can do. We are the people offering trainings on improved ways of growing crops so that hopefully they can harvest more. We are the people trying to improve sanitation in homes so that kids get sick less. It is a lot of information for households when their families are already stressed and feel stuck.

This is where you come in. We need your prayers for wisdom so that we may know how to help families that are stressed and feel stuck. We need your prayers for wisdom to know which families need extra support and what kind. We need you to pray for the communities in Ntcheu where we are managing this nutrition project started in July.

Please pray that the community would come together and help one another. This will be an El Niño year, and we will not get good rains, so families really do need to adopt the agriculture method that we are proposing or else they may not harvest any food. These families are stressed and we need your prayers.