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Shoulder 2 Shoulder is fundamentally about feeding people. The heart of our work in Zambia is moving brothers and sisters (and kids!) in Christ - members of our 125 churches - who are prior eating 3-7 meals per week, to now eating 2 meals per day. Right now, we are providing bags of corn that can be milled into Mealie Meal, a substance that gets boiled into a thick cornmeal porridge called Nshima, to somewhere around 3,500 households that are suffering from some version of food insecurity or starvation. Overall, it is estimated that there are between 4 - 5 million people in Zambia suffering in this fashion. We believe S2S is now addressing roughly 20,000+ of those individuals with our partner feeding program.
Our churches report their numbers for overall membership and the number of members that are vulnerable, and my brother Rob works with spreadsheets and formulas to determine the best distribution system. He is constantly manipulating the numbers to try to feed the most possible of the most vulnerable in our member churches. Most of our vulnerable members are provided corn from bags that are stored in their church or some other secure area. S2S recently purchased (with the help of our 138 donors) roughly $138,000 worth of corn, and that stored corn will feed our vulnerable church members for the 12-month period starting this past July of '25. Then each month, we send additional funds so each member can get the corn they receive from their church milled into the Mealie Meal. All of this process is overseen by our Zambia 5 staff guys, with the assistance of the pastor and deacons at each church.
When we come to Zambia, our churches are excited to celebrate another year of God's provision with us. We will normally have a celebratory service at one of our churches in the various regions. And then we will follow up with what we call a feast. You might see photos or videos on social media of lines of people getting plates of food, or folks sitting around on the ground eating. I would guess that on this trip we will feast with a few thousand people during our 2 week tour. We have now completed 4 feasts (Lusaka, Solwezi, Mambwe & Chipata) and we will do the final feast tomorrow in Livingstone. We just finished our 10 hour drive from Chipata back to Lusaka today. Lisa and I are repacking our luggage and will get to bed early so we can do another 7 hour drive that starts at 5:00 a.m. tomorrow. The travel is pretty rough at times, but I try to remember that those who sow much will reap much. That will be true tomorrow. We will sow the difficulty of international travel but will reap the joy of feasting with hundreds of thankful souls.
There is much more that S2S is currently doing to address material needs among our partner churches in Zambia. I'll try to detail some of those things over our final few days. For now, I need to help Lisa pack...here we go!
