As Lent begins, many members of the Presbyterian Church (USA) will spend the weekend fasting for an end to global hunger, especially in Sudan.

"Fasting during the season of Lent is a common tradition within the Presbyterian Church and a personal one of mine," said the Rev. Elizabeth McCormick, formerly a pastor in Pittsburgh Presbytery who spent 12 years as a missionary in Sudan and is now interim pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Frostburg, Md.

For most Catholics and Protestants, today is Ash Wednesday, the first of 40 days of Lenten preparation for Good Friday and Easter. For the Orthodox and some Eastern Catholics, a similar period of Great Lent began with Clean Monday on Feb. 23.

Last summer, the General Assembly of the 2.3 million-member Presbyterian Church (USA) adopted a plan to spend the first weekend of each month fasting in prayer over a particular aspect of the world food crisis, starting last October. But the plan was buried under an avalanche of reaction to decisions about gay ordination.

The church has a Web site, with information and prayers for the fast: www.pcusa.org/foodcrisis. But when several Pittsburghers on a related Facebook page were contacted, their congregations were using World Vision's popular 30-Hour Famine rather than the denomination's plan this weekend.

The Rev. McCormick didn't hear of the Presbyterian fast until recently. But she immediately signed up, and urged her church members to do likewise. Ordained in Pittsburgh in 1981, she served churches in Leetsdale and in Sharon, Mercer County, before she and her husband followed their dream to become missionaries. She taught at a seminary in the capital, Khartoum, and he was a financial adviser for the Presbyterian Church of Sudan.

When they arrived, Sudan had already endured six years of a brutal civil war, in which Muslim forces from the north attacked Christian and animist populations in the south. A peace treaty was signed in 2005 -- but by then the ethnic Muslim versus Muslim conflict in Darfur was under way.

Many of her students were among 2.5 million refugees from the south living in camps in the desert outside the city. For many the single meal served at the seminary was their only food. She was often invited to preach in the camps.

"I saw firsthand the children who were malnourished, with extended bellies and orange hair, and the very thin, emaciated women," she said.

"What was most difficult was that their sense of hospitality is so overwhelming that they would still provide food for their guests, even if it meant their family didn't eat that day."

Their faith deepened her own, she said. Despite their hunger, they fasted regularly.

"The Sudanese see their suffering as their being united to Christ Jesus in his suffering. So, for them, fasting is a way to show that they intentionally want to be united with Christ in his suffering for the world," she said.

Since she returned to the U.S. in 2007, little has improved, she said. Some refugees who tried to return to southern Sudan were unable to survive there because after 20 years their families had lost the farming skills they needed to survive. And the conflict in Darfur has only added more desperate people to the refugee camps.

"We have teams of graduates from our college serving as pastors who went to Darfur with relief supplies and Bibles. They are trying to help the people there," she said.

When she left Sudan, her students begged her not to forget them.

"I think this fast is a powerful way to remember our Sudanese brothers and sisters, to let them know that we will not forget them," she said.