groups are helping the child malnutrition. what muslims do with a worn out koran. and a ceremoniy of commitment for older couple who is want to spend the rest of their lives together, but choose not to get married. >> this is my sacred vow. this is my sacred vow. >> spoken before the gods who have brought us together. >> spoken before the god whoa has brought us together. has brought us together. the

>> welcome. i'm bob abernathy. good to have you with us. the number of americans living in poverty has grown for the fourth straight year according to a report from the census bureau. 1 in six, more than 46 million people live below theoverty line last year. the percentage is the highest it's been since 1993. the number of poor children also grew. last year 22% of all american children lived in poverty. reverend jim wallace, president of sojourners called poverty the important religious issue in the presidential election. in light of the new figures, many prominent faith groups urged congress to protect anti-poverty programs. many say there is no better way to reduce poverty than create jobs. president obama sent his jobs bill to congress this week

saying it should be passed immediately. the president said the legislation will save several thousand jobs and create new ones rebuilding the country's schools, roads and bridges. the coalition of a thousand faith groups praised the plan, calling it a step towards restoring hope and opportunity. in the mideast, tensions were high this week as the palestinian authority pushed hate wh its effort to get the united nations to recognize an independent palestinian state. palestinian leaders said they would take their request to the un next week. if it goes to the security council, the u.s. is expected to veto it. meanwhile in jordan, pro palestinian activists protested against israel and the u.s. and the prime minister of turkey repeatedly condemned israel to refusing to apologize for the deadly attacks on a pro

palestinian pla tilla last year. we have a special report on the massive effort under way in india to provide a cooked meal every schoo day for 120 million children. india's supreme court ruled several years ago that every child in india has a right to food and it ordered the government to observe that right. that has begun. helped by nongovernmental groups such as the hare krishnas who now feed by themselves more than a million children a day. in all, india's is the largest school lunch program on earth, but still not large enough. we have a report. >> reporter: in thousands of schools, teachers will tell you to add one more r to reading, writing and arithmetic. recess may be the most critical part of a student's school day.

that's because 9:00 a.m. recess is when 300 students in this school in the northern province are provided a hot meal. as are a few younger siblings who are allowed to come along. in this school, onlybout five children in all are able to bring a lunch from home. >> anywhere from a third to 40% of the world's under nourished children live in india and about half have stunted growth. >> the statistics are more telling given india's strong growth rate. >> india finds itself embarrassed. its ambitions of being a global part are very poorly reflected indicators. there is an acute embarrassment that the second class in the world has almost half of the children malnourished. >> they work for india's supreme

court that monitors compliance with the court's orders. about a decade ago, activists saying the government was denying children basic right to food took their case to the court. the justices twice upheld the right and ordered that every child be provided a cooked meal in school. at first he said there was resistance from government officials. >> there was no infrastructures and the teachers would get over and they didn't have the financial resources. the supreme court reaffirmed that they can never be allowed to come into the way of the children's right to food. if the government had to tighten their belt, it had to happen elsewhere. >> with a stroke of apen, they ordered the largest school meal program in the world. that left the daunting task of implementing it. >> the challenge in our country is how to deliver it.

deliver it up to the last mile. that is the challenge. because a large country with 120 million children in hundreds of thousands of schools, that delivery is a genuine challenge. >> thus heads a nonprofit group that was started in the 90s when a group of hare krishnas began preparing a few hundred school lunches. it's one of the oldest belief systems, the modern day movement was led and visible in the west in the 1980s and 70s. the call to serve meals was inspired by an encounter the swammy had after attending a banquet. >> there was left over of all the food and the plates strewn there. there were poor children from the village and stray dogs fighting for the leftovers.

they saw it appear and he called some of his disciples and said just look at this. you can't allow this to happen. >> that are formed the spiritual basis for his work. when school lunches became the law of the land, the group went to the government for funds to expand and to india's corporate sector for expertise. >> passion alone is not enough. you need to have organization and you need to have organizational capabilities. you need to have management capabilities. it has been a very unique marriage of dedicated missionaries and professionals. coming with the heart. >> and with their wallets. among india's growing middle class, there is a dawning of philanthropy. many are attaining wealth at an earlier age. >> my parents, we come from a middle class family. we have a house when they were

50 years of age. in today's india, by the time someone working in a software company in india, by the time they had 28 or 30 years old, they have a house and they have a car. then what? they have a lot of disposable income. they are genuinely looking for opportunities where their money can be used well for social reasons. >> bottomless pot is now the largest of many nonprofit school lunch providers and service 1.3 million children every day kitchens like this, efficient and productive as any in the world. >> something like 7,000 every

day and 300,000. >> separate meals. >> hours before students show up, workers feed wheat, flour, and water into giant mixers. at the other end, lightly greased flat breads emerge, 40,000 every hour in these conditions. >> elsewhere and rice and a lentil stew are prepared, flavoring the berries and no animal products. they are vegetarian in principal and so are most students by economic necessity. in the desert summer, school starts early and the meals arrive as early as 9:00 a.m. four years after they began delivering meals in the area, the most visible impact is school attendance. it is up 11%. no surprise to the principal.

