“The biggest challenge is the sheer volume of people,” says Tony Hall, former US ambassador to the UN World Food Program. Every day an estimated 1,500 malnourished refugees cross the Kenya border to escape Somalia’s widening famine.

"Do you want to reconstitute immune systems or do you want to reconstitute lives?" asks Dr. Joseph Mamlin, who runs a clinic in Kenya that now serves over 60,000 patients. "We've decided to go after lives."

Religion and Ethics Newsweekly this week highlights the growing ties between church communities in western Kenya and Indiana.

Wangari Maathai became the first African woman to win the Nobel Prize for peace. She is a conservationist whose movement has caused the planting of 30 million trees in Kenya and also helped lead to free elections. Recently, Maathai visited Chicago, as Judy Valente reports.