Looking back on 2024, we’ve had quite a whirlwind of a year out here with the relief work in the Middle East!
A year-long regional war culminating in a devastating two-month conflict centered on our host country. Mass influxes of internally displaced peoples. The collapse of the decades-old regime in neighboring Syria and the new influx of new refugees. And on top of that, the “normal” relief ministries of medical aid, bread distro from the bakery, veggie distro from the farms, food assistance, education assistance, and even the women’s sewing projects, continued on at pace too!
And yet, despite the many demands upon us and cries for help from the poor around use, we can see God’s faithful provision throughout the time. As needs increased, so too did the Lord’s help increase!
This post will attempt to provide a brief 1-2 paragraph summary of the activities and Lord’s provisions for each major area of compassion ministry this past year. We will share some numbers to give a sense of the “scope” of the various labors. Those numbers are in no means meant as a “boast” of what our group has done, but simply a statement of fact on how much the Lord has helped provide for in the needs out here!
God’s Provision Throughout The War Relief
The continually escalating war last year certainly changed the dynamics of needs in our area. For the first time since the August 2020 port blast, we found our team helping large numbers of locals. Over a million had fled conflict areas on the borders or to the south of the city where the warring militias had their headquarters. We spent much of our time from late September to late November providing relief aid to the war displaced.
The Lord provided for our little group, working alongside the local Arab church, to be able to cook both breakfast and dinner meals for around 600 people daily. This ended up being around 56,600 total meals cooked and delivered during that time! We also delivered about 1,250 pieces of bedding and blankets to help hundreds of families, and provided medical aid to dozens of very sick people.
By God’s grace, this help opened up many doors to share the truth and be a light of Christ to people in a dark time. Only eternity will tell the true and final impact of the compassion shown in those difficult days. More details on the relief work done during the war months can be found on our site here: Mid-East Conflict 2024
God’s Provision For The Daily Bread Bakery
Throughout last year, the bakery workers faithfully kept on baking their daily bread and delivering it to refugee and poor local families in need. This ministry has continued to provide a crucial supplement to poor families meals with fresh daily bread, and continues to be a good witness of compassion in the community. One local leader commended the work recently, telling the head baker that “what you evangelicals are doing, nobody else is doing the same to help!”
During the past year, the little bakery was able to bake and distribute over 111,000 individual small loaves of bread to families in need, which is around 15,860 full bags of bread. This works out to around 2,135 loaves of bread a week produced and delivered. We’re thankful the Lord continues to enable the bakery to be a light and have an impact in helping refugee families here with their daily bread!
God’s Provision For The Grace Farms Project
In the midst of the turmoil of the war, the Grace Farms project continued on trying to produce nutritious veggies to distribute to local families in need who often cannot otherwise afford such healthy foods. It also continued to help provide work and a basic income for the families of the farm laborers, which was crucial during the war period when work became scarce.
By God’s grace, despite some issues with water supply during a drought year, complicated by the war that at times limited the ability of water trucks to deliver much-needed water to the farm tanks to irrigate, we were still able to plant and harvest around 4.5 tons of fresh produce and distribute the majority of that to families in need. This year (2025), the farm project is coming under a new local farm manager, who we hope will provide the needed vision and energy to improve the farm production substantially to the potential we feel it has. We are hoping for a fruitful harvest this coming year despite the potential for another drought. We are praying for an ability to support more fully those in need in the community receiving food aid from the farms, as well as the families of those working at the farms. Please pray with us towards that end!
God’s Provision For Providing Medical Assistance
While this aspect of the compassion ministry often gets less attention than others in periodic updates, it is still one of the most impactful forms of relief, and one we have been helping with since the very first years of helping refugees in the region. Medical assistance accounts for around 1/5th of our total yearly budget from what people give to TGI, and continues to provide open doors for sharing the truth of Christ with many people.
Over this past year, it is difficult to quantify the hundreds of medical cases helped, and the numerous life-saving ICU admissions or crucial surgeries we coordinated and funded with various partner hospitals/physicians. The sick people we help range from tiny infants needing urgent interventions to elderly people in heart failure to young/middle-aged people injured in accidents and everything in between. As well, there are many times where we can provide direct point-of-care assistance to injured or sick people, visiting them directly in their homes and providing needed medical care or medicines to forego a hospital visit.
In addition to hospital admissions and surgeries, we also continued to provide a large amount of medicines weekly to those otherwise unable to afford them. This past year, God enabled us to fill well over 2,000 prescriptions for people in need. This is often for elderly people with chronic conditions such as heart failure, diabetes and high blood pressure, or young children that are sick with infectious diseases. Every opportunity is an open door to show compassion to the sick, and help them in Jesus’ name in a time of great medical need for their families.
