02 Apr 2014

When famine and hunger strike, it is the poor who are hardest hit, while the well-to-do can manage to jump into another country to source their survival needs, says Lobatse district AIDS coordinator, Mr Samuel Gaseleme.

Speaking at a lunch organised for 10 elderly Peleng residents, Mr Gaseleme said hunger was linked with terms describing people who had been forced by societal conditions to live marginally such as the poor, needy, orphans, widow and oppressed.

The lunch and the donation of food hampers were organised by Holiness Union Church as a gesture of compassion and Mr Gaseleme, who was officiating, said the biblical word on the relation of the community of faith was clear and explicit.

“It is therefore more surprising that in calling local churches to respond to hunger issues, so little recourse has been made,” he said, adding that whether one donated money or their time, giving back to the community was highly rated.

He said as God had identified himself with the poor, it was of paramount importance that church should not view their care for the needy as an act of voluntary compassion; rather, the poor deserved such benefits.

Mr Gaseleme noted that the responsibility for action lay with the privileged rather than government as some in the society commonly assume that the government alone has to bear the major burden of bettering the needy people’s conditions.

He encouraged others to equally have soft hearts for the poor, adding that the poor would if the appeal was fully embodied, there would be no poverty in society’s mist.  The AIDS Coordinator urged churches to direct their energies and resources to the new patterns of moral discernment in the global community by addressing the sources of sin rather than the victims of sin.

Peleng Customary Court President, Kgosi Itumeleng urged churches to regularly visit all schools as they needed spiritual interventions, adding that the behavior of students had deteriorated dismally.

Kgosi Itumeleng said the rotten, sick and bad behaviors displayed by students was to a large extent cultivated by vendors on the school peripheries who secretly sold dagga, drugs and food stuff produced with drugs added on them to students.

For his part, Holiness Union Church, Pastor Israel Tshikare said their aim was to give hope for everlasting life, to preach and reach out to the children and youth as a way of moulding them into responsible citizens.

He noted that also the church aimed at reaching out to the elderly who were in need as espoused by one of the Vision 2016 pillars that says: ‘Compassionate, Just and Caring Nation’. ENDS