KIM LAWTON, anchor: The Obama Administration launched a new initiative this week encouraging Americans to help fight hunger in their communities. The campaign is called  “United We Serve: Feed a Neighbor.” It urges people to donate money to local soup kitchens and food banks and also to volunteer their time and talents. The effort comes amid new government reports that hunger is on the rise in the US. Forty-nine million Americans struggled to put food on the table this past year—that’s an increase of 13 million—and a record number of Americans, 36 million, now receive food stamp assistance.

Joining me with more on all of this is Candy Hill, a senior vice president at Catholic Charities USA. Candy, it seems like this time of year, every year, we hear appeals from groups saying “Oh people are hungry, you need to give.” What makes this year different?

CANDY HILL, Catholic Charities: Well, we certainly are seeing such an increase, and new people that have never come to Catholic Charities for services before. Some of them are even our donors, and some of them are our former board members, so we see a real crisis in the number of people coming and who need assistance this year over the other years that we’ve been in business.

LAWTON: And there’s been some talk of food insecurity, I mean we’re not talking about starving in the streets, but we’re talking about people who are just having a harder time feeding their families?

Candy Hill, Catholic Charities USA

HILL: Yes, and I think when we talk about food insecurity we’re really talking about people not having food for three meals a day, so we find parents who are scrimping or not having a meal themselves in order to feed their children, and seniors who are making choices between whether they buy medicine or feed themselves, and in a country as great as this country we shouldn’t have people doing that.

LAWTON: And this is a function of the economy and all of the repercussions of that?

HILL: I think this is a perfect storm. We see the economy, and the people that we serve certainly were struggling before the collapse of Wall Street, but they were struggling first and will be the last to recover in this recovery.

LAWTON: And to what extent is it difficult in these tough economic times to make appeals for groups like yours, to say to people, give money to hungry people when individuals might be thinking, you know, I don’t know how I’m going to feed my own family?

HILL: Exactly. Well, what I would say as Americans we’ve always risen to the occasion, and this is one of these occasions. Our neighbors are suffering and we need to dig deep into our own pockets. The government has a role to play, all of us have a role to play, and we need to reach out and help each other during this really tough time.

LAWTON: Well, speaking of the government’s role, the U.S. government is urging people to give more in this new initiative, but is that enough? I mean, is it enough for individuals to give $20, a $100 or whatever, or do we need systematic changes in policy?

HILL: Well, I think long term we need systematic changes, but you know that’s a long term strategy and right now we have a short term problem, and so we need people to give and we also need the government to step up and do its part as well.

LAWTON: Are you pleased that the administration is having this initiative?

HILL: Absolutely, because I think it brings, it highlights always when the administration speaks on something and gives information, it helps connect to the things that we’re doing on the ground, and so this initiative, certainly, I think will highlight the need, but also the really creative things that are happening across America to try and meet the needs of individual people.

LAWTON: Yours is a faith-based organization. A lot of groups are trying to help the hungry. What is the specific role for religious groups and those from the faith community?

HILL: Well certainly we have a 2,000-year tradition that we’re supposed to feed the hungry and we take that very seriously and so we’ve been doing this for decades across the country and we see it as a moral issue, that people shouldn’t have to go hungry in a country as rich as ours, and we’re going to continue to try and meet the needs of people in local communities across this nation.

LAWTON: Again, we hear all the time people are hungry, people are hungry, the poor are always with us. Are there solutions? Is it possible to end hunger?

HILL: I absolutely believe it, and certainly the government is calling on that and Congress is as well. We have to think creatively. We have to think about 21st century solutions to 21st century problems, and the safety net in this country is badly torn and weakened, and we need to not just fix it. A repair is not sufficient. We really need to think about how do we eliminate the need for programs like food stamps, and like donations to feed the hungry through a food bank or a soup kitchen, and if we have the political will to do it in this country we can change this. You know, Bobby Kennedy forty years ago called attention in the Mississippi Delta to children being hungry, and yet today you and I are sitting here having the same conversation four decades later. We just need to rise to the occasion and have the political will to change it.

LAWTON: All right, Candy Hill, thank you very much.

HILL: Thank you as well.

BOB ABERNETHY (Anchor): We have a story today about a remarkable man in California.  He is a Catholic priest from Ireland who has ministered for 37 years to both African Americans and Latinos in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Saul Gonzalez reports.

SAUL GONZALEZ (Contributing Correspondent): The Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts has long been synonymous with inner-city desperation and despair. It’s the neighborhood that exploded in urban unrest, after all, in 1965, and then again during LA’s 1992 riots.

Today, Watts is still home to some of the meanest streets in the city, but they’re streets walked regularly by Father Peter Banks, a Catholic priest who, dressed in his robes, rope belt, and straw hat, looks like a fish very much out of water.

Born and raised in rural Ireland, Banks arrived as a young priest in Watts in 1973, assigned to the Saint Lawrence of Brindisi Church.

FATHER PETER BANKS: My picture of America before I came was Hollywood, Disneyland, and the beach. So I got into the car, we drove up Century and we crossed Vermont, and I began to realize this is a very different world. It was all black, and the very first Sunday I stood up on the altar and I said what am I doing here? How will I ever understand the people? Will they understand me?

GONZALEZ: In the decades since, though, this Irish priest and the people of Watts have come to know each other very well, and Father Banks has become a beloved figure both in his church and the wider community. Father Banks says his taking an active role in the day-to-day life of the community has been key to being accepted by the residents of Watts.

(Speaking to Father Banks): How important is it for you to do what we are doing now, to get out and to walk the streets?

FATHER BANKS: Oh, I feel part of the flesh and blood and soul of Watts.

GONZALEZ: As he walks through the community, Banks meets and ministers to the casualties of drugs, poverty, and violence in Watts. One of them goes by the name “Red Man.”

FATHER BANKS: Now, he never minds me saying this, but this man was shot thirteen times and survived.

RED MAN: I love this man. Really, he is the only white man who can walk Watts with no gun, just walking by faith, and walk here and know everybody. Everybody knows Father Peter. He is the true father of Watts. He is a real servant of God.

GONZALEZ: Red Man and a friend then ask Father Banks to lead them in an impromptu street corner prayer.

Central to the story of Watts and Father Banks’s church is the incredible demographic shift that has occurred in this community in recent years. Once synonymous with the African-American community, Watts is increasingly Latino. With that change has come tension.

FATHER BANKS: They call it the black and brown conflict. How do we get black and brown to come together?

