Kernels of Corn
The West Side Herald
Wenchiki is the name of the first village we drilled a water well in. It was very remote and the road into it was not much more than a path. Wenchiki had a population of over 2,000, and the folks there were all farmers and all very poor. They were so remote that a lorry (public transportation) would come there only once in a week, if that often.
One day, while living in Ghana, I received a message from the church in Wenchiki. They said they were in very bad shape and many were starving. Their harvest the previous year had been poor and much got washed away in a flood that came very late in the year. They tried to replant, but the growing season was well spent and the second crop failed. They explained that they were expecting a good harvest, but it was still two to three months away. In the meantime, they had eaten all the food left from the previous small harvest. They had nothing to eat.
By the grace of God, we were able to raise some money and buy a couple of truckloads of dried corn. The corn was not terribly nutritious, but it would fill the belly. We loaded the well project’s utility truck with many 50 kg bags of the corn and headed for Wenchiki.
Upon arrival, several people gathered around the truck and we asked where they wanted us to go to drop off the corn. They said to just park it where it was, that they would unload later, first they wanted to worship and say thank you to God. Here were people who had not eaten much in the past few days and were obviously underweight and hungry. Thin wasn’t descriptive enough…skinny was. Bones were visible. Yet still, they wanted to praise and thank the Father first.
After an hour or so of prayers and songs, we moved the truck closer to the village and started unloading. Two men were in the back of the truck and would lift a bag onto the head of one who was standing on the ground. Mind you, the bags weighed over 100 pounds. One after the other the bags were unloaded and taken to a mud hut they had built especially for the purpose of storing and distributing the corn.
As they unloaded, the men in the truck picked up a bag that had a small hole in it and some twenty or twenty-five kernels of corn fell out of it onto the ground. One of the men, waiting for his bag, saw the hole, grabbed it to close it and walked beside the one carrying the bag, all the way to the hut. Another man bent over and picked up every single kernel that fell from that hole. He then followed the others and put those few kernels back into the bag.
When I saw this, tears came to my eyes and I thought to myself, “I’ve never been hungry a single day in my whole life!”
Josiah Tilton