>> they belong to very poor families and labor class families and they are not very much lucrative. the economic condition is so poor it might be not be able to eat food in their home. depending on this. >> the full day's nutrition. >> for the whole day. >> students have more energy and improved concentration in class. for its part, they aim to expand e lunch program five-fold by 2020. not all children have benefitted equally from the supreme court's order said the compliance officer. >> it's a state that i often visited and despair at the quality of the meals. even within states where the meals work well and the more parts of the state, you have meals which are not comparable at all in quality to what the

children in other countries are getting. >> we're like it, these children said when asked about the meals. when i asked how many students have to go hungry on days when there is no school, the response was nearly unanimous. and they are the more fortunate. despite the supreme court order and recent initiatives to address it, malnutrition is the root cause of 2500 child deaths in india every day. for religion and ethnics news weekly, from india. >> as the slow recovery continues in haiti after last year's earthquake, a new book out called haiti after the earthquake. it's by the much-admired paul farmer, professor at harvard and department chair at the harvard

medical school. he is a cofounder of the humanitarian aid group, partners in help. for a quarter of a century he worked in haiti and other countries too to provide good medical care for the poorest of the poor. farmer was in washington this week signing books and talking about what he says is a too big challenges of effective relieve in reconstruction. helping individuals in need as so many faith-bised groups do and at the same time building up public health, public education and other systems that help everyone. farmer spoke as the head of one of the hundreds of aid organizations in haiti. >> we said what will we be doing wrong? what we are doing is to allow the continued degradation and collapse of the public sector and the institutions of that country. to allow them to collapse even as we grow. that's not the way to build haiti back better.

>> i asked farmer about the faith-based nongovernmental organizations. his answer was a surprise. i'm wondering since the earthquake, how do you assess the effectiveness, the usefulness, the problems that need to be learned for people who go there with a strong religious motivation to try to help the least of these? >> i would say let's not give ourselves more than a c. >> farmer said the ngos have done a good job of helping one by one and suggests they have not done enough to help patients create a government and other institutions capable of taking on big projects. like reforesting the mountains and cleaning up the water. >> church groups and mosque-and synagogue-related group it's not their mission to go and promote water security, but if it's their mission to help their neighbors which it always is, we are going to have to rethink and

think hard about how we can work together. >> farmer has many haitian friends and speaks creole. he knows how hard life is there and says the resilience of the haitian people is the country's greatest asset. >> if they can have optimism and belief, if they can have optimism, we can do. >> rick perry spoke conditly about his personal faith this week in a speech to students at liberty university in virginia. an institution founded by the late evangelist and head of the moral majority, jerry falwell. he said at one point he was lost, spiritually emotionally. >> my first juniory is not the story of someone who turned to god because i wanted to. it was because i had nowhere else to turn. >> walter c. writer, the bishop

of iowa died this past week. he was 87 years old. in the mid-1990s, writer was at the center of controversy over the role of gays and lesbians in the episcopal church. he ordained an openly gay man and signed a statement supporting the ordination of non-celibate homosexuals. the presiding bishop of the church, catherine shorey said he will be remembered for his "steadfast willingness to help the church move beyond prejudices into new possibilities." >> now, a belief in practice segment, disposing a sick red text. when aer toa becomes too worn to use any longer, it is buried. some christians do the same with the christian bible. muslims?

you may be surprised to hear that some muslims say a koran should be burned. we talked with jihad turk, director of religious affairs at the islamic center of southern california. >> the koran as an idea is something in the hearts and minds of the believers and followers of islam. it's not the text or the piece of paper they don't worship the text of the koran. no one can touch the koran or destroy the koran. although it's not sacred or something that is worshipped, it is considered the representation of the sacred word of god. given that it's a representation of it, a muslim would want to make sure it's treated respectfully. when muslims want to respectfully dispose of a text of the koran that is no longer usable, we will burn it. so if someone, for example, if

