Success Story

Photographer: Food For The Poor, Inc. Staff Photographer

Alicia, 4, and Leidy, 3, were nursed back to health at a children home in Guatemala with nutritious foods provided by Food For The Poor (FFP) Inc. under the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition program.

Her little fingers clutched his T-shirt as she rested her head against his shoulder.

After years of cruel neglect, misery and starvation, Alicia, 4, finally found someone who cared. He picked her up into his arms and cradled her as she clung to him for comfort.

At an orphanage in Guatemala, her guardians gave Alicia what she never experienced before — love. Alicia and her sister, Leidy, 3, never received a warm hug. Their tears were never wiped away by a loving hand. Their pitiful cries for food went unanswered.

Like many orphans and abandoned children, Alicia and Leidy never knew love. These beautiful children were found alone in the mountains wearing garbage bags for underwear. They had been beaten and had burn marks on their legs. When they were rescued, Alicia weighed just 13 pounds – as much as an average 4-month-old baby girl. Her sister, Leidy, weighed only 14 pounds.

The sisters were found on the verge of death from malnutrition. They were given milk, sugar and oil to stabilize them before introducing them to a quality high-protein diet. All the food except the sugar donated by USDA and the American people under the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition program administered by Food For The Poor, Inc. Today, the girls are not only alive, they are thriving. The sisters are intelligent and are learning quickly. Without the nutrition they received, in a short time, they would have most likely died.

Education is the most important ingredient for true growth and maturity of young people in the developing world. At Food For The Poor, our experience with extremely impoverished children has taught us that protein in the diet is of great importance in relation to better learning. Food For The Poor is proud to be helping Guatemalan children learn and gain dietary wellness, and we thank USDA and the U.S. commodity producers for being our partners in this very important work.

Food For The Poor’s Guatemala program assists 160,000 school-age children as well as 100,000 preschool children and their mothers.

The USDA McGovern-Dole program and Food For The Poor are focused on long-term sustainable development. Food For The Poor is creating parent-teacher associations in the communities where it works with school feeding so the community has the infrastructure and leadership to continue school meal programs. Forty five tilapia ponds will be constructed during this multi-year program thanks to USDA funding. The funds realized by the sale of tilapia will go to the community organizations and be used to sustain the school feeding programs.