SEND Care among the Poor in Chiayi, Taiwan

Our DMG Asia Personnel Director on
his tour through East Asia

 This is a story about one of our mission target areas in Chiayi county and shows  more about a proud village, which had invested a lot of efforts to remain original and "Taiwanese" as best as possible, which is reflected in their small villages' architeture, lifestyle and its worldview. Not only Anthropologists wonder how they are doing in May we had Hartmut Peters from the German Misisonary Fellowship (Deutsche Missionsgemeinschft www.DMGint.de ) visting us. His concern: How is the Vision 119 Project in Chaiyi developing. this brought us to Min-Xiong. Min-Xiong is a small town 1.5 hours by train south of Taichung outside of Chiayi with three of our missions churchplanters taking care of this communities' needs. The communities' need is their area of caring, with very good collateral results. Right when they began working there two years ago they noted that just across the street from some middle-class neighborhoods are some very poor areas where the residents would sometimes go hungry, as they ran out of money before they receive their next pay.

 



The comparable big temple
of Minxiong

At about the same time they figured out that the cafeteria of a local high school, Concordia Middle School (http://www.cmsh.cyc.edu.tw/eng/index.php), often has surplus food which they often dumped dumped. Their concern to help those without food and their observation of the cafeteria that would dump ihts surplus food became the base of a regular caring ministry to them.

 

Distribution from the Double
 Blessing church

 One of the church members of a tiny church who was contacted asked the principal, who is a Christian to consder helping thjis poor by provding them with the left overs of the cafeteria. The schoolm itself is a Christian School and was started by the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. Today it educates 2,300 students, mostly non-Christians. 

The school took up the challenge to offer students a project, which would allow them by setting aside parts of a meal to save enough for the poor. Some students and teachers, as well as some parents, volunteered to help by collecting all these portions for distribution. Initially they used their home as their base, but as the operation expanded they moved to their church and ministry partner, Double Blessings Lutheran Church, as the distribution point.Volunteers from the community would gather at the church from y to Friday at 1 pm for the “Grace Meal”, and together they would repackage the food into smaller plastic boxes for distribution to the needy. 

Beth knows amny of these needy
families

The portions are in proportion to the number of people in each family, so none will have too much while others have insufficient. To preserve the dignity of the recipients, the food packages are delivered to their homes, instead of them lining up at the church to get the food box. On weekends when there is no school and therefore no surplus food, they have approached two local bakeries which also agreed to donate their bread which remained unsold at the end of the day. As of now, this program provides meals for 78 people daily. So the “food bank”, which has no inventory, serves the needy 7 days a week, entirely dependent on God moving the hearts of the donors and volunteers to do their part. -
Our team in Chiayi has many other matters of concern, but this regular ministry turned out to be especially helpful to take care of people in need for help.