(OSV News) \u2013 \u201cAre you leaving, too?\u201d<\/p>\n
The question, said Abena Amedormey \u2013 country representative for Catholic Relief Services in the west African nation of Ghana \u2013 came to CRS workers as they visited communities they serve after a January 2025 freeze on all U.S. foreign aid, ordered by the Trump administration.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/2-19-26-lent-rice-bowel-300x200.jpg\")
Adriana, 14, of Timor-Leste, is pictured in a July 5, 2024, doing daily chores, such as collecting water for her family. Catholic Relief Services supported nutrition and health initiatives for adolescent girls and young women across 21 communities in Timor-Leste. (OSV News photo\/Benny Manser, Catholic Relief Services)<\/p>\n
By July 2025, the U.S. Agency for International Development \u2014 established in 1961, and which in 2024 provided $187 million in humanitarian funding to Ghana \u2014 effectively ceased to exist, with 85% of its programs cut. The result was that many in-country aid organizations also ceased operations.<\/p>\n
But not CRS.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re surviving \u2013 yet the deep slashes to USAID funding have now made their annual Rice Bowl collection more essential than ever.<\/p>\n
A familiar Lenten program of Catholic Relief Services \u2014 the official relief and development agency of the Catholic Church in the U.S. \u2014 CRS Rice Bowl offers faith communities in every diocese throughout the United States the opportunity to put their faith into action.<\/p>\n
Since 1975, the titular rice bowl \u2014 a brightly colored, cardboard almsgiving box that\u2019s a familiar annual Lenten sight in parishes nationwide \u2014 has invited Catholics to pray, fast, and give in solidarity with the world\u2019s poor.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re very much known across Ghana,\u201d Amedormey told OSV News. \u201cPeople know that we bring relief and we work with the most vulnerable people, where nobody wants to go. It\u2019s the remotest parts of the country \u2014 the most hard to reach areas; the most vulnerable people \u2014 that we work with.\u201d<\/p>\n
Present in the country from 1958 onwards \u2014 just one year after Ghana gained independence from Great Britain \u2014 Catholic Relief Services Ghana works to tackle poverty with a holistic approach, operating projects to improve child and maternal health, increase access to clean water and sanitation, scale up farm production, and enhance community level savings and lending.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe strongly believe in sustainability \u2014 because we don\u2019t want to come in, support you and then we\u2019re gone,\u201d said Amedormey. \u201cIt\u2019s like the saying, \u2018Teach a man to fish\u2019 \u2014 we don\u2019t want to provide fish and leave. We want them to go out to fish.\u201d<\/p>\n
But with the shuttering of USAID, that mission is threatened.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe (Ghanian) government suffered a huge shortfall of financing in the health sector,\u201d shared Amedormey, \u201cand this was also in education, where there were school feeding programs and teacher training programs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those additional disruptions struck the work of other non-governmental organizations.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of organizations had to close shop overnight, had to lay off people, had to stop programming. These layoffs affected health care workers, agriculture extension officers, social workers and administrative staff,\u201d Amedormey said. \u201cAnd so names and faces that were known in a lot of communities as bringing support, overnight had to pack up and leave.\u201d<\/p>\n
Farmers lost subsidized fertilizer, improved seeds and training \u2014 which had all aimed to increase their crop yields.<\/p>\n
Specialized teacher training was suspended, and children who looked forward to school meals could no longer be sure they\u2019d have them.<\/p>\n
All of it, said Amedormey, \u201chad a huge impact.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet, she remains committedly optimistic.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things that CRS has been faithful to is trying as much as possible to fill the gaps,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The Lancet, a peer-reviewed British medical journal published since 1823, estimated USAID assistance has saved more than 91 million lives, including that of 30 million children, over the past two decades.<\/p>\n
The journal\u2019s July 2025 prediction, however, was grim.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur estimates show that, unless the abrupt funding cuts announced and implemented in the first half of 2025 are reversed, a staggering number of avoidable deaths could occur by 2030,\u201d the Lancet forecast. The study noted that almost 14.1 million people could die by that year, with over 4.5 million deaths being children younger than 5.<\/p>\n
Estimates of as many as 300,000 deaths in the less than six months since USAID funding stopped began to circulate from academic demographers, while philanthropist and Microsoft founder Bill Gates accused billionaire tech titan Elon Musk \u2014 who for less than a year headed President Trump\u2019s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and bragged about \u201cfeeding USAID into the woodchipper\u201d \u2014 of callous negligence.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe picture of the world\u2019s richest man killing the world\u2019s poorest children is not a pretty one,\u201d Gates observed, while Musk struck back by daring Gates \u201cto show us any evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n
