Thinking out loud

The river of God is full of water, you provide the people with grain, for so you have prepared it. – Psalm 65:9 In Avad, in eastern Kenya, it took 23 days and several hundred people to build a sand dam a hundred meters long. Or put another way, it took over two years for the community to get to the place to be able to sustain this effort. Either way, the end result is the same – the sand dam provides water in the dry season for 6,000 people in three villages. It is a 23-day (or two year) miracle! Without the sand dam, there would be no water, no life, the villagers told us. With the sand dam, in the dry season, women no longer have to walk miles in search of water. And the drinking water the villagers now have is cleaner and causes less disease. There is enough water for crops and cattle.   The Utooni Development Organization in the Ukambani region of eastern Kenya has built over 1,500   sand dams here. The dams are part of an overall effort to transfor...

God . . . through Christ, has given us the ministry of reconciliation. (II Corinthians 5:20) “You can’t invite people into the family of God and refuse to be their brothers and sisters,” MCC country representative Paul Mosley tells the 90 Intervarsity student leaders gathered for a retreat at a Catholic seminary in central Burundi.   Paul tells us later that these students are all of Tutsi and Hutu ethnic origin and it is very likely that every single one of them has lost a family member to the civil wars and genocide in the region in the last 20 years. “We are ambassadors of Christ and God’s message of reconciliation,” Paul tells the students.   These students are here for three days of intensive Bible study and it is also likely that these few days could change these students’ lives. A decade ago, 15 other university students in Burundi attended a similar IVF gathering to study the Bible together. As a group, they decided that they wanted to respond...

  Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.   – Luke 6:27 Whether or not the Rwandan genocide 20 years ago has actually caused the instability in eastern Congo today, it certainly has been a strong contributing factor. In the mid-90s, Rwandan Hutu soldiers blamed for the genocide of thousands of Tutus and they fled into eastern Congo with their families. These soldiers have formed militias that control parts of the countryside  and the resources there. In response, Congolese have formed similar groups. Today, dozens of armed groups patrol various sections of eastern Congo and the government is not able to provide protection for the communities who are caught in the middle.     MCC is working with the Churches of Christ in Congo (ECC), an association of churches, through a Peace and Reconciliation Repatriation Project (PPR) that helps these Hutu soldiers lay down their weapons and return to their native R...

We can hear the children singing as we park our vehicle at the road’s edge. Looking down the hill, the sight is unbelievable. Hundreds of children are standing in the courtyard of the school, singing to welcome our arrival. The Mubimbi school in the North Kivu province of eastern Congo is just down the road from a camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) where MCC is working. MCC sponsors 120 school children from the IDP camp to attend this school.   In front of their teachers and fellow students, some of the IDP school children sing poems to us – MCC is the one who gives us rulers and pens and pays our school fees, they sing. The principal tells us that there is now no difference in academic performance between the children from town and the children from the camp.   Later, we visit the IDP camp itself. More than 300 families call this camp home. The homes which they fled from six years ago are two days walk away. One woman told us that ...

Shasha camp for internally displaced people in eastern Congo                   On the shore of Lake Kivu in eastern Congo, it is difficult to miss the blue tarps that cover many of the small temporary huts in the Shasha camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs). The tarps are new one-year tarps that MCC has given the 198 families who have called this camp home for the last six years. Eastern Congo is unstable, perhaps because the government lacks both the will and capacity to control the dozens of armed groups, both Rwandan and Congolese, that have roamed the countryside since the genocide in neighboring Rwanda 20 years ago this month. There are millions of Congolese internally displaced in eastern Congo. A smaller number of Rwandese are also refugees here. The Shasha camp is much smaller than the other IDP camps nearby. The camp is populated by the Batwa, a Pygmy group,...