GONZALEZ: That conflict sometimes expresses itself in violence, but often its face is a soft, unofficial form of segregation. Latinos largely stick to themselves, African Americans as well.

(Speaking to African American girl): You wouldn’t go out of your way to hang out with Hispanic kids?

AFRICAN-AMERICAN GIRL: Definitely no, I really wouldn’t because, I know it might sound racist, but if I see a Mexican girl or a Latino girl I’m just, like, not hanging out with her because she is just not my people. I know that’s wrong, but that’s just, like, the way it is in our society and our community.

GONZALEZ: It’s such feelings that Father Banks has tried to battle in Watts, making both African Americans and Latinos feel welcome in his congregation and breaking down walls of mutual suspicion and hostility. He’s done that by learning Spanish, slowly integrating some church services, and developing sensitivity to the problems of both Latinos and African Americans.

GONZALEZ: Father Banks says being Irish can actually be an advantage in his work in Watts.

FATHER BANKS: I feel it is. One time I was talking to the black kids, that’s when I came first, and they were saying something about the whites, and I held up my arm and said, “Look at me,” and this little girl said to me, “Father Peter, you aren’t white, you’re Irish.”

I can relate very much to the black in the sense of the Irish being persecuted. It used to say in the States, I think, “No black or Irish need apply.” So I feel I do identify a lot with the African-American people and their pain and their suffering. I’m able to relate to the Latinos and say I am an immigrant, and I tell the Latino people, I say, I am an immigrant, too. I came here and, I said, I am far away from my own land. I know what you go through, too.

GONZALEZ: Members of Father Banks’s congregation say they appreciate his efforts to build bridges of understanding between African Americans and Latinos.

MARIAN ANTUCHA (Latino parishioner speaking in Spanish with English translation): He helps all the people, African Americans, Latinos, the entire community. To us, Father Peter doesn’t recognize borders. He’s a person who helps everybody, and that’s why we’re here.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN PARISHIONER: If PR and public relationships, communications was a gift from God, poof, he got it ten times, you know, because he can get out there and talk to different people, and they just feel his love, and he will tell them to come here, and then they feel the love. It’s just a relationship that blossoms.

GONZALEZ: As he’s gotten older, Banks says he’s increasingly focused his ministry on the education and safety of Watts’ youngest, at the elementary and middle school operated by his church.

FATHER BANKS: They know more about pain than I do in my lifetime, and they are only six, seven, eight, nine years old. You saw them this morning there, dying for affection. If I don’t feel optimistic and I feel tired, I come over to the school. I get energy from the school, energy from these children.

Hope is to be able to sing in the middle of the darkness, and I think that’s what hope is for me. I can still sing in the middle of the darkness.

GONZALEZ: However, after serving the spiritual and material needs of this community for much of his adult life, Father Peter Banks will soon depart Watts. He’s been asked to take a job as a church recruiter in a rural area of California. Although he says he feels duty-bound to fill this position, Banks acknowledges he feels conflicted about leaving this community.

FATHER BANKS: That’s an emotional issue for me. It’s going to be a big struggle to leave here. It’s going to be—I’m at peace with God. That’s all I can say. I am at peace with God. I feel it is God’s will that I continue his work, and we need priests for the church and brothers and…

GONZALEZ: But it hurts?

FATHER BANKS: Oh, it hurts deeply. I have put so much of my life in here. I have invested so much in children. It is the biggest change of my life. I feel I am leaving home twice. I left Ireland 37 years ago, and I feel like I am leaving home again, too. But I’ve come to terms with it, and I know that I am doing it for a higher cause, a higher power.

GONZALEZ: The people whose lives Father Banks has touched in Watts hope his example will inspire others to continue his work of cultivating peace and understanding in a community that so needs them.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Saul Gonzalez in Los Angeles.

MARY ALICE WILLIAMS, guest anchor: In inner cities across the US high numbers of African-American men are caught up in the criminal justice system. It’s costly to keep them in prison. It’s also costly to the communities they leave behind — and return to. Phil Jones reports.

PHIL JONES: Welcome to Brownsville — a pocket of poverty inside Brooklyn, New York, a place where crime and prison often are a way of life.

RONALD HERRON: Both my parents were drug addicts. My father wasn’t at home.

Ronald Herron

DEJUAN SMITH: I went to prison for murder in the second degree.

NATHANEL RICE: The first time for robbery — two years; second time for robbery —12 years; third time for drug possession.

VINCE MATTOS (Community Activist): I was out hustling narcotics. What I would have to tell Mom is, “Look, I found a whole bunch of money!” I would see Mom crying because she was behind on bills or something like that. I would come in and say, “Mom, look I found x, y and z.” You know, she was like, oh, you know, “God is good” — this and that.

JONES: But Vincent Mattos’s mother is proud of her 42-year-old son.

Mr. MATTOS (speaking to men): Hey brothers. How you doing?

JONES: He now roams these troubled streets as a community activist. He knows the turf.

Mr. MATTOS: Young men that’s out on the corner from sun-up to sundown, falling back to do what they know to do to earn a living because there’s no jobs for them. There’s no helpful reentry program that’s in place right now. Whatever you want, you can get it on this strip. Drugs, sex, and guns, that’s what’s major out here.

JONES: What else is major — the pervasive presence of police with the task of arresting the bad guys and putting them behind bars. There is no doubt that police activity decreases crime. But is there a tipping point, when legitimate law enforcement, designed to protect the public, may have unintended consequences: promotion poverty, even more crime?

ERIC CADORA (Director, Justice Mapping Center): The current overuse and overdependence on criminal justice is a complete failure. It’s having no impact on these issues of public safety and crime. That’s not to say there isn’t a need for a level of criminal justice. But this radical overuse is not accomplishing those goals.

Eric Cadora

JONES: In the 1970s, there were about 200,000 inmates in US prisons. Today there are about two million. For years law enforcement used crime mapping to target places where the crimes were being committed. Eric Cadora, director of an organization called the Justice Mapping Center, is an advocate for sentencing reform and prison alternatives. He proposed another use for mapping.

Mr. CADORA: I said, “Well, what if we don’t do crime mapping? What if, instead, we mapped where people lived who are going into jail and prison every year?” When we started doing maps of where people lived, we found hugely concentrated neighborhoods where vast majorities of people were going to prison and jail and coming back, and other neighborhoods where nearly none were.

This is New York City. The brightest red show the highest rate per thousand adults, male adults, admitted to prison for a single year. Let’s say there are about 100,000 people living in Brownsville — about half of them are male, that’s about 50,000. About — between 10 and 13 percent are going to prison and jail every year.

