the upcoming walk which is being hailed this october on the air hit trail here in peters township my guests tonight will give you a little more information about it and i will introduce them now rebecca  which is the assistant regional director of church world services and ruth and burke she's the congregational recruiter so rich and let's start with you and maybe you can tell us a little bit about some of the local things that about craft the crop walk how many times how many years have we done the crop walk well we have fifteen years behind us and we'll be in our sixteenth spurred and we generally have the ten anywhere in line ten eleven twelve churches participating every year this means that we have approximately one hundred to and can go as high as one hundred  hundred seventy five hundred ninety five even one year that we had so our participation it's good and it has proven to be a very successful project or program in the community well maybe we've collected over seventy thousand dollars from this particular walk and we feel quite proud of that course one of the other things too i think that we need to realize is that twenty five percent of that stays right here within the benefit by this well we have yes we have the peters township food pantry and then we also have the candidates for food pantry and then we have the meals on wheels program and  they look forward to this particular crop walk because they benefit very it means a great deal to them and their programs then right ok this is a good way i can we get someone involved in our cross walk well while i have mention that we have a number of churches that are participants in the crop walk it doesn't mean that just there's congregations are limited anyone can participate then in fact we would like to have the whole community winter day would be wonderful if we could get like the stories to cooperate or something like that and to really everybody right to get in on it  because it does it affects everybody right not just certain people i mean it's for everybody that's in the end so if we can only have some of the people realize that that's with the idea the whole project is that's right it it's limit let's this farce that part's concerned and i think one of the things that i have often thought about you know there are a lot of requests on people to contribute to this and contribute through but i have but we've been impressed that the crop walk has always been one of the more successful programs that we have i think in the community we're one of the oldest ones yes through and through and we do have a wonderful trail that we can walk on in our head carol is a real plus for our community everyone knows the trail and that makes it a good location for us but it's it's pretty and in this time in the fall if particularly pretty we've only had a few occasions one or two maybe where we had some rain but it may have really never been rained out and rain or shine  goes well we're going to have this year too we're going to have a couple of clowns to to entertain us is we're walking down the trail and hopefully that will you know the children might enjoy that even even the adults i mean after all where kids are now back to the food pantry we do help with  over fifty family and sometimes it has been higher than that and of course canon spurred being a much larger area concentrated area they serve many more than what we do here in peter's township so the needs are there and we needn't think that because we're a suburban community that we don't have some of these problems living right with this right we really do in that bring one or two kind of nonperishable food thick canned foods or anything nonperishable and that helps to swell the the pantries a little bit at this time of the year when sometimes meals on wheels now there are enough people that component in the hospital or something and they can prepare their own meals or something then they have this option of getting the meals on wheels faster which helps a great deal say we have the temporary kind of folks who benefit from the meals on wheels and then we also have those that just cannot their home and this is one reason they can stay at home is because of the the fact that we can bring meals to the and that includes diabetics as well as people with other kinds of health problems too but it's a wonderful program and i i feel very pleased that i can be a part of it and it's wonderful that the crop what can help this organization is they rely very much on the contributions that they get from the crop walk and i know that for a fact spoke well of the local benefits for crosswalk that there are hungry in every one of our communities even if we don't see them that they might sit next to us in church or might be next to us in school but they're here there's always that one essential element  crop walk is to benefit the local hungry but crap lack funds are also used in eighty countries to feed people who are poor and people who are hungry and so that seventy thousand dollars that the pete peters peter raised over the years has really benefited people over eighty countries around the globe and crack wax primarily help feed the hungry in three areas the first area would be times of disaster so for instance we just think back over this last year first you have hurricane mitch which devastated honduras and nicaragua and there were plenty and continue to be hungry people from that disaster crap that finds from peter's township or are continuing to be there and make a difference to those hungry people kosovo crap that finds helped feed and house refugees during the kosovo crisis crap that funds from peter's township are being used in turkey right now to meet the needs of the people who really are experiencing suffering that we can't even imagine so your reach from the peters township to really global so you feed people during times of disaster you also through your efforts with crop walk help people to help themselves for the long run we can have that economic development in kosovo for example some of the immediate needs have been taking care of and now people are beginning to rebuild their lives and begin to learn how to have incomes for the long run how to take care of themselves and their families for years to come crack rock find help with those kind of projects also it might be a fish but it might be as simple as buying a widow some chickens so that she can sell the eggs from the chickens that market and feed herself then feed herself then so crap back find here also benefit people for the long run as a third way that crop what funds from peter to peter township really help meet the needs of people around the globe is during times of refugee crises so for instance in south america south africa in sierra leone with the crisis and the refugee crisis there crop walk funds are caring for people who are living fifty thousand people who are living in a stadium borrow your reach  what you do here makes a difference for literally people around the globe well it's really not a handout either it's a helping hand exactly and part of our goal is always to leave our goal was always to help people get on their feet and sustain themselves and then asleep wherever we work that our long term goal is for people not to need