Good food saves lives. Meet three kids who are living proof.

Reporting by Jake Lyell, Advisor Sr., Creative Content Producer

Every child needs nutritious meals to grow up healthy and strong. Yet we live in a world where 1 in 4 kids experience severe child food poverty in early childhood. When families lack the resources or knowledge to provide regular, nutritious meals for their youngest children, their health eventually declines – putting them at risk for the many short- and long-term consequences of malnutrition and setting them up to fall behind their peers physically, cognitively and even emotionally.

Your support helps meet families where they are in their struggle to access nutritious food, whether by providing access to malnutrition screening and treatment, getting them involved in community kitchens or helping them start their own backyard gardens full of nutritious foods for little bodies and minds. Meet three children from different corners of the globe who have overcome hunger and malnutrition with your support!

Dylan, Ecuador

“He’s my whole life,” says Ruth, a 23-year-old single mom, of her only son, Dylan, age 4. “He’s the reason I struggle day after day. I tell myself: ‘Even if I don’t have enough to offer him luxuries, the little I can give him, I do it with much affection and much love because I am a father and a mother to him.’”

Dylan’s father disappeared when Ruth became pregnant at the age of 19 and has since never had a role in either of their lives. Ruth still lives with her mother and siblings in the house where she grew up – a small, two-room concrete house at the end of a dirt road in rural Imbabura Province, Ecuador. Her own mother – also a single mom – has a chronic illness that makes it difficult to work. The family farms potatoes as their staple crop on the land around their house, but the region has experienced drought over the last couple of years, and the harsh equatorial sun has withered much of their crop.

Ruth occasionally earns money as a cook when the work becomes available, once or twice a week if she’s lucky. With this meager income, she supports her mother, her son and younger siblings. “If there’s no income for food and everything else, the little we have, we give it to the children in the house,” says Ruth.

For the first year after he was weaned, Dylan’s diet consisted mainly of potatoes and rice as the family struggled to find any other food in the harsh highland climate of the Andes Mountains. “[My mother and I] do not have food every day, and we don’t have enough for clothes. The little I have, I give to my son, and if I can’t eat, it doesn’t matter,” says Ruth.

Perhaps it was Dylan’s low-nutrient diet. Perhaps Ruth couldn’t breastfeed him as much as she needed to without enough food for herself. Likely, it was both these factors, but by age 2 and a half, Dylan was severely malnourished and under-developed. “He was very weak. He was always sleeping. The little food he ate, he would vomit it up. He had constant fever,” recalls Ruth of the time. “I was told he wouldn’t [ever] talk or that he was born mute, because he only signed. I was distressed. I was desperate. ... I didn’t know where to turn to.”

When Ruth took Dylan to the local government health center, “they told me that he was under height and underweight and that this was dangerous for him.” It was then that Dylan’s name was placed on a referral list to participate in ChildFund’s Growing With You program.

Almost immediately, Ruth received a visit from an outreach worker with FOCI, ChildFund’s local partner organization in Imbabura Province. On the first visit, he brought a kit, or pack, of much-needed food for Dylan and his mother. “The very first time I received a kit, I was very emotional,” recalls Ruth. “I was very happy because my son was going to have something to eat.” The kit, containing nutritious foods like eggs, powdered milk, lentils, fortified flour, oats, cooking oil and cans of tuna, would be the first of many kits of food and supplies to help get Dylan healthy for the first time in his life. “We were going to have something to feed and nourish him!” Ruth exclaims.

After the initial visit, Ruth began to attend regular workshops put on by FOCI for parents of children under 6 years old, like herself. These workshops – which, during the height of the pandemic, would take place over Zoom – focus on themes like child health and nutrition, development, child safety and positive parenting. “[At the workshops], we identify ingredients that participants have in their communities and how they can best prepare them. We learn about the appropriate quantities of food for each child,” says FOCI Social Development Promoter, Oscar Andreas. “We also remind them of the importance of washing food before preparing it and washing our hands before eating.”

Regular visits to their home would also occur, where field workers like Oscar from FOCI would stop in to assess Dylan’s physical, emotional and cognitive development using the child development scale and provide one-on-one nutritional and caregiving advice for Ruth. With increased knowledge and nutritional assistance, Dylan gradually began to put on weight and grow stronger over the next several months. “The nutrition [program] has really worked for him despite how little he might eat,” says Mom.

Oscar Andreas plays with Dylan during a home visit through ChildFund’s Growing With You program.

Then, at the age of 3, Dylan did something that shocked his mother and those around her. “They said he won’t be able to speak, and recently, he just spoke,” she beams. His first word was “mama.” “It’s like a very nice feeling to have him say ‘mama’ for the first time, and I was so surprised.”

Today, Dylan, who just turned 4, is attending pre-kindergarten and defying expectations for a child who so recently experienced severe acute malnutrition. “He quickly masters what the teacher tells him,” says Mom. “He finishes quickly. The teacher told me he’s very intelligent.” While it’s too soon to tell, Ruth worries that Dylan’s growth might have suffered permanent effects: “His weight is normal now,” says Mom. “He’s not malnourished, but his height hasn’t changed much. I’m very worried that he will stay that size, that he won’t grow taller.”

So what if Dylan ends up being the short kid in his class, right? His health and demeanor are worlds away from his former weak and lethargic state. These days, in fact, Ruth has the opposite problem on her hands: “He has become much more energetic. You can’t leave him alone for a second. He can’t sit still!” she halfway complains. “He’s very active. He has a very strong character. It’s like I can’t control him much.”

