The Stories

Reflections from a disaster response worker

As relief workers battle overwhelming need in the parched lands of East Africa and other parts of the world, former Tearfund disaster response worker Ed Walker recalls the ups and downs of life in ‘the field’.

When you arrive at your destination your emotions are all at sea. The last few days or weeks have been difficult: waiting to hear if you will be deployed, wondering where you will go, what your role will be. Then you finally get the call – you are excited, anxious, nervous, emotional, scared all at once.

During the briefing stage in London, I was always trying to keep the lid on these emotions – at times struggling to keep tears at bay. When you are feeling vulnerable, even something tiny can tip you over the edge: suddenly you learn you can only take 20kg of luggage onto the plane and that a vital bit of field equipment also needs to go in your belongings.

By the time I got in the car for the airport I was a mess.

I would always try to get an overnight flight: while I love flying I find airports tiring, and often the emotions of the day and the late night in the departure lounge meant that by the time I got on the plane I was exhausted and would fall asleep – often before take-off.

I would wake early and look out of the plane’s window at the sun rising. With nobody disturbing me, at last the joy and sanctuary of ‘me-time’.

With the Bible open I could read through some Psalms (Psalm 91 was a favourite if I was going to a hot country) and bring my worries and emotions to our mighty and loving God. By the time I landed I’d be more excited than worried. Bring it on!

Then sensory overload: new climate, new vegetation, funny accents – I realise it will take me a while to tune in to this one: ‘Can you really carry all that on one bike?’ ‘That’s a pretty big gun,’ ‘Blimey, it’s hot,’ ‘No, my name is Ed, not Aids.’ New town names to remember, new faces to recognise; more importantly, will I get along with them? Briefing documents, project information to digest, meetings to go to. Where am I going to sleep tonight? Should I be scared by that spider?

During the first two weeks it’s hard to take everything in – setting up is always more stressful, as things aren’t yet fully in place. You are making decisions on what projects to run, writing proposals and trying to get to know and organise a team.

I would try to bury whatever emotions and stresses I was feeling and mask them with a face of calm. I rarely succeeded, but the following emotions were my constant companions in the field – on certain days I felt some more keenly than others, but they were always there:

JOY: What an amazing privilege to serve some of the most materially poor people on the planet and to work in such far-flung corners of the world and meet such a range of people groups.

LOVE: When I looked into the eyes of the local people and saw beyond the cultural, linguistic and wealth differences, I could see into their heart and recognise them as a human equally loved by God, just as deserving as me and you. No longer were they a pastoral nomad I could not relate to. They became my brother, my sister, my mother, my father, my daughter – alike in every way.

ANGER: At the injustice that in the 21st century a child can still die from lack of healthcare, that a mother has to walk eight hours to get assistance during a difficult pregnancy, that powerful people can wantonly bomb or attack an innocent and struggling people group.

STRESS: The demanding workload – often covering for other people, often in tough physical environments with very basic infrastructure.

DREAD: That something terrible might happen to one of my colleagues working in a volatile area of a war-affected region.

SADNESS: At missing key moments in the lives of friends and family back home.

ENERGY: Because – I loved what I was doing and felt passionate about it.

Please pray for Tearfund’s relief teams across the world who are currently responding to humanitarian crises caused by conflict, injustice and natural disaster. Pray for their protection and that God will use them to save lives, reduce vulnerability and bring hope and dignity.

Ed worked for Tearfund in Burundi, Darfur, South Sudan, Kenya, Sierra Leone and Liberia and alongside Tearfund Ireland’s Chief Executive Reuben Coulter.

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A family together - Melusi’s story

Small, hardly describes Melusi’s home. It’s tiny. He shares one bedroom with his elder brother and mother. Another family shares the other room in the house. There is absolutely no privacy. A constant stream of children pass through the house and the noise of traffic from the streets is deafening. Joy, Melusi’s mother, tries to sleep. She has just arrived home exhausted after a long days work selling tomatoes in the Bulawayo market in Zimbabwe.

Struck down by TB

‘Life used to be better’, Melusi says. But in 2005 his father, a pastor, died from tuberculosis and left the family struggling to survive. In the densely crowded and unhygienic slums of Bulawayo the disease travels fast and kills slowly. Melusi can remember his father’s last months as he wasted away, becoming skin and bones, his body racked by a deathly cough. Now his father is gone.

Keeping families together

Joy could so easily have been overwhelmed by her husband’s death and her family could have fallen apart because of extreme poverty. Many mother’s in similar circumstances in Zimbabwe abandon their children to orphanages in the hope of a better future for them. But Tearfund’s local church partner ZOE stepped in.

ZOE is providing practical support, as well as spiritual guidance, to hundreds of vulnerable families by providing business training and school fee support. Joy wraps her arm around Melusi and smiles, ‘Because of their support the future is looking less fragile. Our family can stay together.’

Have fun and raise money for Zimbawe this summer with our Make a meal of it fundraiser. Download our resources here.