While the two billionaires argued in the media, aid workers worldwide wrestled with providing the help they had previously.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe big thing that has changed is our ability to deliver aid to the people that we are called to serve around the world,\u201d said Beth Knobbe, CRS advisor on church mobilization. \u201cIt\u2019s been limited in certain ways, given the dramatic cuts to U.S. humanitarian aid. Those cuts are just absolutely devastating to the people that CRS serves.\u201d<\/p>\n
Knobbe told OSV News that \u201cthe rise in hunger that has been happening because of things like inflation, tariffs, continual natural disasters and violence around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHunger is not going away,\u201d she warned. \u201cThere was a time when we were actually making tremendous strides in the fight against global hunger. And what we have seen \u2014 really since the start of COVID \u2014 is just a complete reversal.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to the Global Report on Food Crises 2025, published by the Food Security Information Network in support of the Global Network against Food Crises, \u201cIn 2024, more than 295 million people across 53 countries and territories experienced acute levels of hunger \u2013 an increase of 13.7 million from 2023.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s even more important than ever that Catholics take seriously that call to live Lent,\u201d Knobbe said. \u201cCRS Rice Bowl gives people a chance to truly grow in solidarity with our global neighbors through their prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd that almsgiving is so critical,\u201d she added, \u201cbecause the needs are so great \u2014 both at home and around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some 11,000 Catholic parishes and schools will participate in 2026, Knobbe said.<\/p>\n
In Honduras \u2014 where CRS has been since 1959, and programs primarily focus on agriculture, education, emergencies, and clean water \u2014 the challenges are also multiplying, and with it, the critical assistance from this year\u2019s Rice Bowl collection.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a huge loss,\u201d Haydee Diaz, CRS country manager for Honduras, told OSV News of the USAID cuts. \u201cBecause the government here doesn\u2019t really have the resources to do the kind of improvements that tend to really change a school system over time, and lead to a better- educated population. More jobs, people are better off. They\u2019re able to stay, and not be so desperate to migrate.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the Central American nation is braced for the next natural disaster it will experience without USAID assistance, which totaled $152 million in 2024.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things that really worries us is what\u2019s going to happen if a major hurricane hits,\u201d Diaz said. \u201cBecause it\u2019s been the U.S. government that\u2019s really been providing Honduras with the resources to improve hurricane response. What does a poor country like Honduras do?\u201d<\/p>\n
The cutting of U.S. aid in combination with increased U.S. immigration restrictions is, it seems, an ironic paradox.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs Americans, we say that we want people to stay home and not migrate to the US,\u201d observed Diaz. \u201cBut we\u2019ve cut the programs that give people a chance to really stay in their communities and thrive there.\u201d<\/p>\n
In chain-like fashion, that also impacts other outcomes.<\/p>\n
\u201cNobody wins when children don\u2019t get an education \u2014 and the country stays poor and doesn\u2019t have the ability to draw jobs or investments from other countries, because they don\u2019t have a well-educated workforce,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt doesn\u2019t benefit the U.S. to have neighbors to the South that are poor, where people feel like they don\u2019t have a future,\u201d Diaz added. \u201cAnd that\u2019s what USAID programs used to do. USAID used to really give people that hope that they could make it here \u2014 that they had some support, and that they could thrive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nonetheless \u2014 like Amedormey in Ghana \u2014 she hasn\u2019t dimmed her outlook, particularly with the CRS Rice Bowl collection just around the corner.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been very inspiring to see the generosity of individuals in the middle of such a dark, difficult time, where so much international aid has been cut and international aid programs have really been dismantled,\u201d Dia said. \u201cIt\u2019s been wonderful to see how individuals have stepped up, and really started to contribute.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(OSV News) \u2013 \u201cAre you leaving, too?\u201d The question, said Abena Amedormey \u2013 country representative for Catholic Relief…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":118968,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[178,180,179],"class_list":{"0":"post-118967","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-scranton","8":"tag-scranton","9":"tag-scranton-headlines","10":"tag-scranton-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118967\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/118968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}