Thanks to supporters of ChildFund’s work, Ruth will continue to attend workshops and receive nutritional kits as needed until Dylan leaves the Growing With You program when he turns 6. Lit up like a firecracker, he already has his eyes on the horizon line. “He has told me many times that he wants to be a doctor,” says Mom. “Since my mother is a little sick, he says he wants to be a doctor to treat his granny.”

Although he’s been enrolled in ChildFund’s programs since he started Growing With You, Dylan was sponsored about a year ago.

Shenu, Sri Lanka

Nilanti, 37, lives with her husband, five children and in-laws in a small village in Monaragala District, Sri Lanka. Theirs is a large house made of homemade bricks and iron sheets and sandwiched between vast rice paddies, which now lay fallow. The economic crisis that has unfolded in this island nation in Asia has brought many things to a halt, including most of the family’s rice farming. “Normally we harvest 20 bags of rice each year, but this year, we got just three,” says Mom. Whereas drought is the culprit for such a poor harvest in many places in the world today, on Nilanti’s farm – and countless others throughout the country – it’s the severe shortage of fuel and fertilizers that has resulted in a devastated livelihood for the family and a near-complete loss of income for an entire year.

It is in this setting that Nilanti’s youngest child, Shenu, now 2 years old, began her second year of life and started to eat solid food. Since that time, Shenu’s growth rate and nutritional outlook have remained poor, charting in the orange “needs improvement” section indicating moderate acute malnutrition. “Before this crisis, we used to be able to afford eggs and meat, but now we’re lucky if we can afford these things once a month,” says Mom. Consequently, once Shenu began to eat solid food, her meals consisted mainly of fried rice with a tomato and onion sauce. “I would try my best to give Shenu what she likes so she would eat. It just wasn’t the right things. It wasn’t the healthiest.” Shenu’s poor growth chart reflected in her physical health as well. She was sick much of the time with fevers, colds and congestion.

With a daunting number of children in Shenu’s same situation, five months ago ChildFund began to respond to the crisis in her village by opening a community kitchen as part of the Community Response Hubs project. Here, lead mothers and volunteers cook a large, healthy and well-balanced meal three times a week, with the mothers and volunteers supplying the labor while ChildFund supplies the food and equipment. Young children up to age 5 can come and receive a meal here three times a week. Other children and family members are also served if food supplies are adequate.

“The food at the community kitchen is more appealing to kids,” says Mom. “They like to eat it. [Shenu] eats with other children her age, and the group aspect encourages them all to eat well.” Animal protein like meat and eggs, as well as superfoods like moringa leaf, are served here, along with a vegetable curry. As a participant in the program, Nilanti also cooks at the kitchen as a volunteer once a week, serving her neighbors while gaining valuable knowledge from a lead mother on how to cook healthy food at home. “I don’t know where we’d get our meals from if this wasn’t here,” says Mom, referring to the community kitchen. “It is a pillar of strength for our community.”

Shenu enjoys a meal at ChildFund’s community kitchen.

With the family’s vast rice fields unable to be farmed on the scale they used to be, ChildFund helped Shenu’s family establish a more manageable garden, one that could be enriched with manure rather than industrial fertilizer. ChildFund also provided seeds, equipment and training to the family. Today, they grow a rich variety of fruits and vegetables at home including tomato, bitter gourd, beans, radish, chilies, leafy greens, peanuts and papaya. Nilanti is even starting to earn a bit of income with the extra harvest she’s getting. “Just yesterday, I sold a gourd for 400 rupees ($1.16),” she says.

These days, Shenu is eating a better quantity and variety of food than she ever has, and it’s starting to show on her chart. “I used to get scolded in front of all the other mothers,” Mom says, talking about her experience in bringing Shenu to growth monitoring sessions. “But the last time I brought her, she charted in the green! I felt so happy. It was just yesterday she was weighed in and showed an increase of 600 grams (over 1 pound) in just a month. I was overjoyed!”

Patrice, Senegal

Patrice, 4, used to suffer from malnutrition until his mother, Helene, began attending a monthly growth monitoring session and nutritional seminar supported by ChildFund in Ziguinchor Region, Senegal.

“He used to have a fever. He was sick all the time. But they monitored him,” she says. “They used to come to check on him, give him this flour that I cooked, and feed him.”

Today, Helen works as a community health volunteer with ChildFund’s local partner, Federation Dimbaya, to help monitor the growth of young children in her community and educate other mothers on the importance of good nutrition for their children.

“I also wanted to help the other mothers the way I’ve been helped so that their kids grow up in good health,” says Helene.

ChildFund's nutritional outreach program in the city of Ziguinchor, Senegal, starts with an invite for community mothers with children ages 5 and under to attend a nutritional seminar and growth monitoring session. Here, in the lower-income parts of the city, parents are constantly busy with odd jobs to keep up with high rent and food prices. Inflation has been especially hard on families in Senegal, a country that imports about 70% of its food. Thus, parents often look to the cheapest processed food off the shelf to fill their children’s stomachs.

At the regular nutrition sessions, knowledge and recipes are shared by a nutritionist, along with a meal, and mothers walk away with ideas on how to cook with local ingredients and prepare healthier foods for their children while on a busy schedule. Through regular growth monitoring sessions, where trained volunteers examine and weigh children, mothers can keep an eye on their child's physical development. The volunteers refer the most severe cases of malnutrition to the formal health care system.

As for Patrice? “He finally reached his normal weight,” Helene says happily.