Thinking out loud

How long, O God? Will you forget me forever? (Psalm 13:1) Earlier this week, I arrived in Lebanon from where MCC staff work with a dozen partner groups in Lebanon and Syria. It has been several years since staff has been able to work from Syria or even travel there, but we continue to support relief and peace building work in communities in both countries through partner organizations. Lebanon has a total population of only 4.5 million people but hosts about 2 million refugees, primarily from Syria. You can imagine the enormous strain this has put on the infrastructure of this small country. The director of our partner, Permanent Peace Movement (PPM), tells us that MCC was the first outside organization that understood what they were doing and supported them in building peace in Lebanon. Another partner, Popular Aid for Relief and Development (PARD), works in refugee settlements with women, children and families. We visit a Syrian family in the Daouk settlement, ...

  In your presence there is fullness of joy (Psalm 16) It is a blessing to have the opportunity to step out of one’s own culture for months at a time, to experience another culture and to see one’s own culture in a fresh way. For the next several months I will be living and working in Sarajevo and traveling from there to visit MCC’s programs in Iraq, Ukraine, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. My first week in Sarajevo is largely filled with orientation with MCC Europe and Middle East area director Amela Puljek-Shank and with the Eastern Europe country staff. I’ve settled into a small apartment and have begun exploring the city. Sarajevo has a rich faith tradition history. While the city is 95% Muslim today, there are Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox traditions present here as well. Yesterday, I was able to visit some of the oldest places of worship in the old part of the city for all four faith traditions. I am quickly learning that the deep conflicts in this regi...

We think of Thanksgiving and Christmas as a season for giving. More and more though, we also remember that Thanksgiving commemorates a time of taking, when several hundred years ago, my ancestors took land from people who already lived on this continent.  A month ago, as my wife and I thought about the season of giving that was approaching us, we decided we wanted to try a giving experiment. During the month of November, we would give $20 to everyone who asked us, whether that was on the street, through mail or email, in church, or anywhere we were, if someone or some organization directly asked us for money, we would give them $20.  When the month of November began, I wondered how many thousands of dollars we would give to others during the month. After all, we recognize November as a gearing up month. It is getting cold outside and organizations are getting ready, preparing for the Thanksgiving to Christmas ask when non-profits receive a high percentage of the total ...

God executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and loves the strangers, providing them with food and clothing. Deut. 10:18 10,000 steps every day. That's just over five miles.  I have a dogged determinedness to reach my goal each and every day. And I've reached my goal every day since the beginning of last June.  In late October I was in O'Hare international airport in Chicago on my way to Indonesia. I knew I would have difficulty reaching my daily goal if I didn't do some serious walking in the airport terminal. Too much sitting in airplanes was ahead. And so I was moving at quite a clip through the O'Hare concourses trying to get in as many steps as possible before my flight boarded.  Then I passed by a family that, even at the rate I was moving, I noticed looked quite out of place. From Africa, the way it looked. All five family members had on heavy winter coats. This on what was a mild October day in the Chicago area. And so I stopped, steps or ...

Mehrunessa is the youngest of five daughters. Her father died last year and her house burnt down, so she and her mother are now living with her brother’s family. At age 15, her mother is looking for a good groom so she can be married off. Through the Nepali Girls Social Service Centre (NGSS) in Darjeeling, India, Mehrunessa receives support for school through MCC’s Global Family program. She is one of about 90 children and their families who receive school fees and food support of just under $200 each year. Mehrunessa walks more than two kilometers to school and back every day. There are 43 other girls in Mehrunessa’s class at the Ghoom Girls High School. She takes all of the classes that North American girls her age would take and her favorite is geometry. She hopes to continue school through grade 12, but that is five years away. When she gets home from school, she will help her sister-in-law with housework and also carry water up the hill to her house.  We...

My presence will go with you and I will give you rest .  Exodus 33:14  Nestled between Nepal and Bhutan in the very northern tip of India, the tourist town of Darjeeling is an unlikely place for an MCC partner to be working with people infected with HIV/AIDS. The West Bengal Voluntary Health Association (WBVHA) is responding to the needs of a community that experiences high migration patterns from neighboring countries, including truck drivers, sex workers and day laborers. In a country of 1.2 billion people, the relative number of people with HIV/AIDS in India is relatively small – 2.75 million cases nationwide and 7,000 in the Darjeeling district. But the vision of the WBVHA is to provide home-based care and support without discrimination to those who are infected and their families. During the last 10 years, more than a thousand people who are HIV positive have received help and care from the WBVHA with MCC’s support. The WBVHA also works with hospitals, r...

In the village of Bandar Kharibari in northern Bangladesh, the gift of a cow is making a crucial  economic difference in the lives of families. Through a five-year grant from the Canadian Food Grains Bank (CFGB), MCC is working with its partner, Bangladesh Rural Improvement Foundation (BRIF), in the northwest section of Bangladesh, the poorest region in one of the poorest countries of the world. In the villages around Dimla, including Bandar Kharibari, most families own less than half an acre of land. Families work for larger land owners during the August to November rice growing season. There is plenty of work during the planting and harvesting times, but almost no work in the months in between, known as the monga, or the famine season.  The CFGB Monga Mitigation Project has identified 1,900 families in the region to receive a gift of a cow. Before the project, almost no one owned a cow, or if they did, they were rearing it for their landlords. Project lead...