When Tearfund supporters and Brenda and Gordon Wilkinson were staying in Honduras in 2004, the food was as basic as beans and rice - every single meal, every single day.
"When you've eaten that for ten days or two weeks, then you really are thinking golly, this is what people are surviving on, there really is no choice," says Gordon, who travelled with his wife to the country to see the work that had been done there by Christian humanitarian agency Tearfund since the devastating Hurricane Mitch in 1998.
It was during this trip, the second of three trips with Tearfund, that the Wilkinsons started to think more seriously about the kinds of food people eat in other countries where Tearfund is at work. On their return to the UK they got to work gathering as many recipes as they could from Tearfund staff, supporters and partners, recipes that were in some way meaningfully connected to their experiences or personal encounters in a particular Tearfund country.
Thus, they began what would turn out to be 18 months of hard work to create a new kind of cookbook that would not only bring these little known recipes to people in the UK, but would also educate users on the very real needs and developmental challenges in the countries that the recipes originate from.
"It is more than a cookbook," says Brenda of their highly successful 68-page cookbook, 'Recipes for Disaster'. "It is opening a window into the reality of life in that country beyond the food."
Open up the book and it is the faces of people, not food, that jump up from the pages to greet the budding chef. They are people who are seeing their lives transformed by the work that charities like Tearfund are doing within their communities.
In the Cambodia section, a tiny girl in a dirty, worn out T-shirt stares forlornly out of the page from between two large storage jars. Beneath the picture, a short passage tells the reader that there an estimated 300,000 Aids orphans in Cambodia. The opposite page, meanwhile, carries a local recipe for sticky rice and mango picked up by the manager of Tearfund England, the Rev Andrew Cowley, during a 2005 study trip to the country.
Other recipes include green banana from Burundi, frijoles (kidney bean stew) from Colombia, and gado-gado (vegetable salad with peanut sauce) from Indonesia.
"The additional information gives you a sense of why this is a country where Tearfund has to support local partners," says Gordon. "It bridges Tearfund supporters in the UK to the people around the world who need their support and prayers."
By June 2006, 5,000 copies of the cookbook had been printed. By September, enough had been sold to cover all printing costs and send a £1,000 cheque to Tearfund. This Christmas, Brenda and Gordon will have raised nearly £20,000 for the charity.
Their hope is that the many Christians who have already bought the book will be inspired to act on some of the humanitarian issues raised alongside the recipes.