their own private collection or library had a text of the koran that was damaged or that was in disrepair so the bining was ruined, et cetera or got torn, they might bring it by the islamic center and ask that someone dispose of it properly. what i will do is take it to my fireplace at home and burn it there in the fireplace. i sort of take the pages out and burn it to make sure it is thoroughly and charred and no longer recognizable as script. in islamic tradition, it's the arabic that is considered the authentic original scripture. the very early scripture of the koran when it was first put into a binding with a lot of loose papers around. this was 1400 years ago. the first companions of mohammed

led under the leadership actually instructed the followers to take all of those pages and burn them. that set precedent as to what should be done. if you burn it, it destroys the words and the ink on the paper. it's no longer perceptible and scripture. just the ashes at that point. >> for muslims according to jihad turk, when done with the proper intent, the burning of a damaged or worn out koran is in no way disrespectful. the specific paper and ink may be gone, but the sacred word of god endures. also choosing conscious over law. in western kentucky, eight amish men, members of the strict old order group went to jail rather than pay fines for refusing to use bright orange triangles on their buggies.

they said the state requirement violated their practices of avoiding bright colors and not putting trust in anything man-made. a neighbor paid the fine for one of the amish men and the others got from to ten days. finally, a love story. about two old friends, jeny and will bloom, both in their 70s and strongly religious. both had lost their spouses and they fell in love and wanted to spend the rest of there lives together. they didn't want to just live together and they found another way. i am grateful to my husband for telling us about will and jenny and will and jenny for letting us use their video. >> it's called a ceremoniy of commitment. a religious wetting-like service with no legal involvement by the

state. no marriage license or official recognition and no use of the words marriage or husband or wife. >> in the presence of god and in the name of love, you, jenny and will come to have your union blessed by god and by this congregation. >> jenny shed and will bloom met 60 years ago at the northern baptist, now american baptist conference center in green lake, wisconsin. we met them at the retirement center in peabody, massachusetts north of boston. each had been married and had children and grandchildren and each had lost his or her spouse. they rediscovered each other, fell in love, and wanted to be married. but they found that for themselves and their families, marriage could bring substantial financial problems. issues of pensions and insurance and taxes and bequests.

>> the legal problems and inheritance problems with people our age with different families already in existence get very complicated. >> the legal entanglements that could come up later on, it could happen to be quite fierce. if one of her kids says that's ours, not yours. that happens. >> although will and jenny concluded it could be too costly to get married,as lifelong baptists, they at least wanted their has been to be blessed by the church and respected by their families and friends. >> we definitely wanted to be together. we wanted to do it the proper way as an example for our own children and grandchildren. we didn't want to live together without any ceremony of any type. >> there has got to be something significant about what we are doing. not just right, but it has to have meaning.

we felt that the only way to do it would be to have a ceremoniy or a service before, not just before our friends and family and so on, but before god. >> reverend ann, a chaplain at brooks bee village new about the service of commitment. the united church of christ developed for gays and lesbians who were not allowed to marry and wanted more than a civil union. that service became the model. >> there is a yearning in them and that all wants to be expressed in terms of the sacred and the holy and within the context of god's presence. appealing to god to witness to your sincerity, do you, wilbur, take this woman who stands

bore u, choosing her alone from all the world to be your beloved life partner? >> i do. >> then jenny's promises. >> this is my sacred vow. >> this is my sacred vow. >> spoken before the god who has brought us together. >> spoken before the god whoa has brought us together. >> and jenny exchanged rings. they took communion together and then they were blessed. >> fulfill yourpromises. let the peace of christ rule in your hearts. remembering that as members of one body, you are called to live in harmony. never forget, never forget to be thankful for what god has done asked will and jenny looking back how did they feel about their commitment service. >> it just felt so -- such a

feeling of warmth and correctness and just felt like christ there was with us. >> i felt up. i felt good. i said holy mackerel, now jenny and i are for real. >> i felt it was right. that was a relief to me. i needed to feel this relationship was right. >> to be honest, now she's mine. >> i asked will, what do you call each other. what do you call your situation now? >> we are husband and wife. when somebody meets for the first time, this is my wife jenny shed. she says this is my husband, will bloom. as far as we are concerned, we are husband and wife. until death do us part! >> that's our program for now. i'm bob abernathy. you can follow us on facebook and twitter and find us on you

tube and watch us any time, anywhere on smart phones and iphone. there is also much more on our website and comment on our stories and share them, audio and video podcasts are available. join us at pbs.org. as we leave you, music from the washington national cathedral choir performing at last weekend's concert for hope at the kennedy center. ♪

barry kibrick: today on "between the lines," how our brain's flaws shape our lives, with professor dean buonomano. welcome. i'm barry kibrick. dr. buonono is a professor in the departments of neurobiology and psychology at the brain research institute at ucla. with his book "brain bugs," he provides insights into the brain's inherent imperfections along with the tools to correct them.