| October 3, 2006
Dear Friends,
This is a time of profound change in Congo and in our work here.
Congo’s first “real” elections took place the
end of July, the SANRU project that we have been working with
for the last five years is coming to a close, and the way missions
is done in Congo is changing.
Elections
Originally the elections were planned for June ‘05. They
have been delayed three times since then. Thirty-three presidential
candidates and over 9,000 parliamentary candidates ran for office.
The day of elections went much better than expected, but three
weeks later, when the results were announced, parts of the capital
city exploded in violence. None of the presidential candidates
received the required 50 percent of the votes to avoid a runoff
election. For three days after the results were announced Kinshasa
was shut down, as President Kabila’s troops and Vice-President
Bemba’s troops battled in the streets. As the country prepares
for the second round of elections on October 29, people are expecting
more violence and demonstrations. Please pray for a peaceful political
transition in Congo and that God will raise up leaders in all
areas of government who will work for the good of all the Congolese
people.
SANRU
The SANRU health program that we have been working with for
the last five years with Interchurch Medical Assistance (IMA)
is coming to a close. It has had a great impact on the 10 million
people in the health zones it has assisted. Interventions such
as the use of insecticide-treated nets to prevent malaria have
gone from 3 to 49 percent household coverage, vaccination coverage
went up by 30 percent, and over 2,600 clean water sources were
constructed. (To learn more, go to SANRU's
Web site.) We had hoped that funding would be extended, but
changes in U.S. policy are causing the funding to go to health
zones in southeast Congo. For the last nine months we have been
working on a proposal for these new health zones. That project
will start in early October. The SANRU/IMA team will take the
lead in a consortium comprised of IMA, ECC (the Protestant council
of Congo), Catholic Relief Services, World Vision, and Merlin,
with technical assistance from Johns Hopkins, Management Sciences
for Health, and Helen Keller Foundation. The program will cover
60 health zones and serve a population of seven million people.
It will include almost all the health zones where the Presbyterian
Church in the Congo has hospitals. Larry has been named “Chief
of Party” for the program, so he will be overseeing the
whole program and has the task of keeping everyone working together.
New mission mode
Congo has been prioritized by PC(USA) as one of the countries
in which we should do more because of the need here and our historic
involvement, but the reality is that PC(USA) has less money and
fewer personnel to do the work than it has had in the past. Before
the pillaging of 1991, there were 42 missionary families in Congo.
Three years later, that number dropped to less than ten. And now
there are three. The reason people left were mostly personal ones
and not based on a policy to downsize. During this same period,
mission funding has dramatically dropped as U.S. churches have
moved their money to programs where they feel they have more direct
control over how the money is used. The consequences of these
two events have made it necessary to do missions in a different
way. We concentrate our efforts on developing and supporting the
capacity of the local church and using our limited funds to leverage
international donor support. We also do our best to facilitate
the direct involvement of churches and presbyteries that want
to do mission work in Congo.
One of Inge’s main activities for the last year and a half
that helps facilitate this new mode of mission involvement has
been improving the functioning of the Methodist Presbyterian Hostel
and Guest House in Kinshasa (MPH). The guesthouse is a service
to the various denominations in the Congo, lodging missionaries
and Congolese nationals traveling on church business, work teams
from the United States and elsewhere, and also hosts church conferences,
retreats, and workshops. MPH has between 100 and 200 guests a
month. During conferences, there are often 30 to 50 guests a night.
The building has not had much maintenance for the last ten years,
so Inge has been trying to get the building back in shape and
re-equipped, in addition to setting up management systems.
So this is a time of great hope and also anxiety in Congo. If
these elections go well, they could mark the end of a decade of
brutal wars and the beginning of a stable environment where greatly
needed economic development can take place. We are still praying
that after the final elections more money will be coming to Congo
so we can continue the work that SANRU started in all the regions
of the country. And as funding and personnel decrease with all
mission denominations working in Congo, we search for new ways
to be effective with the mission of the church.
Peace,
Inge and Larry
The 2006 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 317 |