JONES: This increased prison population has come at a staggering cost to taxpayers.

Mr. CADORA: We can now calculate, block by block, how much we’re spending to remove and return people en masse from and back to that block.

JONES: This cluster of housing projects is what Caldora calls a “Million Dollar Block.”

Mr. CADORA: We found about 150 individual blocks in New York City for which we were spending more than $1 million a year to remove and return people to prison and jail.

Vince Mattos

JONES: Cadora uses dark red to show the concentrations in other states. They are maps that call for new directions.

Mr. CADORA: What these maps have done is accumulate the effect over the course of a year of a criminal justice and imprisonment system. What’s heated up here is a mass migration with the costs of having to move back and forth from this neighborhood to prisons upstate and back. So what we’re seeing here is constant grappling with resettlement, with disruption, cost of split families, tough health care.

JONES: Greg Jackson, another civic activist and a life-long resident of Brownsville, doesn’t need a map. He’s seen his own community imprisoned.

GREG JACKSON (Community Activist): Incarceration is not just the individual going to jail, but it’s the whole family going to jail, for Brownsville. Everybody’s suffering from it.

JONES: How’s that?

Mr. JACKSON: Because when this individual comes out of jail he still can’t find employment. And that person, the kids he left behind, the parents he left behind, the wife he left behind, they all suffer in the interim. So, when he comes out you think, “Wow, it’s a good time, my father’s coming out of jail, my mother’s coming out of jail.” There’s nothing good about it.

JONES: For one thing, felons aren’t allowed to live in these public housing projects, although some do. Others end up homeless, and most are jobless. Ask Dejaun Smith, still struggling eight years after his release.

Mr. SMITH: I’ve done odd jobs like — I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many. I went to an interview several months ago, and once they learned about my conviction they looked at me like, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

JONES: After decades of hard-line policies on crime — tough justice — more and more communities are looking into what is called Justice Reinvestment.

Mr. CADORA: Let us take the investments that had been built up over the years from criminal justice, redirect them to investments in civil institutions in those neighborhoods — better schools, better health care, better mental health support, and so on. In many of the states where the Justice Reinvestment initiative has taken root, prison populations are either dropping or the trend line in growth has been radically reduced, and that’s from Connecticut to Kansas — liberal to conservative.

Matoka Belton

JONES: Most of the crimes are connected to violence, drugs, and alcohol. But researchers found another culprit for the increased prison populations.

Mr. CALDORA: We found states where 60 to 65 percent of everyone entering prison each year were entering as a result of a revocation of parole and probation.

JONES: That was the case in Kansas, so legislators passed a new law — a new direction —committing taxpayer dollars to cities and communities that change parole and probation regulations that’ll reduce the prison population by 20 percent.

Mr. CALDORA: That’s kind of what the reinvestment project is about. It’s about saying, “Look, if you can reduce it, we’ll give you the money to keep reducing it.”

JONES: According to Caldora, states are being forced to rethink their hard line throw-the-criminals-in-jail attitude because, especially in these hard economic times, the criminal justice system is too costly, both financially and psychologically.

Mr. CALDORA: They realize that this overwhelming overuse of criminal justice is one of the greatest threats to sort of civil society.

JONES: This threat to society, this impact on communities in prison, can be felt on the streets and inside the crowded housing projects. We met Matoka Belton. She didn’t want us to see her three children. Their father went to prison.

(to Ms. Belton): What was he in prison for?

MATOKA BELTON: A number of things, and it was due to survival.

JONES: What was impact on the children of him being away?

Mr. MATOKA: It’s hard because they’re like, you know, what “school” is this, because you try not to say he’s in prison. “What school is this that they don’t come home? College?” But then it comes to the point where they’re a certain age and you can’t lie anymore. I was once an inmate myself. I know what it was like for my children to feel like, “Wow, my mother’s not here. Why can’t mommy come home with us?” It’s hard to leave a visit.

JONES: It’s a cruel cycle — poverty, crime, prison — passed from one generation to the next. A child whose parent went to prison is likely to end up behind bars too.

Mr. MATTOS: When you look at a kid and you say, “How could that kid, you know, have done such a crime like that?” Because he was never really told that was something wrong to do. He never celebrated Christmas with the family or sat down at the dinner table with the family.

JONES: About 700,000 inmates come back home every year. Most are unprepared for re-entry, and their communities are unprepared for their return. As the US government is making huge investments in industries and businesses, it is now being forced to also address a broken justice system, a system in desperate need of a stimulus package of sorts — justice reinvestment.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Phil Jones in Brooklyn, New York.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a dramatic example today of what one dedicated person can do to change the lives of people in need. Fred de Sam Lazaro revisits a story he reported 10 years ago about an Irish Catholic nun who is a school principal in Calcutta, India. Her name is Sister Cyril Mooney.

Sister CYRIL MOONEY (Principal of Loreto Day School, Calcutta, India, whistling): Left, left, left-right-left.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: With her habit, her whistle, she is the sergeant of this morning drill — in many ways the old-fashioned parochial school principal who can strike terror in encounters like this.

Sr. CYRIL (speaking to female student): Are you aware that you tried to cheat?

DE SAM LAZARO: Encounters the student will carry well into adulthood.

Sr. CYRIL: So now say to me, “Yes, Sister, I am very sorry. I did cheat.”

YOUNG FEMALE STUDENT (repeating phrase): Yes, Sister, I am very sorry. I did cheat.

Sr. CYRIL: You did cheat, right? Look at the tears. Are you sorry?

YOUNG FEMALE STUDENT (shakes her head yes)

Sr. CYRIL: OK. It shouldn’t happen again. All right. Once the tears come you know that the contrition is there, you know.

DE SAM LAZARO: And so you think she’s cured basically?

Sr. CYRIL: She won’t do it again. None of them ever do it a second time when they’re caught.

DE SAM LAZARO: Sister Cyril Mooney has transformed the lives of thousands of children in this school and across the city of Calcutta. She grew up in Ireland, where she joined the Loreto Order and went to India in 1956. She got a PhD in zoology and began teaching in the elite English-language Loreto schools begun during colonial days. But she found the quiet, comfortable life discomforting.

Sr. CYRIL: I was appalled by the poverty almost outside our gate. I kept on saying to myself, what are we doing in our great big English medium schools? We are educating an elite for the country very much as you had Victorian society way back at the end of the 19th century. There was the same thing in England, the same thing in Ireland. You had a peasant class that never went to school, they were there to serve, and you had the well-off people to whom they served.

