UnitingWorld has launched our 2026 End of Financial Year Appeal to support the world’s poorest in the Pacific, Asia and Africa
Every morning, before anything else, Semis pounds rice by hand so her family has enough to eat.
“If I don’t do this today, we don’t eat tomorrow,” she explains, as a matter of fact.
Semis lives in rural Sumba, eastern Indonesia, one of 219 million people in our region living on less than $3 a day. Already living with erratic rainfall and an increasingly arid climate, subsistence farming families like hers are among the most exposed in the world to global economic shocks. When costs rise, hunger follows. When the crop fails, there is no fallback. When the rain doesn’t come, Semis and her husband go into the forest to forage wild roots and plants just to get through.
And yet her hopes are as humble as her life.
“My hope,” she told us, “is for my child to go to school, and for there to be enough to eat.”
That’s it. Not wealth. Just enough, and a future for her daughter she never had herself.
This is what UnitingWorld’s End of Financial Year Appeal is about, working alongside local church partners in Sumba to break the cycle of poverty and hunger for families like Semis’s. Not a handout, but a hand alongside: food gardens, water access, agricultural mentoring, health support for mothers and children.
“I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” — John 10:10
Your tax-deductible gift before 30 June has up to six times the impact through our partnership with the Australian Government. It’s the most powerful time of year to give.