I love it when I sit down to update our followers, and I get a picture from Zambia. The image on today's post comes from Revelation Baptist Church. We call it a part of our Mambwe group, but the church sits at the very northern edge of that group and borders our Chipata group. We got to spend some time with Pastor Francis Daka last August on a bus ride as we left the Mambwe region and headed back to Chipata. What a terrific young man, who just wants to love and serve people. He farms and works hard as he also leads a church with around 150 members and 20 or so vulnerable households. Brother Francis is now one of more than 100 pastors that we partner with to provide more food for the meals of the most vulnerable brothers and sisters in their communities.
We are nearly finished with our harvest acquisition in Zambia, with just a few more church communities to receive an allotment of maize that they will store and distribute over the coming months.
Our partners at Zambia Iowa Ag Partners have a fundraiser on Monday evening, and we hope to maybe get a little better idea what their plans might be over the coming months, as we again hope to partner with them by providing a wonderful distribution system for the training they are focused on providing.
Over the coming weeks I expect you will hear more about that. We also received some additional funding for clean water projects this week, and are still on track to complete at least one new project each month of 2025.
What a fun month June has been, as we have added FIVE first time donors and THREE new recurring donors to our efforts this month. With the addition of so many church communities due to the harvest acquisition, our monthly expectations will be increasing from both a cost standpoint and a benefit standpoint. This month is a transition month, as some of the new Mambwe church communities received their maize at the end of May and will begin their program this month. But then next month, we should have ALL our new communities enjoying their first distribution to their most needy members. At this point I am expecting our monthly efforts to provide some food for well over 3,000 families in July, after serving around 2,200 for much of the last twelve months. Such an exciting time of growth, and to be able to combine that with the significant increase in clean water projects is making for such a fruitful year!!
Allow me to say THANK YOU again to those in America that are sharing just a bit of their surplus with Shoulder 2 Shoulder in order to provide food to some who otherwise are living in deficit. And another THANK YOU to those in Zambia that are sharing just a bit of their FAITH with us in America who are otherwise so reliant on our money that our faith is in deficit. And finally, a THANK YOU to our partners in Zambia - the guys who manage the work for S2S, as well as the hundreds of community leaders that manage the storage and the monthly distributions for their communities.
Let me close today's update with words from Matthew 25, as Jesus said, "Whenever you did one of these things to someone overlooked or ignored, that was me - you did it to me." We believe each month, whether through our clean water projects or our feeding program, we are providing clean water and daily food for these lovely people who represent Jesus Himself.
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