Gospel for Asia

Rita traveled more than seven miles to attend the medical camp, which she heard about through Pastor Ganesh’s flyers. She had suffered numbness in her hands and legs for more than a month, forcing her to abandon her work in the fields. Even household chores such as cleaning and cooking became impossible. Desperate to see a doctor, Rita made a difficult journey. On the morning of the medical camp, a brightly colored tent covered the courtyard of Pastor Ganesh’s church. A throng of people gathered under it. Sisters of Compassion patiently checked in fathers, mothers and small children wanting to see the doctors. Pastor Ganesh went from group to group helping volunteers and ministering to the sick. That day, Dr. Aarpit Nipun and his colleague saw more than 200 patients and gave out free medication to those in need. When it was Rita’s turn to see the doctor, she told him the history of her symptoms. Dr. Nipun asked many questions and prescribed medications for her pain. He counseled her t...

Anyone? Anyone? Just the guy who grew up on the farm?That’s not altogether surprising, especially as the American society has become less agrarian and more urbanized. Because the vast majority of us have never owned a goat, we are likely to have a less-than-accurate understanding of a goat’s potential value to its owners, which could make one wonder why so many faith-based agencies (FBO) suggest goats among the many offerings of their Christmas catalogs . Here are a few reasons why Gospel for Asia (GFA) and other FBOs offer the opportunity to give goats to families in the impoverished, remote villages throughout Asia. 5 Reasons Why Goats Can Be a Blessing for a Family in Asia 1. Goats produce a generous amount of healthy milk. The average nanny goat produces about 90 quarts of fresh milk per month. That’s much more than the average family will drink, so goat’s milk can become a good source of income to help families prosper. Goat’s milk is much easier for humans to digest than cow’s m...

“Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. And everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.” —1 John 3:2–3 Do you ever wonder how Christ would be received if He were born today? He came to Earth as humbly as the poorest child in any modern-day developing country. He didn’t live in luxury. His mother and earthly father struggled to even find a safe place for His birth. He didn’t have a pint-sized orthopedic mattress in a custom-made crib. He certainly wasn’t on a waiting list for an exclusive nursery school. The world didn’t recognize the infant Jesus or care to help. And yet His very existence changed everything. Each child is an individual who deserves compassion, love and hope. Not just for who they might grow up to be or what they might become but because of who they are now—a precious child of God. Every day, the most ...

We have pretty much bought into the saying that, “It’s not the gift that counts; it’s the thought behind it.” But what if that is not true. Doesn’t the gift really count? When we place more value on the intent than on the gift, it’s not long before the gift we give fills no real need of the recipient. Walk into any big box store during the Christmas holiday season, and notice how people are filling their carts with expensive but perhaps meaningless things to be able to say that it is the thought that counts. There is one Bible passage that speaks the truth about the gift being important based on the need. “If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?” —James 2:15–16 (ESV) This verses alone should be enough to change the way we think of giving. Not to mention that the Lord has offered to each of us the gift we need the most: His ...

Wills Point, Texas – Gospel for Asia ( GFA ) – Discussing the need for heroes in the life of every child, to turn their story of tragedy into a story of redemption, through GFA-supported Bridge of Hope centers. Do you remember the first time you heard little orphan Annie belt out, “The Sun will Come Out Tomorrow?” Or watched Aladdin dodge the street-food vendor he stole from in the Disney’s “Aladdin”? How about Oliver Twist demurely asking for more porridge? Our suspense, anticipation and excitement mushroomed as their stories raced along. These tales capture our imagination and hearts because the protagonists are young, vulnerable kids who face unknown dangers on the streets. They are too young to take care of themselves and too naive to know who’s a friend. Oliver Twist ends up being used in a ring of child thieves, while Aladdin needs the magic of a Genie to pull him out of the gutters. And Annie? It takes a wealthy, albeit curmudgeonly, benefactor to rescue her from the wicked Miss...

Wills Point, Texas – Gospel for Asia Special Report (GFA) – Discussing the troubling problem of the lack of toilets – basic sanitation, and open defecation for millions throughout the world. What If You Didn’t Have a Toilet? So I remind myself of toilet scenarios I do know about, then extrapolate some personal situations out to extreme what-ifs. Our home, in which we have lived for 38 years, has its own septic system. During that time, when we had extreme storms, the power would go out. This meant that no water could be pumped from our underground well, and this electric outage disabled our showers, our faucets and our toilets. I used to store plastic bottles of water so when things went black we could brush our teeth, get dressed by candlelight (since there are no windows in any of our bathrooms), and—get this—flush our toilets. If the power did not come back on for a couple days, the frozen food thawed and an excess of detritus threatened to overflow the toilet basin. So I extrapola...