DE SAM LAZARO: So when she took over this school in 1979, this social entrepreneur cut in half the number of traditional fee-paying students, forgoing revenues for things one might find in elite schools like a swimming pool. The uniform hasn’t changed, but today 50 percent of these students — most from the slums — attend for free.

In 1983, Sister Cyril reached beyond the slums to an even lower rung of poverty: street children. Their families live on the sidewalks — rural migrants who must leave their children to fend for themselves as they look for work as laborers. For these kids the metal doors are always open to come in for a meal or a bath. They’re never forced to stay. The children must decide on their own if it’s better here or on the streets, where many have learned to survive.

Sr. CYRIL: I went over to meet someone off the station, and this little one ran up to me with a cup of tea. She told me, “I make my living by picking people’s pockets. But I only pick what I need.” Now what do you do with a child like that? What? Eight years of age. I mean, unless we can do something better why should we take away their survival skills?

DE SAM LAZARO: Survival skills or not street children are vulnerable to being trafficked into the sex trade. So the Loreto Day School has become a night shelter called the Rainbow Program, where about 250 girls study, play, eat, and sleep. The school’s roof terrace has been converted into a dormitory. The next morning the children of judges and doctors mingle with those of rag pickers, their lives intertwined on purpose. Every so-called regular student is required to spend at least two hours a week tutoring a Rainbow child.

Not only have social barriers fallen, Sr. Cyril says, but the students have become advocates for change. They volunteer to teach in rural areas, and they’ve tackled the pervasive use of domestic child labor in middle-class homes.

Sr. CYRIL: It’s against the law to employ a child below the age of 18, but many of these children are passed off as relations up from the village, so nobody can catch the employers. But our children who live next door to them and are the same social standing — parents — as the employers of these, they go and they fight with the employers, and they get out these children to come and play, and they identify them. Now they brought them in for a camp — a medical camp.

DE SAM LAZARO: On this day several bus loads of young domestics were brought in for routine health check-ups.

(to Sr. Cyril): I see children here who look they’re not even 10 years old.

Sr. CYRIL: Oh yes (asking question in Hindi). He’s only seven years old.

DE SAM LAZARO: Sevenyears old and on-call 24/7 to gather water, wash utensils. to wipe floors. A few lucky ones, like Saloni Khatun, are rescued early enough so they have fewer learning handicaps. Saloni is a third-grader, brought here four years ago by a Loreto alumna who noticed she was being abused by her employers.

SALONI KHATUN: One day I was wiping. and they were not in the home. She took me here.

DE SAM LAZARO: She took you from the home?

SALONI: Yes.

DE SAM LAZARO: What were you wiping? The wall?

SALONI: The floor.

DE SAM LAZARO: The floor?

SALONI: Yes.

DE SAM LAZARO: So you were wiping the floor, and this girl came and got you?

SALONI: Yes. She brought me here.

DE SAM LAZARO: What would you like to be when you grow up?

SALONI: Air hostess.

DE SAM LAZARO: Air hostess? What do they do?

SALONI: For helping others.

DE SAM LAZARO: Helping others, whether on an airplane or on the streets, is a common refrain. Teresa Shah, an 11th-grader, was brought here when she was three by her mother, who still lives under a sidewalk tarp. She plans to go to college, then work, and says she’ll share her wages with Loreto and with her family.

TERESA SHAH: After my studies I’ll find a job, then I’ll earn something, and first earnings I want to give it to Sister, because this is the place where everything is for us. So then I’ll look after my parents also, and I’ll see I look after the Rainbows also.

DE SAM LAZARO: Okay, you’ve got big ambitions.

TERESA: Yes.

Sr. CYRIL: Our idea is to push them as far as they can go academically, and then if they can’t go any farther they’ll vet them into one of the vocational trainings and give them a training whereby they can start to work. Now we have big numbers of them already gone out. So my hope is that every child who comes out will have a better future, and I think the next generation will have a very good future.

DE SAM LAZARO: You’ve broken the cycle of poverty.

Sr. CYRIL: Yeah, we’ve broken that cycle.

DE SAM LAZARO: But how to break the cycle of endless need in a city of 15 million and growing? Sr. Cyril’s approach can be found in classes that train so-called barefoot teachers. Most are women with some formal education nominated by their communities to come here for a six-week course. They come from rural areas or Calcutta’s burgeoning slums, where they return to teach.

This community near Calcutta’s eastern bypass road is sandwiched between the railroad tracks and a lake now being filled to make way for a metro station. It is populated mostly by rural migrants desperately seeking work in a city that long ago ran out of room. But this slum now has a school. Teacher Jharna Naskar, trained at Loreto, says it was a top priority for parents here

JHARNA NASKAR (Teacher, through translator ): I have seen these children roaming around here. They were in such bad conditions, dirty conditions. Now they are here, learning some songs, some exercises. Also they’re learning about health and hygiene.

DE SAM LAZARO: Jharna Naskar is one of 7,000 barefoot teachers trained by Sr. Cyril, an achievement that has not gone unnoticed. In 2007, India’s government recognized her with one of the country’s highest civilian honors rarely bestowed on foreigners.

Sr. CYRIL: I ask myself, what are you here for? Are you here to produce agents of human change among your children? Are you here to change the mental set of people? So even if you do it with a small number it spreads. After all, Mahatma Gandhi was only one man. He managed to get the might of the British Empire out of India, which is something quite fantastic. I mean, we can do it if all of us will work together.

DE SAM LAZARO: It began here, but today some 350,000 children across Calcutta are off the streets and sitting in some form of classroom. For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Calcutta, India.

UNIDENTIFIED NUN (making announcement on the PA at a day center): Attention in the shelter.  We are now ready to serve breakfast.  Families with children at the beginning of the line.

LUCKY SEVERSON: What Americans don’t want to hear right now is more bad news, but it should come as no surprise that so many of our neighbors and fellow citizens — more than one in 10 of us — are either experiencing hunger or staring it in the face.

SHANNON: We’re getting ready to sell the house because we’re going to be going into foreclosure.

SEVERSON: People like Shannon and Erin simply can’t hang on any longer.

ERIN: Our payments are going up. Every six months they keep going up, and we don’t make enough to cover the mortgage and all the other necessities — you know, electric, gas, food.

SEVERSON: If not for churches and charities manning the food banks and mobile pantries, many more would be hungry. If not for friendly volunteers, the ordeal of asking for a handout would be even more demeaning.