Give today. €43 can pay for school fees and books for two families for one year

• More about: Zimbabwe, Forgotten Children
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Tea with Aung San Suu Kyi (well, not actually)

Recently I was in Myanmar. It’s a small country in South East Asia with a repressive military regime. The leader of the opposition movement Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for the best part of two decades and was only recently released. In spite of all this the local church is thriving among the tribal groups who live in the jungle regions and they are bringing transformation in the poorest areas of the country. The secret to their success is the integrity of their leaders and the intensity of their prayers.

I met a remarkable woman on my trip. It wasn’t actually Aung San Suu Kyi but Grace, a senior church leader of the Myanmar Baptist Convention, who shares a similar vision and passion for her country. Over a dinner of delicious Thai food Grace told me how the church is addressing poverty. ‘In conventional development outsiders come and “do things” for us. But this just makes our people dependent’. Tearfund’s long-term approach is to empower local communities by developing their skills and helping them discovery their own skills and resources. In one village they came together to begin building a well for clean water, Tearfund provided some technical expertise and they worked hard to get it built. ‘We feel a real sense of ownership’, says Grace ‘That minimizes dependency and makes change sustainable.’

Later that week, on a stifling hot Sunday morning I attended a local church. The sermon was in Burmese and my attention was beginning to drift. And then the congregation began to pray, and I was blown away…. Maybe I’ve led a sheltered prayer life but this was praying like I’d never seen before. I don’t know exactly what the congregation were praying for, but together, they were quite simply pouring out their hearts. Some knelt and prayed quietly to God. Other cried out loud, tears pouring down their faces. This was raw, honest, passionate prayer. They were praying as if their lives depended on it.

That is the vital spark to their prayer, their lives do depend on it. In Myanmar they are faced with government opposition and extreme poverty but through prayer and by working together they are seeing change in their society. May we be inspired by them.

What’s incredible is that this scene is played out again and again around the world. As night falls in Myanmar, and the prayers of the villagers come to an end, the sun is rising elsewhere, and the prayers of others are just beginning. Together, around the world, individuals, groups, churches are gathering and passionately praying for God’s will to be done, for lives to be transformed.

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The Church that listened

For years Gotera Church in Addis Ababa was one of the city’s best kept secrets. Church members were a close-knit, inward focused community with little interaction with the world beyond its doors. Gotera Church was hidden from view. The community surrounding the church was poor – the people destitute and ignored by the church.

Then it happened: Mesfin, a Tearfund development worker visited the church and taught them how to help their community out of poverty.

There’s really a whole book’s worth of everyday miracle material here. The work of Gotera Church in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa is remarkable, effective and wrapped around a storyline that stays with the imagination for days.

It all starts with the city. Addis is not wealthy, but certain districts are poor – properly poor. Thousands live without water or electricity, jobs are things which belong to other people in other areas, yet the massive migration of families from rural areas to the city continues.

And then there’s this one particular church – Gotera. For years it was one of the district’s best kept secrets. Church members were a close-knit, inward focused community with little interaction with the world beyond its doors. Gotera Church was hidden from view. The community surrounding the church was poor – the people destitute and ignored by the church.

From small beginnings

Then it happened: they got a visit from Mesfin, a Tearfund-supported development worker from their church denomination. He told them Bible stories, sparked off discussions and opened their eyes to the possibility that all these barriers between them and their community might not be such a good thing after all.

The first step, Mesfin suggested, was to get out and visit non-church people in their homes, to ask about their concerns and listen to what they had to say. Out of the 40-strong congregation just one overcame the fear and took up the challenge. Gradually others followed, returning with a sense of shock, their own poverty dwarfed by what they had seen among the widows, orphans and outcasts around them. It was time to act.

Listening to the poor

Within months the church family had visited 600 households – not preaching, but listening, learning and inviting others to join up for a community meeting. It was there that they decided to identify and work with the 200 poorest households, most of which were headed by women.

What followed next was simple, yet life changing. The church helped group these 200 households into ten self-help groups and appointed two part-time community workers to support, train and advise. The groups saved together, worked and raised funds together. And as they saw their funds increase, so too did their confidence and self-esteem.

Within six months there was enough money saved to start supporting women as they put business ideas into practice; one set up a road-side tea shop, another bought, farmed and sold a cow. One group even made a ‘loan’ to one of their members dying of HIV to buy medicines, even though the money will never be paid back.

From pennies to prosperity

Richard Barkley, a Tearfund Ireland board director and retired banker, visited Ethiopia in October and met Asnakech, a lady who was part of a similar self-help group in another city.

Askanech served popcorn and coffee to her guests and talked of how she and her neighbours were encouraged to start a self-help group (SHG) four years ago. ‘My husband had lost his job. I was only able to give my family one meal a day. We had nothing. We were not used to the idea of saving, and we did not think we could improve our situation.’