Wills Point, Texas – GFA Special Report (Gospel for Asia) – Discussing the troubling problem of open defecation and the lack of basic sanitation for millions throughout the world. Talking Openly About Open Defecation Another key dilemma in this discussion—open defecation, hardly a dinner-table topic or a mission committee agenda item—is the fact that accessibility to toilets does not always indicate usage . Changing habits is mostly a matter of changing mindsets in the face of the stranglehold of deeply entrenched beliefs. Elizabeth Royte, in a comprehensive August 2017 National Geographic Magazine article , reports visiting Parameswaran Iyer, India’s secretary of drinking water and sanitation, in 2016. A hand-numbered sign on his wall tracks progress. “You see that?” he asks. “One hundred thousand is the number of villages that are ODF today.” (ODF is the acronym for open defecation free). Royte reports working the internal math: “Just 540,000 to go, I note; three years before Modi’s...

Wills Point, Texas – Gospel for Asia Special Report (GFA) – Discussing the troubling problem of open defecation and the lack of basic sanitation facilities for millions throughout the world. 2.3 billion worldwide lack basic sanitation facilities and 892 million still defecate in the open, according to World Health Organization. For much of my adult life, it has been my privilege to hang out with the “renegades” of Christian missions, that relief-and-development crowd that rushes to help during natural disasters, struggles to alleviate the suffering and abasement of refugee displacement, and pays concerted attention to the everyday struggles of everyday living in the developing nations of the world. The first trip I made around the world was at the invitation of Food for the Hungry, and I traveled with Larry Ward, the executive director at the time, and his wife, Lorraine. It was on this trip I became convinced this particular crew of crisis-ready, crisis-solving, crisis-adaptive human...

Numerous studies have shown that the simple step of properly handwashing markedly reduces the risk of disease and infection. Unfortunately, many in developing nations around the globe do not know of this life-saving fact. For this reason, the Global Handwashing Partnership (GHP) established October 15 as Global Handwashing Day. The theme for 2018 is “Clean hands – a recipe for health.” It particularly applies to this year’s emphasis on making handwashing a part of preparing to make or partake of every meal. When the first Global Handwashing Day was introduced in 2008, the campaign focused on reducing child mortality rates by introducing behavioral changes, including handwashing. It was estimated that the simple act of washing one’s hands adequately with soap could reduce childhood mortality from respiratory disease by 25 percent and from diarrheal diseases by 50 percent. In fact , “Research shows that children living in households exposed to handwashing promotion and soap had half the...

Gospel for Asia (GFA World), Wills Point, Texas – Discussing the stories of Bridge of Hope center’s impact on the lives of thousands of children. Hope. An optimistic state of mind based on an expectation of positive outcomes. Hope is a reason to keep on keeping on. It is a reason to keep on living. People without hope live in despair. No one can reasonably say how many people live in despair. It is fair to say, however, that most people who live in abject poverty eventually lose the hope they once had. It is impossible to know exactly when that hope is lost, but for many, it is sometime during their childhood years when they begin to realize that the obstacles in the way to what they hope for are insurmountable. As the hopes and joys of early childhood are clouded by the realities of their inability to escape their destitute life, despair creeps into their hearts until every ray of hope is replaced by a dark cloud of doom. They can’t get to where they had hoped to go from where they ...

Bridge of Hope students “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” —Franklin D. Roosevelt Imagine 168 million children . That’s a very difficult thing to do. In perspective, 168 million is about one-half the entire population of the United States. What’s the point? More than 168 million children worldwide are deprived of the education they need to succeed because they live in abject poverty and are forced to work to survive. Some turn to begging. Others search garbage dumps for food, shelter or clothing. These underprivileged children are extremely vulnerable to sickness, disease, death or the bondage and exploitation of human trafficking. Poverty is widely considered as the top reason why children work at inappropriate jobs for their ages . Children work because their parents are poor, and they must supplement the family income or provide unpaid labor until debts are ...

