Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Calvary International Fellowship: Update

This is from my buddy Ed who's a missionary in Kenya. That place is totally spun out. Do me a personal favor and pray for Kenya and our friends serving the Lord there. This is the third post I've put up on various blogs today bringing news and prayer requests from missionaries. Post 1. Post 2.

In 1998 I was a journalist in Albania covering the Kosavar refugee crisis. After spending days among the suffering and human tragedy I found myself in a quite café on the Adriatic. It was a beautiful sunset, the pasta was wonderful and the coke was cold. It should have been relaxing and joyful celebration of a completed assignment. Everything should have been great, except I had deep sorrow that words are not sufficient to express. The preceding days had been spent in refugee camps documenting horrific scenes of people fleeing the horrors of ethnic cleansing. For days I silently prayed for people as my Nikon snapped away. With no shame I was a completely biased journalist slipping one family some crumpled lira to help them get reestablished. Now I was sitting in a café enjoying a hot meal and knowing I was heading back to a soft bed in the hotel before returning to my comfortable house and family in California. It was difficult knowing that the airplanes flying over head were on sorties going into Kosovo to kill. It was difficult to know that as I sipped that coke that people were fleeing their villages and becoming refugees.

That feeling is back. Kenya has been absolutely terrorized by ethnic violence resulting from a corrupt election process in the last days. There have been riots outside Calvary International Fellowship and the last three nights we have heard gunfire. Official reports put the death toll at about 200 from across Kenya, but that is way too conservative. Police are guarding the morgues so journalists can not give accurate counts. The most sickening report is that one tribe burned a church full of people from another tribe killing 30 people in the process.

Read the rest of this post here: Link to Calvary International Fellowship: Update

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Bryon, I've just read all three of your posts. Thanks for linking to the first two. I've been reading, off and on through the day, various news accounts and getting what little information I could from Compassion. There are Compassion-assisted projects in all of the areas of violence.

We also have a missionary couple at our church who have both family and ministry ties in Kenya.

My heart is so heavy for Kenya. I'm praying that the Holy Spirit will settle over the country like a low-lying cloud, bringing calm and peace, and instilling in all parties a willingness to work with integrity to resolve their differences.