2009 Minutes for Mission

• A Child Care Center Grows in Mjuma
• A Journey of Peace through Civil Rights History
• Red Hands Say “Stop the Use of Child Soldiers!”
• A Vision of New Homes and Interfaith Peace

A Child Care Center Grows in Mjuma

Upon returning from the Peacemaking Program’s travel/study seminar to learn about HIV/AIDS in South Africa and Malawi in 2008, Kyle and Christie Kittrell reported on the trip to their congregation — First Presbyterian Church in Jefferson City, Missouri. The idea of supporting a community-based child care (CBCC) project caught on very quickly with congregation members, some of whom returned with the Kittrells to Malawi in June to find a community that would be a partner in establishing a CBCC. Working with the Livingstonia Synod AIDS Program of the Church of Central African Presbyterian, they identified the small community of Mjuma. First Presbyterian Church has already raised the funds to build a center for the Kasasa CBCC in partnership with the people of Mjuma.

Community-based child care is a model of care for children and their families affected by HIV/AIDS. The model usually includes a broad range of interventions designed to assist children and families at the community level. CBCCs are intended to allow children to live with a parent or grandparent and to attend a school or preschool. Children can come to a community center where they get a nutritious meal, participate in basic education and tutoring programs and receive spiritual nurture.

Christie and Kyle continue to tell the story of their ministry in Malawi. Taking an idea from Betty Thompson, who also was part of the Peacemaking Program’s seminar, the Kittrells carry a book about the project in Mjuma. They invite those who hear their presentation to write down prayers for the people of Malawi. When they return to Malawi, they will share the prayers with our sisters and brothers in Christ.

Your gifts to the Peacemaking Offering help make travel/study seminars like the one to South Africa and Malawi possible. The 217th General Assembly (2006) encourages congregations to consider directing all or part of their 25 percent of the Offering to combat the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

A Journey of Peace through Civil Rights History

In February nine students and a teacher from Oceana High School in California took a 10-day bus trip that changed their lives. They visited places in the South where important events in the civil rights movement occurred, like Atlanta, Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma, Little Rock and
Memphis. They met people who were active in the struggle for voting rights and equal educational opportunities for African Americans, like Elizabeth Eckford, one of the nine African-American students who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, and the family of Denise McNair, one of the four girls murdered in the 1963 firebombing of a church in Birmingham. The trip was sponsored by Sojourn to the Past, a project started by a California high school teacher in 1999 that is now a foundation that has taken more than 4,700 students on similar trips.

A few years ago some students from St. Andrew Presbyterian Church in Pacifica, California, went on the Sojourn bus trip. Sharon Hale, grandmother of two students, went along as a chaperone. Impressed by the experience, she returned to St. Andrew and told everyone about it. She died in 2008, and partly as a tribute to her, St. Andrew Church contributed its portion of the Peacemaking Offering to send some students from local high schools on a Sojourn to the Past trip in February 2009.

Students return from a Sojourn trip knowing much more about the civil rights movement and pivotal events in its history. Inspired by the people they have met, they return with a belief in the importance of peaceful protest as an alternative to violence in resolving conflict. And they return
resolved to make changes in their own lives and among their friends.

When you give to the Peacemaking Offering, you are a part of changing lives, like the students who have gone on Sojourn to the Past trips. Give prayerfully and generously.

Red Hands Say “Stop the Use of Child Soldiers!”

Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs” (Mark 10:14).

According to an optional protocol to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, it has been forbidden to use children as soldiers since February 12, 2002. Unfortunately, human rights groups estimate that as
many as 250,000 children are currently involved in wars around the world. Human Rights Watch reports that both boys and girls engage in combat, “serve as human mine detectors, participate in suicide missions, carry supplies, and act as spies, messengers, or lookouts.” Girls are also subject to sexual exploitation and abuse by older male soldiers.

The Presbyterian Peacemaking Program, the Presbyterian United Nations Office and the Office on Child Advocacy are helping Presbyterians address this issue. One way this happens is through the Red Hand Campaign.

Children and teenagers around the world initiated the campaign to encourage world leaders to end the use of children as soldiers. The red hand is the symbol of this effort. Participants in the campaign create red handprints on paper (by using finger paint, drawing an outline, using
red paper, or in some other way) and then add their names, hometowns and a message.

On February 12, 2009, Red Hand Day, more than 250,000 red hands were presented to international leaders with the message to enforce the ban on child soldiers. The Office of Child Advocacy and the Peacemaking Program provided an opportunity to make red hands at the Association of Presbyterian Church Educators conference in San Antonio and invited visitors to take the project home to their congregations.

Together, in the name of Jesus, we hope and work for a world where all children can find a safe place. Your gifts to the Peacemaking Offering support initiatives through congregations, presbyteries, synods and the Peacemaking Program to work for the safety of children worldwide.
Please give generously.

Presbyterian support for the Red Hand Campaign continues. Red hands sent to the Office of Child Advocacy, 100 Witherspoon Street, Room 3224, Louisville, KY 40202-1396, will be delivered to the appropriate international leaders.

A Vision of New Homes and Interfaith Peace

(for use with bulletin insert “Building Walls to Tear Walls Down”)

When a group of Christians, Jews and Muslims living in Indianapolis, Indiana, got together to build a Habitat for Humanity house, they found that working together on a project benefiting a family in the community helped them build stronger bonds with each other and also allowed them
to celebrate their differences. This interfaith group, coming together under the name the House of Abraham, built its first house in 2006, a second house in 2007 and a third one in 2008, all in Indianapolis.

Even as these people of different faiths were building homes, their vision was expanding. They wanted to build a Habitat house in the Middle East. So in the summer of 2008, House of Abraham sent an interfaith group to
Amman, Jordan, to build another house. The group included four people from Second Presbyterian Church, an imam, a rabbi, a high school student, three college students and other adults. They were not there to build the entire house, but to build the walls and start on the roof of this home for a Muslim family of six. Just as they learned about each other and developed friendships when they built houses in Indianapolis, they shared and made new friends with the Jordanian helpers working alongside them and with the family whose house they were building. In the words of Stacy Smith from Second Presbyterian Church, “We were there building walls to tear walls down.”

Peacemaking Offering funds from Second Presbyterian and from the Presbytery of Whitewater Valley helped support the House of Abraham homes in Indianapolis and in Jordan. Your gifts to the Peacemaking Offering help Presbyterians work for peaceful relations in their hometowns, their home countries, and around the world. Won’t you become a part of building peace in our world?