Melody Wattenbarger

This is the Roadrunner Food Bank in Albuquerque, which is funded almost exclusively from private and corporate donations, from companies like Costco for instance. The food goes from here to over 600 outlets throughout New Mexico, the majority of them faith-based. It’s an impressive operation. Roadrunner is a member of Feeding America, formerly known as Second Harvest, the country’s largest hunger relief agency. Melody Wattenbarger is Roadrunner’s executive director.

MELODY WATTENBARGER (Executive Director, Roadrunner Food Bank, Albuquerque, NM): Food banks are sort of like the canaries in the mineshaft.  We’ve been saying for a long time that things were not going well — that families were struggling. The frustrating part is that the need has been going up 30 or 40 percent, and I said yesterday now we don’t need canaries in the mineshaft anymore. Everybody knows. Everybody knows how bad it is.

SEVERSON: Feeding America gives food assistance to over 25 million Americans. Nine million are kids; three million, seniors. The nonprofit supplies over 200 food banks in every state that, in turn, distribute to food pantries like this one in Riverhead, Long Island managed by the Long Island Council of Churches. Reverend Tom Goodhue is executive director, and he’s not happy.

Reverend TOM GOODHUE (Executive Director, Long Island Council of Churches): We’re more and more feeding people now who are employed fulltime and can’t make ends meet. It makes me angry. I got to tell you, to see hardworking people who are still employed full time and are doing the best they can and can’t make ends meet really, really makes me mad.

SEVERSON: In New York City, nearly two-thirds of the food agencies haven’t had enough supply to meet the demand. Joel Berg is the executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger.

JOEL BERG (Executive Director, New York City Coalition Against Hunger): If things had gone in the last few years from bad to worse, the last year things have really gone from worse to worser.  That’s horrible English, but that really describes what’s happening.

SEVERSON: A recent survey by Feed America found that three out of four food pantries nationwide are faced with rationing food. This small outlet north of Albuquerque called People Helping People has had to close its doors on occasion. This is Chris Hoyle:

(to Ms. Hoyle): And you’re really under siege right now, aren’t you?

Chris Hoyle

CHRIS HOYLE (People Helping People): Yes, we are. Yes, we’re struggling right now without finances.

SEVERSON: Because?

Ms. HOYLE: Because our donations are down and our numbers are extremely high.

LINDA STEVENSON (People Helping People): We are probably looking at about 50, 60 families — new families — a month.

Ms. HOYLE: Yes, we’re seeing a lot of people who have never come, and they’re just in need now. They’ve hit at a place in their life when they’ve been laid off, they’re in between jobs, and they simply need food.

SEVERSON: People we’ve spoken with who feed the poor say this hard time stands above all others they can remember because of how deep it reaches and how widespread it is. They say an increasing number of people who were once donors themselves are now coming in for help, and they say that churches and charities can no longer feed all the Americans struggling with hunger.

The hunger situation in New Mexico is even worse than other parts of the country. Here, one in six adults can’t put enough food on the table. One in four kids are hungry.

Ms. WATTENBARGER: Almost half of the people being served by our mobile pantries are children. What we think is happening is that people are able to swallow their pride when their children are involved, and if there weren’t children, they likely would just make do in some kind of way.

SEVERSON: Many feel that they are forgotten victims of circumstances beyond their control. Some are angry but they don‘t quite know who to blame.

Ms. STEVENSON: There are people making paychecks that are absolutely ridiculous, and there are people that are hungry. How do they sleep with their conscience? How do they do that? Obviously they — I’d love to invite them here, see what the real world is like.

SEVERSON: One of the biggest increases in demand comes from folks on fixed incomes, like Betty Orwick, a long-time volunteer.

BETTY ORWICK: Fixed income — Social Security goes just so far. Food prices are way up.

SEVERSON: Has that been one of the big problems—that food prices have gone up so much?

Ms. ORWICK: Yes sir, yes sir, and I speak for a neighbor of mine. They decide whether or not they should get food or whether they have to get their medicine. That’s hard.

Ms. WATTENBARGER: My heart really goes out to people on fixed incomes, because there isn’t anything they can do. They have so much pride, and they just will almost never seek help.

Lindsay Work

SEVERSON: Near downtown Albuquerque, the St. Martin’s day center and soup kitchen feeds about 400 people a day. Many of the clients here are chronically homeless. As many as three out of four have a mental or physical illness. These are not the people who lost jobs in the suburbs from huge chains like Circuit City and Linens ’n Things. Most here lost minimum-wage jobs in places like fast food establishments. Some, like Lindsay Work, can’t go back to work until they get medical care, which is way beyond their means.

LINDSAY WORK: I was a security officer for about the last 17 years, and I had a massive seizure working security at the state fair, and after that I just lost everything.

SEVERSON: Now he and his wife are sleeping in shelters.

Mr. WORK: You got to make the choice of either food, rent, or bills. You know, whatever gets — keeps you safe, and right now it’s the thing of food. You’ve got to put food in your stomach.

SEVERSON: Linda Woods Fuller is the director at St. Martin’s, up against lagging donations and vastly increasing need.

LINDA WOODS FULLER (Director, St. Martin’s Hospitality Center): We help with the near poor. You know, we don’t just say homeless, because the near poor is that population that is steadily increasing.

SEVERSON: Here’s the good news: People are less oblivious to the misery around them. They’re helping more.

Rev. GOODHUE: One of the great things that I think is happening in this recession is the people are much quicker to see that their neighbors are in the same boat that they are in. So there’s been really a huge outpouring of generosity from people saying, “I want to make sure my neighbors don’t starve.”

SEVERSON: And some pastors report that more people are going to church and volunteering in food pantries like this one sponsored by the Evangelical Church of Philadelphia in Albuquerque. Pastor Joe Romero:

Pastor JOE ROMERO (Church of Philadelphia, Albuquerque, NM): Every time there’s a crisis and it seems like it’s desperate — and it’s always at the end of the rope — and when people feel they’re at the end of the rope they start turning towards God, you know.

SEVERSON: The bad news is that the need is so great, all the churches and charities put together can’t feed all the hungry.

Mr. BERG: Saying that we can end hunger with a few canned food drives—a problem that impacts 36.2 million Americans, a population larger than the state of California—just isn’t true. The only way to make a serious difference in actually reversing the trend of growing hunger in America is for the federal government to once again play the leading role, which I am thankfully able to say under the Obama administration it’s actually starting to do.

SEVERSON: Berg says hunger costs the U.S. $90 billion a year in medical costs and lost productivity. A few years ago, the Department of Agriculture devised a new measurement called the Food Insecurity Index. In New Mexico, it’s 16 percent. Melody Wattenbarger doesn’t like the term. She says maybe if we called it what it is, we would treat it more seriously.

