sick

Most would agree that being sick is no fun. Being sick away from home is even worse. This week I was both away from home and sick. In a hotel, no familiar remedies at hand, no liquids at my fingertips to hydrate me. No familiar bed or extra covers. No comforts to help through the fevers and chills, no family, no friends, just me and the germs for company. It only takes an experience like this to force into the forefront the importance of home, friends and family during times like these, or any other sorts of stresses.

My home dilemma was solved on Friday when I flew back from North Carolina to Kansas. For me, it could not be soon enough.

Millions of others face this fact every day, but instead of a temporary displacement, their loss of home is permanent. Across Darfur and Chad, over 2.5 million Darfuris live in displacement camps, some away from family, friends or tribe due to war or death from war. Their lives uprooted, often with the clothes on their backs as their only possessions, fleeing from bullets often at any hour of the day and night. They fled from their homes, soon burned to the ground. Entire villages erased, leaving nothing but smoking piles of rubble.

Living in camps alone would be a hardship enough, but their means of sustaining their life now depends on organizations across the world struggling through red tape and rebels to get their shipments to the camps. Living in camps also encourages disease and sickness due to close proximity and limited medical supplies. And of course, there is always the threat of more attacks by the Janjaweed rebels and government forces attempting to exterminate these peoples. And so it continues.

What hope would you have?

What will happen to them next?

For he will deliver the needy who cry out, the afflicted who have no one to help. He will take pity on the weak and the needy and save the needy from death. He will rescue them from oppression and violence, for precious is their blood in his sight. Psalm 72: 12-14

Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it. 1 Corinthians 12:27

Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work. Ephesians 4:2-16

You are their best hope. Yes, you.

Visit www.savedarfur.org to learn more about how you can help right now.

If you are in the Kansas City area, you can learn more about this region by attending a movie and conversation around, “The Devil Came on Horseback” on Thursday at 7PM. 138 Main, Gardner, Kansas. Contact me if you can attend. We’d love to have you there.

drawing conclusions

“No one shall be subjected to torture, or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”- Universal Declaration of Human Rights

I revisited an old drawing of mine in a family Bible today. It was a story I wrote when I was 9 years old. It was a story about my favorite person and a drawing. The story said:

Language
September 27, 1973

Deana

My favorite person is grandpa arends. He doesn’t have much hair but a little hair in the back and brown eyes and glasses and I liked him taking me to the zoo. He is still alive.

On the back was a simple, quickly drawn picture of my grandpa and I walking. Many of my memories of my grandpa Roger were of walking. Sometimes it was the zoo, other times in the neighborhoods of Grimes, Iowa where we’d occasionally make it to Main Street, talking to friends on porches or in yards as we made our way through town.

Spending summer weeks at my mother’s parents conjures up other fond memories. There was no pool in town, so my grandma got out her old wash tub, filled it with water and I splashed in that. They grew raspberries (my favorite fruit to this day) and we enjoyed them with half and half or in a fresh pie. There were zoo trips and dinners out with other great aunts and uncles. Sometimes cousins visited and fun was had by all. I learned how to fry chicken and crochet. I showed my prowess around scrubbing out sinks after doing dishes. I helped bake bread and count the number of canned vegetables and jams in the basement. I learned how long it takes to polish a rock in a polisher. And yes, I did catch fireflies in on of grandma’s old mason jars for a nightlight, only to release them each morning to start again that night.

These memories are in stark contrast to the collection of drawings I looked at this week from children in IDP (Internally Displaced People) camps of refugees from the Darfur area of Sudan. Instead of pictures of family life and events of joy, children in these camps, witnesses to the ongoing genocide in that country, drew frightening and consistent pictures of homes being burned and people being attacked. For them, there is no peace. The drawings can be viewed in full here. Here is one of them.

The five hundred drawings collected by Waging Peace amount to a form of criminal evidence from silent witnesses. The killings, bombing and looting shown in the drawings directly contradict the Government of Sudan’s version of events over the last four years of bloodshed. The pattern that emerges from these drawings corroborates what we know has been taking place in Darfur and shows a worryingly similar pattern of attacks developing in Eastern Chad.

There have been 5 years of conflict in this region. Now there are school age children who are living in camps that no nothing of peace. Over 1 million of Darfuri children know only a life of destruction, not of home.

This young boy was 8 when his village in Darfur was attacked in 2003 by Janjaweed and Sudanese armed forces. He is now 12 and living in a refugee camp in Eastern Chad.

In this drawing the attackers, on camel and hose backs and in armed vehicles, are setting the houses on fire and shooting at civilians from all corners (note how the bullets are crossing each others paths). The villagers are also fighting back with spears and arrows, while the Janjaweed and Sudanese forces are attacking them with machine guns.

The skin colour of the attackers is lighter than that of the victims, clearly denoting the ethnic character of the attacks.

The tribes of the Darfur region in Sudan are African, not Arab. As the Janjaweed rebels (backed by the Sudanese government) put it as they slaughter villages, “They are too black.” At the crux of this conflict we find race, not religion. More than 400,000 Black African people have been killed, and more than 2 million Black African people have been forced to leave their homes.

Do not deprive the alien or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge. Deuteronomy 24:17

“Never again” was the rally cry after the Holocaust. “Never again” was shouted after the Rwandan genocide in the early 1990’s. Yet, it is happening again. A child is a child of God, no matter where they live, how they worship, or what color their skin happens to be. It’s time to LEARN about this conflict and genocide. DO something to help. TELL others.

Start here.