The global authority on food security levels has projected that in Somalia alone, 1.5 million children under the age of five will experience acute malnutrition between August 2023 and July 2024. 

“There are so many families that have left their homes, and now they’re scattering all over looking for any assistance that can come their way,” says Peter Macharia with World Concern.

Woman collects water from a protected water well. (Photo, caption by Daryl Finley/World Concern)

“Most of those families are dependent on rains, and they have no choices. Women have to move miles and miles to access clean water.”

World Concern seeks to serve the unique needs of the communities in which it operates. In the Horn of Africa, the food and water crisis dominates. 

“We do water trucking, finding water that is clean in a well that we have built or others have built and we truck that water to villages that have no clean water,” Macharia says. 

World Concern also provides cash vouchers for food, nutritional supplements for children and nursing women, and de-worming medicines, among other helps. 

“We have also been working on permanent solutions like digging wells, constructing water dams to harvest rainwater, and those kind of things. So our desire is not just to help (alleviate) the suffering, but also to have a permanent solution to the problems that people face,” Macharia says. 

Pray for those who are suffering deeply from the effects of drought. Ask God to bring rain. Jeremiah 14:22 says, “Are there any among the false gods of the nations that can bring rain? Or can the heavens give showers? Are you not he, O Lord our God? We set our hope on you, for you do all these things.”

“I really encourage (listeners and readers) to be prayerful, and when they see things that are happening, let them see them as as happening to their brothers and sisters,” Macharia says.

Pray that World Concern and local believers will be able to serve the physical and spiritual needs of many in the Horn of Africa. 

Header photo courtesy of Peter Caton for World Concern.

The training uses pictures that show the biblical story unfolding. As a result, Galen Burkholder says hundreds of new churches have sprung up. “There are some unique challenges, obviously, in working with nomads. Establishing a fellowship doesn’t always allow for a building in a traditional sense. Instead, they work with various shelters as they move from place to place. Also, many nomads are not literate.”

Peacemaking

Warfare has a long history among the tribes, but the Christians have begun to act as peacemakers. Now, once hostile tribes gather together for worship.

Burkholder shares a story from Northeast Kenya. “One of the disciple-makers lost a son due to an attack from a neighboring tribe. It took about a year until he was willing to go with his leader to sit with that tribe and to talk with them about what Jesus has done to transform his life.”

Immediately, three men confessed to shooting his son. They put their lives in his hands, but he forgave them.

Praise God for his faithfulness among the nomadic tribes.

Drought

But many of these groups are losing their way of life amid the Horn of Africa’s worst drought in decades. The lack of rainfall is killing animals, and forcing nomadic groups to settle in villages.

Continue to pray for the tribes, often unreached by the Gospel and ignored by the rest of the world. Burkholder says, “Pray that the Lord will continue to bring nomadic people to faith in Christ so that they will be equipped to make disciples among neighboring tribes.”

Header photo courtesy of Steve Pastor, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. 

World Concern has launched a response. Peter Macharia says, “We are providing them with clean water for drinking and for use at home.” World Concern gets the water many miles from where people live, and stores it in tanks so people can use it.

Macharia explains how the food program works. “We give them food vouchers, where they go and get food from the local businesses, and we pay the local businesses. We are stocking their livestock by giving them goats, sheep, and small animals because those are the main economic mainstay for the local community.”

“We are doing these things to make sure that it is not just about meeting the needs now. We are also meeting the needs of the people for days to come.”

Macharia says droughts have become more and more frequent in Somalia. COVID-19 and frequent fighting in the country make the situation worse. “Three things – climate change, conflict, and COVID-19 – have had a very devastating impact on their ability to earn income or to produce their own food.”

World Concern works with local Christians to avoid extremist violence, often rampant in Somalia.

Pray the drought will end soon. You can support World Concern’s work in Somalia here.

Header photo courtesy of World Concern. 

Local officials later apologized. But the bizarre stories illustrate how much pressure Chinese districts face to keep COVID-19 cases at zero, especially as the Chinese government prepares for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing.

Zero COVID-19 policy

Eric Burklin with China Partner says small COVID-19 outbreaks shut down entire cities. He spoke to one pastor in Nanjing, a city of over 8 million. “I think they had maybe 10 or 15 cases in that town. And everyone had to stop going to work. They had to show up in their districts for testing sites. And were literally testing everybody, the whole population.”

People who test positive get quarantined in hospitals. Most areas also retain mask mandates, even outdoors. China remains one of the few countries left to hold a zero COVID-19 case policy, and it has kept cases very low ever since the initial outbreak in early 2020.

Burklin says the Chinese government wants stability. “I talked with a pastor in Hong Kong last night. And that’s the keyword that they are saying in China right now: stability. They want everything to be stable. They want everything to go smoothly for the preparations of the Olympics.”

Chinese Christians

Meanwhile, many Christians still can’t gather in large numbers to worship. But that doesn’t mean ministry has stopped. Burklin says, “We are in regular contact with pastors over WeChat who are just rejoicing and saying, ‘We know Jesus Christ is the Head of our Church. We are going to keep serving Jesus in our community. Even though the local churches are shut down, they meet in small groups, but a lot of the house churches were already doing that anyway.”

Chinese Christians see themselves as the Church. Burklin says Western Christians can learn from their example.

The header photo shows Beijing National Stadium. (Header photo courtesy of Peter23, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons) 

That’s where Keys for Kids’ Creature Feature Storytellers come in. The Storytellers are little stuffed animal holders with an mp3 player. The player has around 30 hours of Keys for Kids devotionals and the whole Bible in audio. Greg Yoder with Keys for Kids says they are currently working on Storytellers in Arabic which can be distributed to kids in the Middle East and refugee camps.

(Photo courtesy of Christian Aid Mission)

“Many [refugee] kids haven’t been able to go to school so maybe they’ve forgotten how to read. These Storyteller devices could be what could not just lead a child to Christ, but lead a whole family and maybe even start a church!”

Even one single Storyteller has a ripple-effect of impact. An average of 144 kids will listen to a devotional or Bible story on one Storyteller, according to a Keys for Kids partner.

And Yoder says they’re not stopping at Arabic. “We’re hoping Spanish will be available sometime in January. But we also have Albanian, Greek, [and] Macedonian. We have Mandarin – both traditional and simplified – underway. We also would like to do Hindi and Tamil and Bengali. So there are a lot of other languages that we’re either just beginning talks on or they’re in some way, shape, or form in the process of actually being translated.”

(Photo courtesy of Keys for Kids)

It takes $80 to get one Creature Feature Storyteller in the hands of a child who needs to hear about Jesus. Click here to donate towards Storytellers with Keys for Kids!

Plus, if you’re still working on your Christmas shopping, Yoder points out a Creature Feature Storyteller makes a great gift.

“Maybe you’d like to get one for your own child! Well, when you do that, you actually buy one for yourself, but also place one somewhere else and invest into the ministry of the Keys for Kids Storyteller program.”

And one thing everyone can do? Pray for this project: “Pray that there will be protection for our translators as they’re working on these in-country. Pray that people will catch the vision and the passion for this, not just here in the United States but abroad so that they would begin investing in this with their lives.”