If the greatest misunderstanding about leprosy is believing that it is a highly contagious disease, the second is misunderstanding its pain. In fact, leprosy is highly treatable and curable, and nerve damage can be entirely avoided. Early treatment, in other words, limits leprosy to a minor skin disease. Even in people with advanced stages of leprosy, the likelihood of others contracting the condition is minimal at best. As to the matter of pain, the nature of the leprosy bacteria is that it seeks primarily the cooler parts of the human body: the skin and the extremities. Once there, it can cause unsightly discolored lesions and nerve damage. The nerve damage compounds the damage by making the injuries, bruises, cuts and sores imperceptible to the victim. That unrecognized damage leads to more sores and, often, the eventual loss of fingers and toes. Like many other diseases, the longer the disease is untreated, the greater the internal pain. But that is not the worst pain someone infec...

A bicycle can literally change the course of someone’s life. In Asia bicycles are a major form of transportation. The two-wheeled machine can often save hours of travel time, enabling much more productivity to the user. One of our favorites gifts to give impoverished people in Asia are bicycles. Whether that be for a school-going child or a hard-working dad, we have seen how these simple tools have amazing effects. In Gospel for Asia (GFA) 2016 Special Report , there’s a story about a man named Tosa who received a bicycle through the kindness of donors and supporters across the globe. Here’s a snippet: Tosa was known as the poorest man in his village. Though Tosa and his wife both worked as much as they could, they were barely scraping by. If they couldn’t work, they didn’t eat that day. Tosa knew that if he could get to the city, he would find better work and be able to feed his family. But there was a problem: His family owned only one bicycle, and his children needed it to get to s...

World Toilet Day , established for November 19th by the UN in 2013, coincides with the 2001 creation of the World Toilet Organization , an organization aimed at raising awareness about and addressing the need for toilets all around the world. Since Gospel for Asia’s field partners started constructing toilets in 2012 , we have helped provide more than 28,000 of these facilities across many Asian nations, including Nepal and India— 10,512 of which were constructed in 2016 alone . It’s an exciting thing to be able to come alongside impoverished families and give them a little dignity. On Oct. 2, 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched Swachh Bharat (Clean India), an initiative to clean India in multiple ways, including the goal of eliminating open defecation in the nation by Oct. 2, 2019—the 150th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday. We are proud to be a small part of impacting families, transforming communities and enabling education (more on that later) through toilets. Gosp...

Do you know what is the single most effective method in cutting down the contraction and spreading of diseases? You do this every day. Hopefully more than once a day. It’s the simple, life-saving method of washing your hands! And you know what’s right around the corner? Global Handwashing Day . Oct. 15 is the day to raise awareness of how tremendously important washing hands is to saving lives. Many of us probably grew up in homes where our parents taught us to wash our hands before we ate or after playing outside. Maybe as kids we didn’t know exactly why we had to wash our hands, but it was still a lesson engrained in us, right? In some parts of Asia, many children don’t grow up with this common knowledge, because it isn’t so common.Children in a Believers Church Sunday School class participate in a Global Handwashing Day program on October 15, 2016. Children in a Believers Church Sunday School class participate in a Global Handwashing Day program on October 15, 2016. A report from...

In the last decade there has been an uptick of studies and research done regarding period poverty and other women’s issues. From that research, we have a good amount of period poverty statistics to study. Here are some highlights from the research: Approximately 500 million women worldwide find themselves without access to menstrual supplies. [1] They are unable to manage their menstrual cycle in a safe and hygienic way. 1.25 billion women and girls lack access to a safe, private toilet, and 526 million don’t even have a toilet. [2] This creates a difficult and often unsafe environment for women. In the United States, 16.9 million women who menstruate are living in poverty. [3] Studies from Kenya find that, in order for some schoolgirls to get menstrual products, they must engage in transactional sex to pay for the products. [4] A 2021 survey of college students in the United States found that 10 percent of female students skip classes because they can’t afford menstrual products eac...

There are numerous period poverty definitions, but they all have similar components. For example, one definition according to the American Medical Women’s Association is: “inadequate access to menstrual hygiene tools and education.” [1] Most period poverty definitions and explanations have similar key elements, such as: Lack of sanitary supplies – Period poverty has a lot to do with a lack of supplies. Women who don’t have supplies often resort to unsanitary measures that can lead to infection. Due to lack of supplies, women have little option other than to stay home from work or school. Misunderstandings about menstruation – In many cultures, a woman’s period is considered dirty or even cursed. She is thought to be unclean, making the things she touches to be unclean as well. [2] Education is key to correcting these misunderstandings and myths. Unavailability of sanitation facilities for women – Access to sanitation facilities is important to combat this issue. Women need a privat...