us to be there anymore i understand you travel to with staff or go this year i did in january i visited three west african countries i went to senegal and to the gambia and to guinea the south the idea behind my visit was to see firsthand how crack rock funds are changing people's lives and i came back with two impressions the first one is how far a dollar goes we can't even imagine in this culture how far developed dollar goes into developing nation for instance i w senegal and visited twenty hospital wards for malnourished children and the reason i went to these wards was because they were but instead i wanted to show me empty wards for malnourished children because of a crackpot project seven years ago a tree was introduced in the tree was present in west africa but it was introduced into the diet of the west africans through a crack rock front as it turns out this tree called the moringa tree which is native to west africa if you drive a leaves and feed them to an infant to smell nourished it takes a hospital stay from three to four months to ten to twenty days and people were really excited so they wanted to show me these empty warts if that same ring to tree is given to pregnant mothers or nursing mothers upset or level of nutrition in such a way that it contains one hundred percent of the daily requirement of vitamins minerals iron and protein my goodness so you can eat the pod you can eat the flowers you can eat the with firewood that in itself is a miracle it costs fifty dollars to plant forty of those trees forty of those trees literally changes the life of a whole village of people become clean transformed their life from inadequate nutrition adequate nutrition now i know you have raised fifty to fifty dollars one hundred times over in your crop walk efforts and that's what you've done you've changed the whole country side of people through that sort of effort so that's the first impression that i came back with from west africa the second impression besides talk our dollar goes how grateful people are people understand that the aid if they're receiving comes from people of faith in the united states who care about them who are telling their stories who are listening to the who are really seeing the pictures of the lives of people who suffering and caring about it and to up to a village people wanted me to come back and say thank you you know they're really grateful they're really appreciative and they're working hard to so that their lives will be economically more secure that's a wonderful wonderful story i mean no it's not a story it's a fact we sort of in this now you know everybody has wagon has already started with black wax and there are two thousand nationally in pennsylvania there are two hundred forty and almost all of those take place over the next six weeks from now till the end of october that's a lot of people work it is i think we estimate that about two million people participate either by wacking or by giving to crop walks and yes that is something else i mean if you can't walk or you're well not that you're physically not able to but you know for other reasons that you can't walk that day anything is except right there you go back by yourself around the track it was fifteen million dollars or raise annually through crop was twenty five percent of that so well over three million dollars stays in the united states and in pennsylvania nearly two million dollars is raised in prof walks so to me that says something about where our hearts are that we're really caring about other people and you also said what did make crop walk unique was that the participation of the people is that with you man i do i think laptops are unique because completely volunteer organized a community has a crosswalk when they decided to important for them and the leadership comes completely from within the community the other thing that makes crop walks unique are most of the participants in crop walks are from churches synagogues catholic parishes it's one of the very few things we do as people of faith that we do together there are so many things we don't agree on theologically or socially but most people of faith agree i agree on god's call to care for the hungry and to feed the hungry so it's one of the few things that we do as a community where we come together and we don't just look at ourselves and don't just look at our own needs but we turn our eyes outward and look at the broader world in which we live and acknowledge that we stand or fall together  let me see rishi and maybe you could recap a little bit more on the local information well you know i like what rebecca said about the various congregations scatting together because i know that this has been a real plus for our crop walks here in peter's township just the interaction maybe even on an individual level but it has been most beneficial i think in creating cooperation among the congregations but october seventeenth is the day as we don't want to forget that at and i think also as you brought out if you can't rock you can be a sponsor and all you have to do is find a walker in there there will be many people out there young and old who are going to be asking if flowing gart will be passed this night that is on time so hopefully it will be a nice day and we've had more of those and we've had the rainy day that the one fifteen on october seventeenth that features greek presbyterian church  there will be short period of registration before the walk starts and that registration is important then we take off up the road and down the trail and from there on it's fun for most people could always call our eight hundred number if they wanted information about the peter's township crop walk and we can put them in matching information they need you know that's one eight eight eight c ws crop  why i think it might be helpful that i mention too that this is a walk the only kind of vehicle if you want to call it that other than your feet that would be permitted would be a why again that might be used we've had parents bring their youngsters in of pulling them in a wagon and that's permissible as wheelchair wheelchairs we've had a number of wheelchair walkers  anything other than that is not a not safe right and so we do not permit the course to inline skates or any kind of skate bicycles try sickles social hall and it's a welcome relief for the walkers when they do get back and if it's a warm day as we've had some of them we've been kept quite busy provided getting enough water getting the drinks we've had now i just october seventeenth made it pierce great presbyterian church one fifteen that's when we start when we decide the actual distance of the walk and that we didn't mention this says it's about five miles but if there's anyone the can't go the five and they can just do want why we're glad to have them out there to whatever and i think it was brought out in our meeting too that if there's someone in a push the person that he'll so there is a place to park for anybody interested in something or even if they're not in a wheelchair and are limited otherwise it's possible that they could start up there day well i'd like to thank my guests very much for all this wonderful information and we just hope that it will little get out to everybody