WATTENBARGER: It is a cruel circumstance for people, and to call it other than what it really is — it’s people skipping meals, children going without food. It’s hunger.

SEVERSON: According to Feeding America, the president’s stimulus package will add $20 billion to help relieve hunger among America’s families. It’s by far the largest increase of its kind in history. This means a family of four on average should receive an additional $80 a month in food assistance for the next three years.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson in Albuquerque.

KIM LAWTON, guest anchor: As President-elect Barack Obama put his economic team together this week, there were more signs of the magnitude of the financial crisis across the globe. According to a new report from the Christian anti-hunger group Bread for the World Institute, the number of people who are living in extreme poverty has increased by 100 million in less than two years, and the number of hungry people has increased by more than 75 million. The report said the world is facing a hunger challenge unlike anything seen in the past 50 years, and it called on Congress and the new administration to revamp U.S. foreign assistance in order to more effectively reduce global poverty and hunger.

Joining me now is Reverend David Beckmann, president of the Bread for the World. David, it seems like we hear all the time reports about hunger and how it’s on the rise. What makes this year different?

Reverend DAVID BECKMANN (President, Bread for the World Institute): Well, actually the world’s been making progress against hunger. Over the last several decades, the proportion of the world’s people who are undernourished has been coming down steadily. But the economy that’s been hurting a lot of us is also doing a lot of damage among poor people around the world. So, over the last several years, we’ve seen an increase in world hunger of 75 million people. So the widow in Mauritania who used to eat two meals of sorghum a day, she’s now eating one meal of sorghum soup.

Rev. David Beckmann

LAWTON: And even in the U.S., we’re hearing reports that hunger is on the rise here as well?

Rev. BECKMANN: Absolutely. The economy is really tough on poor and hungry people. In on own country, you can go to the nearest food pantry — they’ll tell you. The government’s just coming out with data on hunger in 2007, so we know that last year the number of hungry children increased by 50 percent, and that’s before the economy got really bad.

LAWTON: You all make the case for more foreign assistance or better foreign aid. Is that a hard sell in a time when people are really concerned about the situation here? You know, is it hard to say we need to help people overseas when they’re worried about, you know, domestic hunger?

Rev. BECKMANN: I’m encouraged. We did a poll of voters on Election Day and 70 percent of American voters said they would like our government to spend more money to deal with the global hunger crisis. I think people know it’s the right thing to do. Certainly when we celebrate Thanksgiving we’re reminded of that. I think we also know it’s not smart to neglect misery in far-off places, and we’ve seen how the whole global economy is interconnected. So it’s good for our economy to pay attention to the global dimensions of development. Bread for the World’s members are churches across the country — are campaigning to make foreign assistance more effective. We think in a time like this we’ve got to make sure that our foreign aid is just as effective as it can be, and that more of the aid is getting to people who are struggling to overcome hunger and poverty.

LAWTON: Are you optimistic that the new Barack Obama administration will be receptive to some of your suggestions?

Rev. BECKMANN: Yeah. President-elect Obama really has made important promises to hungry and poor people in this country and around the world. I think the new — his idea of a jobs program is important. On the other hand, he’s pushed in all kinds of directions — certainly Congress will be. So those of us who care about the hunger and poverty dimension of this economic crisis need to talk to our members of Congress and tell them as they deal with the crisis, we also want them to deal with hunger and poverty in our country and all around the world.

LAWTON: All right. David Beckmann, thank you very much.

Rev. BECKMANN: Thank you.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a more now on a story we told in 2006. It’s about Scott Neeson, an Australian, now an American citizen, who gave up a rich life as a Hollywood movie executive to go live in Cambodia. There he helps poor children escape their lives as trash pickers and get an education. Recently, producer Trent Harris went back to Cambodia to see how Neeson and his kids are doing. The answer, as Lucky Severson reports, is inspiringly well.

LUCKY SEVERSON: He takes this walk practically everyday through the slum that surrounds the Steung Meanchey landfill outside Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Thousands live here amidst the filth and stench.

SCOTT NEESON (with little boy): He’s playing with his own syringe here. Oy, it’s not a good idea.

SEVERSON: They spend their days picking through the chemical waste and broken glass, searching for anything of value. Human scavengers — many are children. It’s where we first found Scott Neeson two years ago.

Mr. NEESON: When I first came here, I had nightmares. I had terrible dreams for a week or two afterwards, and I think some of the things I’ve seen out here are just horrendous.

Scott Neeson

SEVERSON: Neeson first came to Cambodia on a backpacking trip in 2003. What he saw changed the course of his very comfortable life. He was a Hollywood big shot — president of 20th Century Fox International.

Mr. NEESON: It was a really glamorous life, you know, I had the Porsche.

SEVERSON: And a big house?

Mr. NEESON: Yeah, a five-bedroom home that was worth a few million dollars. I had the Porsche and a big old boat.

SEVERSON: You were a man of means?

Mr. NEESON: I was a man of means and luxuries, and yet I sort of enjoyed it, but I wasn’t particularly happy.

SEVERSON: So he started the Cambodian Children’s Fund, the CCF, a live-in school where kids from the dump can learn reading and writing and about a world they never dreamed of. It’s a sparkling place with healthy food and clean, smiling faces. His goal in the beginning was to care for about 40 kids. When we saw him last in September 2005, the number had grown to 118. Back home, colleagues like Mitch Yankowitz were still waiting for him to come to his senses.

MITCH YANKOWITZ: I thought Scott would be back in Los Angeles in 12 months, kind of the stereotypical midlife crisis for a highly stressed senior executive, but Scott really proved me wrong.

“I no longer have a 401k, but I have all the coconuts I can drink and eat.”

Mr. NEESON (by coconut tree): I no longer have a 401k, but I have all the coconuts I can drink and eat. It’s a tradeoff.

SEVERSON: Two years later, the former highly stressed senior executive still takes his daily strolls through the tin shanties, but now he’s rarely alone. He’s become a pied piper, a symbol of hope in a heap of despair.

Mr. NEESON (speaking to boy): We’re going to buy you some pants one day. Just for the hell of it, we’re going to buy you some pants.

SEVERSON: They’re like his extended family. He seems to know every little kid and every mom and dad, and by now, they know him.

Today, the CCF cares for and schools over 300 children, almost 10 times his original goal, and it may be the best education Cambodia has to offer. Imagine coming from this — to this. The school uniforms were contributed by an Italian designer.

