Are you looking for a great new book to help a child who is experiencing bullying? How about a confirmation curriculum big enough for the faith questions of youth? Does the worship liturgy seem rather stodgy and stale?
There’s a resource for that.
During the heyday of PBS’s “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood” even a lot of Presbyterians did not know that the mild-spoken host of the popular PBS children’s program was a clergyman, indeed, no doubt the most famous living Presbyterian in all the world.
In the fields near Ojo de Agua, Honduras, a young mother picks watermelons for $6 a day. She cannot afford to send her nine-year-old daughter, Cristal, to school, so she keeps her locked in the house while she works. The young mother, who is positive for HIV, passed the virus on to Cristal during her pregnancy. In a country where discrimination against individuals with HIV is widespread, the mother struggles to keep Cristal healthy and safe. Every month she and Cristal travel three hours round-trip to the HIV clinic for antiretroviral therapy and care. Unfortunately, their appointments are often scheduled on different days. The mother cannot afford to take two days off of work and pay transportation costs, so she stops taking her medication. Nevertheless, she makes sure Cristal continues to take hers.
Claudia Hamm didn’t really understand the problem of human trafficking until it became personal to her.
“I’m a grandmother of a 16-year-old girl,” she says. “There’s a market for girls like her—even younger than her. It’s a hard thing to come to grips with.”
It took Presbyterian Women, and the Super Bowl coming to the Bay Area, for Hamm to become aware of human trafficking. “It wasn’t even on my radar until Presbyterian Women made it one of their top mission priorities in 2012,” she says.
Because of that, Hamm, who was then moderator of Presbyterian Women …
Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi won the 95th Nobel Peace Prize on Friday (Oct. 10) for their work promoting education rights for children in a year that has been anything but peaceful.