To the editor:

Since October 2009, St. Peter’s Sunday school program has been collecting funds for the hungry. You may have noticed some of the cans out and about in the community? Cans that have a soup label on them asking you to end hunger by donating? Clinton Foodmart had them, as well as other local businesses.

Around Thanksgiving of last year, St. Peter’s Lutheran Church of Clinton began teaching its youngsters about what children and people in other counties don’t have. Here are some of the facts they learned:

Every day, 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes. That is one child every five seconds.

In 2005, almost 1.4 billion people lived below the international poverty line, earning less than $1.25 per day. In 2006, about 9.7 million children died before they reached their fifth birthday, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

If your annual income is $30,000, you are in the top 7 percent of income in the world. If your annual income is $50,000 you are in the top 1 percent.

The Sunday school participants also learned that hunger can be cut in half worldwide by 2015 if every American gave just seven cents per day.

Armed with this information, the children of St. Peter’s Lutheran Church challenged whoever they could reach to join them in a project called “Seven Cents a Day.” These “new soup cans” helped to bring the hungry into our awareness every day, and the pennies collected in them are going to fight hunger.

This program is a part of the “Bread for the World.” This is a collective Christian voice urging our nation’s decision-makers to end hunger at home and abroad.

On Sunday, June 13, the St. Peter’s Sunday school program will make a presentation to Good Cheer Food Bank and an international hunger relief program with the funds they collected from this program.

The children wish to thank those in the community who contributed and Clinton Foodmart, Good Cheer, Milas, the Clinton Post Office, Whidbey Island Bank, Jim’s Hardware and the Langley Post Office for allowing them to put out their collection cans during the past few months.

Mikkel Hustad

Pastor

St. Peter’s Lutheran Church

Clinton