Faith
Joshua Korn is the spiritual director and community liaison for the CURE International hospital in Niamey, Niger. In this personal essay, he describes his work with CURE and explains how he is contributing to the fight against global poverty. Stay in touch with Joshua on his blog, Josh and Julie.
I grew up in West Africa. I lived in Togo and la Côte D’Ivoire until I was 14 years old. Ever since then, I always wanted to come back. Africa gets in your blood, and stays forever like malaria. That is cliché, but true. I heard about CURE and the great work they do through a friend, so when the opportunity to come to Niger came up, I jumped at it. We jumped at it, I should say. My wife, who works here with me, is actually much more jumpy than I am.
Josh and Julie with one of the children from the CURE hospital
The CURE hospital is primarily a children’s hospital, and we specialize in treating burn victims and children with cleft lip or cleft palate and clubfoot. As spiritual director, I provide spiritual and emotional support to the patients and staff at the hospital. In practice, this can mean many different things. My job description is pretty vague, and purposely so, I think, because it is hard to define what I do. I work very closely with the hospital’s social worker in trying to determine what the needs of our patients are and what we can do to help. Giving a child a life-changing, life-saving surgery is a big deal, but I am realizing more and more that often, it is just scratching the surface.
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Feb 3rd, 2012 6:38 PM UTC
By Field
ONE member Heather James reports on a faith event in Washington state.
Saturday morning was incredible. Braving construction chaos and downtown parking, a group of 25 interested (and interesting) everyday citizens of Washington State converged in Tacoma to attend a ONE Faith workshop with Jonathan Young, our regional field director and Adam Phillips, manager of faith advocacy at ONE.
We learned about initiatives for global health and poverty relief, and how these things relate to our faith communities. Our goal for the morning? To come away with at least one practical thing a faith community could do to make a difference in the life of one of the 1.5 billion people living in extreme poverty.
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Each day this week, we’ll highlight a major accomplishment in the fight against poverty that ONE members helped achieve in 2011. Today, ONE Blog Editor Malaka Gharib discusses some of the major achievements from ONE’s faith-based efforts.
ONE volunteers on tour with the David Crowder*Band
At ONE, we believe that faith is a major driving force behind social change. And that’s why we spearheaded a number of campaigns this year to help motivate and mobilize faith communities to take action on behalf of the world’s poorest people.
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Dan Haseltine, lead singer of Jars of Clay and founder of Blood: Water Mission, reflects on his experience at ONE and (RED)’s World AIDS Day event, and compares the HIV/AIDS epidemic to a dragon.
I’m sitting in a mostly quiet airport eating an international dinner (read: China Panda), trying to remember names and faces and which comments went with the particular faces and names I could remember with a little help from the pocket full of new business cards I acquired. My first thought is, “The Ronald Reagan Airport has great lighting.” My second thought, which has equally little to do with my day is, “I wish the Dunkin Donuts was still open.” But my third thought, the one that has been rattling around in my head since 6:30 a.m., was, “How do you kill a dragon?”
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If you’ve been following the ONE blog these past few months, you certainly noted that the David Crowder*Band took ONE with them on their farewell 7 Tour. Over 34 sold out dates nationwide, the guys made it a priority to not only deliver an inspirational set of songs but mobilize their fans to take action and join up with ONE to fight the famine in the Horn of Africa.
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Guest blogger Jack Gordon of Faith in Action DC reflects on an important lesson about life that he learned from his childhood.
In the late 1800s, Bahá’u’lláh, the prophet and founder of the Bahá’í faith, famously wrote: “The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens.”
Years before I read this quote for the first time, I witnessed the concept in action in my very household through the hospitality that my parents extended to guests from around the world. During my childhood in suburban New Jersey, we hosted a young Israeli-Argentine couple, a middle-age El Salvadorian pastor and his wife, and a succession of Chinese graduate students. Through these intimate connections, my sisters and I developed a natural respect for and inquisitiveness about foreign cultures and especially languages. Likewise, our visiting friends were fully integrated into our family life -– sharing meals, holiday celebrations and everyday chores.
The lesson -– perhaps unspoken -– was: we are all in this together.
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Pastors Aaron Graham and Justin Fung reflect on their faith inspirations, encouraging ONE members to be generous this Thanksgiving.
We live in a world where a person’s future is too often determined by where he or she is born.
If you’re born in a certain village or zip code, you have a better chance of dying before 18 than receiving a secondary education. And on the flip side, if you’re born into certain freedoms, you have access to life-giving resources such as an education, health care and a worshiping community.
In the aftermath of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt talked about the Four Freedoms — freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
As advocates with ONE, we are focused this Thanksgiving on addressing the freedom from want for our African brothers and sisters — both on an immediate level in response to the famine and on the level of long-term sustainability.
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