Liberia: A Neighbour's Help

While the rest of the world's eyes are locked on Libya and the Middle East this is what is going on in the Ivory Coast and Liberia.

Liberia: A Neighbour's Help

Peace Folks,
K & J

BBC News Africa

Our friend Tas, a BBC reporter, wrote this story after going out to the field with some of the EQUIP staff. Please don’t be alarmed, neither Kyle or myself was with her!

Read the full story about the Scramble to Flee the Ivory Coast’s Unrest.

When Plans Change

We’ve been here in Liberia four months. Four months in which nothing has gone as planned. Nope, our plans have been flipped upside down by a few thousand (try 50,000+) refugees milling around Liberia’s eastern border. This past week we began to hear about fighting on the other side. Everyone take a deep breath and be reassured that we are in no immediate danger. Kyle and I are a long way from the border, 5 hours away to be exact, and the fighting is in the Ivory Coast not here in Liberia.

The fighting has however sent a rush of refugees over the border into the areas surrounding our clinics. The last month or so felt like a stale mate as far as the refugee “crisis” was concerned. This feels as if a dam has broken that had been holding thousands of refugees back. One of our colleagues that went out to our Buutuo clinic, a hotspot for Ivorian refugees crossing over, reported thousands of refugees packed like sardines into a local school to sleep.

We’ve had such an unusual experience in the time that we have been here. Lots of curve balls have been thrown our way and it’s left us wondering what it is that God is trying to accomplish through our hands here.  The needs are great. The work is plenty. Pray that the Gospel can be made known through our lives and through this situation. We are praying for peace in Ivory Coast and continued peace in Liberia.

Weekly Prayer Needs:

Pray for peace in Ivory Coast and for peace to reign in our own hearts.

Pray for rest for us.

Pray for safety wherever we may travel.

Pray for wisdom on the way forward in our ministry here.

What We Signed Up For

We didn’t sign up for this. I’ve said it once…I’ve said it twice…I’m even shamefully guilty of saying it three times.

We didn’t sign up for this.

West Africa’s not the most stable place in the world. It just takes one misfire election and people start lining up to cross over the borders into seemingly safer land. In West Africa borders are little more than streams, and dense forests. Fear rises in a neighboring country and suddenly already resource strapped communities see 1, 2, 30, 40, 120, 220, 320, 500, 1,000…more people added to their populations.

People who have left all; clothes, food, jobs, homes to come to a foreign land because the other option promises an uncertain future.

“You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” Exodus 22:21

We didn’t sign up for this…but wait…maybe we did.

The truth is when you throw your hands up to the sky and tell God, “Here am I send me” you don’t really know what you’re doing.

You don’t really know what you are signing up for.

He told us to “Go” but He never said what we’d find when we got there.

We look around and we realize that we've found refugees.

Then it dawns on us “We signed up for this.” Yes, actually somewhere between "Here am I Lord" and "Send me" we signed up for this.

So they’re here (more and more everyday) and so are we and they are strangers and foreigners and so are we…in so many ways... and we have to learn how to serve “the least of these” because it doesn’t always come naturally. Sometimes we balk in our hearts and more often with our mouths at the ministry God gives us even when it is running over the border towards us by the thousands.

Pray for us as we serve those that enter our lives from across borders and from across town. Pray for us this Christmas season as we imagine Joseph, Mary and Jesus searching for safety as refugees in a foreign land. Pray for us as we search out what it is exactly that we did sign up for.

May it always be for the sake of the Gospel that we give our holidays, hearts and lives.