Mr. NEESON (to girl): Hey, you. Her older sister is at our vocational center right now studying to be a hairdresser, and she wants to come and join — don’t you?

Joseph Mussomeli

SEVERSON: Neeson rose to the top ranks of Hollywood even though he never even graduated from high school. Maybe that’s why he is so obsessed with education. It drives him crazy when he can’t accommodate all the kids who just want to learn.

Mr. NEESON: I haven’t come up with a good answer for that yet. It’s so sad. We’re just at capacity. Boys like this — all he wants to do is study. That’s all he wants to do.

SEVERSON: Joseph Mussomeli is the U.S. ambassador to Cambodia.

JOSEPH MUSSOMELI (U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia.): I think he’s inspired a lot of people here. Even some jaded Westerners who have become cynical about everything — when they see what Scott has done in really just less than three years, they’re always just amazed.

SEVERSON: What he has done is quite remarkable, and it reaches beyond the second new school, and the third and the fourth. Neeson wants to lift the entire community out of the rubble.

Mr. NEESON: Now the kids here are learning how to bake bread. In fact, most of them bake bread easily — they’re doing croissants and the more difficult things. That’s a fabulous sign, the CCF’s Star Bakery, Phnom Penh, and this is our fabulous baker girls.

The Cambodian Children’s Fund

SEVERSON: The baker girls are attending the new vocational school. They bake as many as 175 loaves of nutrient-enhanced bread each day, much of which goes to the families at the dump.

Mr. NEESON: I love this place. Right here is the makeup class. The girls are being trained for hair dressing and makeup. That’s their chosen profession.

SEVERSON: And then there are the sewing classes where kids make bags out of garbage.

Mr. NEESON: So that’s the bags themselves. This is an old fish food sack. The women and men that work here four or five hours a day working with the bags, and three hours a day learning reading, writing, English, and computer.

SEVERSON: These teenagers are also learning design. Neeson wants them to create their own clothing lines. Eight of his vocational graduates have found good paying, full-time jobs, including this young lady working in the kitchen of an upscale restaurant.

Marie Cammal

Mr. NEESON: And she’s been here quite a few months saving her money, and last month she bought the family their house and the land they’re on.

SEVERSON: Marie Cammal has worked with homeless children in Cambodia for many years. She says what Neeson is doing will make a difference.

MARIE CAMMAL: Because when you change the life of one child of Cambodia, in Cambodia that means you save at least two or three generations ahead. You give education to one boy or one girl — that means this boy and this girl will have a better job and will feed 15 people in their family, within their family, yes, but we need a lot of guys like him.

SEVERSON: What drives Neeson is the deep satisfaction he gets when he sees the transformation in these kids’ lives.

Ambassador MUSSOMELI: It’s like this is the big romance of his life. He came here, unexpectedly fell in love with the country and the people, and it has given him a reason to live.

SEVERSON: This is CCF’s new community center. Neeson like to call it the Steung Meanchey Country Club, because it’s an exclusive club. Only families from in and around the dump can be members.

Mr. NEESON: It provides a sense of community to become a member and to be able to meet you neighbors probably for the first time. You can sit around, you can talk, watch movies, because currently there’s no sense of community. People sit under their houses, they’re drinking alcohol, and there’s a terrible, terrible level of domestic abuse.

SEVERSON: He hopes the center will give the families a sense of community pride, and for those who break club standards, a sense of community shame.

Thet, one of the children Neeson helps

Mr. NEESON: On the other side, of course, is if there’s bad behavior in terms of domestic violence, then we can rescind club membership.

SEVERSON: Actually, the community center offers perks some country clubs don’t — a day care center, for example. The reason most toddlers are wandering through glass and chemical waste is because mom is working at the dump and dad, if he’s around, is often drunk.

Mr. NEESON (to boy): Oy, be careful there, be careful. Oh man, this kid’s got some serious parasites going on, huh? What do you do? The kid, you know, got these drunken guys here and you don’t want to hand the baby back. She needs to go to a doctor.

SEVERSON: What pleases him most is his HMO plan — free health care for all the families living and working at Steung Meanchey, one of the best health care plans in the country. He arranged it through an American charity called Hope Worldwide. The medical center treats everything from cuts and bruises to diseases that would often be fatal.

Ambassador MUSSOMELI: I mean, on a very grass roots level, Scott is doing more for this country. He’s changed the lives of several hundred children and probably several thousand families. When people see him they have to think good thoughts about America.

SEVERSON: Except for his fund-raising efforts in America, Neeson is focused on only one thing — giving these kids a chance. And he says as long the contributions keep coming, he won’t rest until he does.

Mr. NEESON: I don’t know how you rest, actually. There’s nothing worse than awareness, unfortunately, nothing worse than having your eyes open.

SEVERSON: While producer Trent Harris was with Neeson at the site, he spotted a little girl who could not find a smile.

Mr. NEESON (to Thet): Come on honey, come on, its time to go home.

SEVERSON: Her name is Thet. At first, she was bewildered and scared, overwhelmed by all the food. This is her most recent picture. It’s why Scott Neeson left Hollywood.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson reporting.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a powerful special report today on children who live and work on the streets. The UN estimates there are 100 million such kids, seven million of them in Brazil. On her recent trip to Brazil, Kim Lawton met and followed a British Christian who is spending her life trying to rescue some of those children.

KIM LAWTON: Sao Paulo is one of the largest cities in the world, and across this bustling urban sprawl, a growing global problem: children — millions of them — working and living on the streets. They lead a precarious, all too dangerous life.

CALLY MAGALHAES (Co-founder, Associacao Aguia “Project Eagle”): Living on the streets, sleeping on the streets, they’re exposed to pedophiles, to corrupt police that want to harm them in some way, to anybody who wants to do them harm, and so many of our children are murdered. Many of them die.

LAWTON: Cally Magalhaes and her husband George have made it their lives’ work to try and save them.

Ms. MAGALHAES: One by one, we’re trying to get the children off the streets in Sao Paulo.

LAWTON: British-born Cally is an evangelical Christian. She first became aware of the problem of street children in 1994 after reading about it in a magazine.

Ms. MAGALHAES: And as I read this magazine article I just began to cry and cry and cry and cry, and I thought, I’m not going to stay here in England with my nice job and my nice house and my nice life. I’ll go and see if I can do something about it.

LAWTON: She moved to Brazil and began working in the slum neighborhoods called favelas. There, she met a Brazilian man, George, who shared her vision. They got married and founded a nondenominational ministry called Associacao Aguia — “Project Eagle” — to try and rescue street children.

