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Aiding Families & Communities in Crisis
The Hunger Site is proud to be partners with three leading charities that are working hard to end hunger and poverty. Mercy Corps , Feeding America , and Millennium Promise build on your efforts by providing food and resources to those suffering from hunger and poverty in the U.S. and around the world.
When you click daily, the money generated by our site sponsors goes directly to these outstanding organizations to further their efforts in the ongoing battle against hunger. Below is just a small example of how funds from your daily click are helping real people, both in the U.S. and worldwide.
Mercy Corps: Aceh province, Indonesia
The wider world seems a long way from the rice paddies of Naga Umbang, a quiet village of 395 people backed by thrusting green mountains in Aceh province, at the tip of Indonesia's Sumatra island. But all you have to do is mention food and fuel prices and the winds of a global crisis come rushing in. It's top-of-mind for nearly everyone working these paddies, and even those who used to have a semblance of financial security aren't spared.
Zainbon is a 37-year-old rice farmer with a black baseball cap perched atop her pink headscarf. Her husband mans a desk as a temporary, low-level bureaucrat in the district transportation office nearby, but still they struggle to find the rupiahs each month to get by. She pulls at her scarf, explaining how they stretch six or seven dollars a day across the needs of cooking staples, school fees, fuel and now, in the fall planting season, fertilizer and rice seed. A Mercy Corps survey in the area recently found staple food prices climbing between ten and twenty-five percent, on top of fuel prices that jumped forty percent earlier this year.
"This is hugely important for us — the staples are rising and the salary isn't keeping pace," Zainbon says. "What about others whose husbands are just farming? They're struggling even worse."
This worldwide crisis is striking an area just starting to find its feet again after a vicious cycle of calamity. For decades, a rural separatist conflict kept many farmers out of their rice fields and fruit plantations for fear that they would be caught in the crossfire. Then in 2004, the Asian tsunami sent a wall of water up to thirty feet deep and flattened everything in the area, including the entire village of Naga Umbang.
With the houses now rebuilt, the rice paddies cleared of debris and new water buffalo roaming the yards, villagers are now teaming with Mercy Corps to strengthen their rice farming techniques and improve crop yields.