‘Initially we were given some training. We then came together in a group, and started saving 50 cents (about €0.02) each week. Over time this increased to 2 Birr (€0.09) and then I took a loan of 100 Birr (€4.50) to start trading second-hand clothes in the market. I repaid the loan and took another bigger one. Now I have a loan of 1,000 Birr (€45.45) and I have a small shop to sell the clothes. My husband is working with me and we are now able to send our son to university to study engineering. This is a miracle!’

‘It’s remarkable’ says Richard Barkley ‘The church and community working together. It began with pennies being saved. Gradually small businesses were started and families began to escape poverty. As a businessman I am impressed by the abilities of these ladies. This isn’t charity, this is the church helping people stand on their own feet.’

Across Ethiopia, Tearfund and its local partner Kale Heywet Church is supporting around 1,000 SHGs involving 15,000 people. With the average family numbering six people, that means 90,000 people are directly benefiting from SHGs. It’s become clear that these truly local banks are not only transforming lives but relationships within communities as well.

• More about: Ethiopia, Vulnerable Women
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Training helps Zimbabwean family beat hunger

Farmer Nicholas Ncube knows all about bad harvests. In 2002, the rains failed and so did his maize plants. He produced just eight buckets of the crop for his family of five. An average family that size needs one tonne a year. His wife and three young children only got through 2002 thanks to food donations from charities.

In 2003, he learnt about the Foundations for Farming programme (FFF) run by Tearfund partner River of Life and since then the shadow of extreme hunger has not darkened his door. FFF has taught Nicholas, who lives in Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland South, to concentrate his crop production efforts on a smaller part of his land. But the results are startling – crop output is higher.

Surplus

Last year he harvested two tonnes – enough maize to fill his granary and therefore had enough food to last from one harvest to the next. He even had a surplus to sell and make some money.

The rains on which his crops depend remain frustratingly unpredictable, but using FFF techniques and spreading the timing of his crop planting means he can produce enough to get through.

Nicholas said, ‘FFF gives me hope even though I don’t have oxen to plough my fields. I am seeing that my life is changing and it’s better than those who do have oxen. That’s because I usually do have a harvest for my family and they don’t starve and I can pay the school fees and things like that.’

Training the next generation

Thousands of students have completed Foundations for Farming (FFF) (conservation farming) training. Many of these students have been orphaned and receive a stipend to complete the training. Both female and male are enrolled. It is making an enormous difference in the lives of vulnerable people enabling them to stand on their own feet.

A total of eight hectares are under cultivation and each student is assigned just under an acre of land and given training in horticulture. At the end of the first year, the crops they grow are sold and earnings are returned to the college to offset training costs.

At the end of the second year, all the students’ earnings are retained by them, enabling them to return to their home areas not only trained but with capital to start their own agricultural enterprises. To this end they receive training in how to run a business, learning about accounts and book-keeping.

The sense of hope being created at Ebenezer is tangible. It’s summed up by a sign next to one student’s crop which has the word ‘Zenzele’. It means ‘able to do it myself’.

You can help give a hope and a future

In Zimbabwe, Tearfund works through local churches and partners like Zoe. Individual church volunteers mentor individual children and their families, giving them not a ‘hand-out’, but a ‘hand-up’. Your donation will help to fund this work, and provide thousands of vulnerable children and families with the chance of a brighter, self-sufficient future. Give today.

• €45 will provide agricultural training for five church volunteers. With this training they could then help 120 orphans to farm their own food, giving them the skills and opportunity to build an independent future.
• €81 will provide orphaned families with seven chickens – providing them with nutritious eggs and food and helping them on the way to self-sufficiency.
• €119 will provide an entire community of 30 families with seeds from which to plant up to eight different crops, allowing them to diversify their crops so they are less vulnerable if a particular crop fails.
• €598 will pay to hold workshops to envision and train 60 church leaders – helping them to play a leadership role in their community’s struggles to defeat poverty.

To make a gift today, please give online, call Christine at 01 8783200 or post a cheque to Tearfund Ireland, 5-7 Upper O’Connell St, Dublin 1.

• More about: Zimbabwe, Forgotten Children
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A childhood torn apart

Civil war broke out in the Democratic Republic of Congo when Patrick was six. His mum died four years later, and his dad was shot by rebels when he was 15. Aged 16, he was forced to live on a barren lava plain with other fleeing the fighting.

Patrick says ‘I want peace – everyone is crying out for peace.I would like to tell your people that my future is uncertain and while I’m in this camp I cannot study. So please help my schooling –that would be great.’

Through our disaster response teams, we’re reaching out to Patrick with practical and spiritual support – and beyond to millions of other children whose lives have been torn apart by conflicts and disasters. After the Haiti earthquake thousands of children have been orphaned and hundreds of thousands left homeless.

Please pray with us, crying out with the people of the DRC to God for peace. Express your faith in action, and help children like Patrick to rise above a brutal childhood and desperate current circumstances.

€17 a month could pay for trauma counselling for four children

€17 a month could provide emergency household items, water containers and blankets for four children like Patrick

€17 a month could provide a household latrine for five children like Patrick every year

Donate now

• More about: Congo, the Democratic Republic of the, Emergencies
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