LAWTON: Cally, George, and their teams of volunteers work directly in the streets, finding the kids and trying to build their trust.

Ms. MAGALHAES: Sometimes we just go and talk. Sometimes we take a bag of activities. We do drawings, and they do colorings. It’s very fascinating to see what they draw. Often they draw houses and families, because that’s their dream.

GEORGE MAGALHAES (Co-founder, Associacao Aguia “Project Eagle”): Actually, I present myself as a friend to the boy or a girl. I say, “I want to be your friend, and if I can help in some way, you can tell me what I can do to help you.”

LAWTON: As they chat with the children, they try to find out their situation.

Ms. MAGALHAES: I asked him where he lived, and he wouldn’t tell me. And I said, “It’s okay. I’m not going to take you home. I just want to help you if I can,” and he told me where his mom lives.

LAWTON: But he doesn’t live with her?

Ms. MAGALHAES: No, he lives here on the streets.

LAWTON: There are two types of street kids. The first are called children on the street. They do actually live with their parents, usually in a shack or slum. But they work all day on the streets, begging or finding odd jobs.

Ms. MAGALHAES: At the end of the day they go back and give the money to their mum or stepfather or whoever, and sometimes that money is used to buy food. But more often it’s used to buy alcohol or drugs or something like that.

LAWTON: Then there are children of the street, those who live here day and night. Often, they’ve ran away, either to escape abuse or to use drugs. Many steal to survive and to support their addictions. Some move on to more serious crimes. Children start doing drugs young here. They get high by inhaling glue and paint stripper.

Ms. MAGALHAES: They put it in what looks like a bottle of mineral water, and then they breathe that through their mouth. It’s actually worse for them than if they’re sniffing glue. They’re so high on paint stripper.

LAWTON: Over time, Project Eagle volunteers get to know the children and then try to figure out what the best situation for them would be. Can they return home, or do they need to go into drug rehab? Gisele, who’s now 16, left home years ago to live on the streets.

GISELE (translated by Ms. Magalhaes): I lived here mostly because I wanted to, but mostly because of the drugs.

LAWTON: Four months ago, she had a baby and moved back home with her mother. Today, Gisele left her baby at home, and Cally finds her hanging out on the streets again. Project Eagle also offers practical help such as food and medical assistance.

Mr. MAGALHAES: The whole Gospel is the one that not just says God bless you, but to provide everything to be necessary for the person.

LAWTON: On this day, they’re bringing packages of food to kids who live in what’s called a squat — a rambling den of makeshift shanties under a bridge. More than 50 people live here, including 38 small children. These kids have all been on the streets for years. Julia is eight-and-a-half months pregnant. I asked if she’s worried about having a baby here.

Ms. MAGALHAES (translating for Julia): She said it should be okay. The problem is if she goes into labor here, and she’s not well; the ambulance won’t come here. She has to go by foot to the hospital.

LAWTON: The kids tell me they’re glad to have some shelter, but they say they sleep with one eye open. People throw kerosene in here to try and drive them away. Street children are often attacked. Many simply disappear. They are often viewed as a social nuisance, or worse.

Ms. MAGALHAES: They pick pockets. They steal people’s mobile phones. They cause a lot of problems, and so people don’t see them as a child who needs love and care and a new future. They see them as a huge problem, and so what do you do with a problem? You try and eradicate it.

LAWTON: Vigilantes and corrupt cops have been accused of killing the children just to get rid of them. Some are taken to youth prisons where George goes to counsel them.

Mr. MAGALHAES: Inside the youth prison it’s better to talk to them because they are not taking drugs there, so I can talk to them clearly. And most of those, they want some help.

Ms. MAGALHAES: When we went to the youth prison at the beginning, they used to give us sort of mild cases, like a child who’d maybe stolen an apple or that kind of thing. And now they give us the murderers and the rapists and the kidnappers. And they look at us and they say to us that this one only God can change. And it’s true.

LAWTON: Some of the children rescued from the street end up here, at this rehab compound called “In the Hands of the Angels.” They’re treated for drug and alcohol addiction and taught basic life skills. It’s a church-run ministry about an hour outside the city. The young men here farm, go to school, and get vocational training. One of the residents is a 19-year-old former street kid named Danilo. Danilo says he ran away from home when he was eight because his alcoholic father abused him. George met Danilo in youth prison, and after he was released George got him placed here five months ago. Danilo says God has given him a new life.

DANILO (translated by Ms. Magalhaes): I just want to thank God that I’m here and that without God there’s nothing — that I’m here today and I’m well and I’m healthy because of God. And someone who hasn’t got God hasn’t got anything.

LAWTON: He says he wants to go university and study anatomy. He never wants to go back to the streets, and he worries about the kids still there.

DANILO (translated by Ms. Magalhaes): It’s very dangerous. I’ve already seen people being killed in front of me. I never killed anybody, praise God. But I’ve already seen people being murdered.

LAWTON: One of the biggest challenges, Cally says, is getting street children to think beyond today.

Ms. MAGALHAES: We like to sit down on the ground with them and talk to them about their dreams. We say, “What do you want to be in the future? What do you want to be?” And they look at you and they say, “What you mean?”

LAWTON: Project Eagle tries to help them find their dreams.

Ms. MAGALHAES: You know, they have dreams. It’s just that they’re so deep down inside them that no one ever bothers to pull them out of them, and so we try to talk to them about thinking about tomorrow, helping them to look at themselves and believe in themselves — that they can have a future, that they don’t have to live on the street in the middle of such dirt and violence and crime and drugs, that God created them, that he loves them and that he has a plan for their lives.

LAWTON: But it can be work with a low rate of return.

Mr. MAGALHAES: The first year we worked on the streets, we took 11 people to rehabs. And at the end of the year the 11 people were back to the streets.

Ms. MAGALHAES: When you invest time into a person’s life and you love that person — we love the children that we work with, and you want to see them succeeding, and then just suddenly something will happen, and they’ll run away from the rehab or — it’s just so sad. And we do cry. We weep into our pillow because we feel so sad for that person’s life.

LAWTON: Still, they press ahead. They’re training new volunteers, including ex-street children, and they are working to build new family-based rehabilitation centers. They believe that, bit by bit, they can make a difference.

Ms. MAGALHAES: We don’t mark success by numbers. We mark success by a hug, cleaning a child’s face, washing their feet, giving a family a packet of food that they would be starving hungry if they didn’t have that food that day. Just doing something to make that person’s life better in some way and showing the love of Jesus to them.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton in Sao Paulo, Brazil.