God’s Provision For Food & Heating Assistance
This past year was especially difficult for almost everyone living in the country due to the war disrupting many of the day-laborer jobs people pursue here to make ends meet. That increased the amount of demand for help with food and heating during the year, especially during the winter months.
This includes delivering pre-packed food bags that we purchase from local grocers to poor local families. Last year, the Lord enabled us to be able to purchase and distribute around 5,075 pounds of food to families in need, which is around 2.5 tons total. In addition, we’ve been able to distribute 1,000s of gallons of heating fuel last winter and this winter, and dozens of pot-belly-stove heaters as well to help keep families warm during the cold, damp winter months in the mountains.
God’s Provision For The Education Assistance Program
While the provisions thus far have been mostly focused on helping with tangible, physical needs, the Lord also provided in a tremendous way to continue helping last year with the educational needs for over 60 refugee and poor local children. The Education Assistance Program (EAP) has sought to cover tuition and book costs to enroll them in a quality, Christian-run school in the mountains. It is a joy to see these children brought from illiteracy and ignorance to being able to read, write, handle their math, and even read Scripture (which is written in a harder, formalized written Arabic dialect). All EAP kids also attend our yearly Summer English Class outreach for two months, which provides us with amazing opportunities to know these kids better and share the love of Christ with them.
This past year, we had the privilege to see 13 of our sponsored EAP kids reach graduation milestones, either completing high school, middle school or elementary school. That event was documented on our updates earlier this year. We continue into this current school year (2025) with less kids than last year, now only 39 sponsored students, due to the closure of the remedial-school and also some children returning to Syria with their families.
God’s Provision For The Women’s Sewing Initiative
This is another small area of ministry that often gets overlooked in light of larger projects and urgent needs. But it is no less important in its function to provide stable, meaningful work to a number of local women and in turn provide the end products of hats, scarves, blankets and other clothing items to poor families in need. We currently have over half a dozen women involved in either knitting or sewing items weekly, that we then pay them for and distribute locally.
In addition to distributing hundreds of sewn and knit items last winter, we were also able to give out many of these items to children displaced by the war during the colder periods in October/November, and to refugee kids attending seasonal events at the local church this past year. The women who sew and knit have become quite skilled at it, and rely on it as needed supplement for their family’s living expenses. Our hope moving forward is to find ways to enable them to work more by helping them sell some what they produce via our ministry, and returning that back to the sewing program and other relief needs.
Trusting God For Future Provision
As we head into an uncertain year in 2025, with new demands and new challenges, we are thankful to look back on all that the Lord did in the year prior. We are thankful as well to the core group of people who continue to read these updates, pray, and freely help give towards the needs our team encounters daily. We’re thankful to be able to be laboring alongside the local church and helping thousands in need in a dark and needy place.
For those who are new to Thirsty Ground International and do not know us from our simple beginnings in 2013 back in South Texas, we are and will remain a faith mission that relies entirely on God’s faithfulness. We therefore do not seek to solicit donations, send promotional mailings, or appeal to man for help in times of pressing financial need. We pray, and go to God first, and wait for His provision. And He is faithful to provide! However, we gratefully receive donations from those who freely desire to give it.
We try to balance this with informing people here on the website in general of ongoing opportunities they can give towards helping if they so wish, and how they can do so, while avoiding “high pressure” appeals for money. We prefer to see the Lord provide in answer to prayer. Very often we can gladly share testimony afterwards with the one who gave, who did not know the need or the prayers behind it, yet the Lord used them as the answer.
Thus, when we recount with gratitude the Lord’s faithfulness for the past year, we truly do mean it! He alone knows all the needs breaking upon us out here like waves from a stormy sea. He alone is the one we can look to for unfailing provision, although of course we acknowledge that He uses His people, His churches and even other unexpected means to meet these needs brought to Him in prayer.
Thank you to all who pray and have partnered with us these past years. As detailed in the last update on our site, the future here is unknown as the region undergoes monumental changes, and heads into uncharted waters. We will continue to post updates here on the Lord’s future provisions as well as new open doors and opportunities to be a light for Christ out here!
If you wish to be involved in any way, you can support TGI via our site, sign up for our relief updates e-mail newsletter to better know how to pray, or contact us if you are interested in knowing more about how to be personally involved.
We are a faith mission that looks entirely to the Lord Jesus for our ministry needs. We do not directly solicit donations, we will not fill your inbox with promotional emails, and we certainly will not share your contact details if you join our mailing list!
