Day 1 of 40 - Pinky
Welcome to 40 Days of Prayer. If you are returning to our Lent season prayers from previous years, you'll remember that we've worked through our 40 day prayer guide, which had specific prayers each day. This year, we are doing things a little differently.
Over the course of the next 40 days, you'll hear prayer requests from members of our Hands family across the world. We'll use this to pray each day for the most vulnerable in Africa. Whether this is your first year or you have participated for many years, our hope is that you'll experience a deeper connection and partnership with God's work here in Africa.
Let's pray that God will help us to set aside time in our busy lives this season to join with others across the world, to talk to him about the things that weigh heavy on the heart of Hands at Work.
May we have eyes to see and ears to hear that these are not just stories and voice notes, but our sisters and brothers calling us to pray for God's children.
We pray that this season would have a greater understanding of the power of prayer and how it changes us, our families, communities, countries, and the world.
Day 3 of 40 - George
I just wanna take a few moments to give you a little bit of an update from Goma in the DRC. I hope your media by now have given you some information, but let me take 60 seconds just to give a bit of a brief overview. That area of North Kivu, where Goma is the capital and we work in the surrounding villages, there's always been conflict since '94 the genocide - and even before that. There's a lot of reasons for that. Promises made. Minerals. Islamic extreme groups. Ethnic cleansing. Hutu groups. Tutsi groups. Nonetheless, it's been always kind of controlled that there was some movement that we could have.
Recently M23 invaded the Eastern Congo again and they have brought what we can call full-scale war. They have invaded even cities that have got more than 60,000 people in it. At the moment, they are circling Goma and they are busy cutting off all the roads to Goma, to starve Goma, because Goma is dependent on the roads bringing food in, and that's gonna force them to negotiate.
That is now directly affecting us. At the moment, none of us can get into Goma. So, the first thing I ask you, please, as a point of urgent prayer, pray that God will open the door for us to be able to go and support our team there. You can imagine they're under extreme pressure, specifically one of our communities, but this can change any moment and more of our communities can be involved. Right now, Luhonga has been surrounded by the M23. They even came into Luhonga. All the grandmothers, our Care Workers and our children fled. They fled to Sake, which is the nearest town to Luhonga. It's about eight to 10 kilometres from there, depending on how you get there. And they ran there. Some of our Care Workers live in Sake, and so they took them into their homes and then a little old school. And so we've got our children together in Sake. And we are feeding them, but it is full on refugee camp environment. You can imagine, cholera, typhoid, all these things. So please pray for our children in Luhonga.
Pray for our Service Centre team: Bindu, who's our coordinator in the Service Centre. Zawadi, Bahati, and Jehosephat, and then Denise, who's our bookkeeper. Please pray for them. They are actually going into Sake from Goma every day. And that road between Goma and Sake is one of the targets of M23. They try to cut that road off because that is the only road left into Goma to take food in. So every time Bindu and them travel on that road, they are very vulnerable and they're doing it virtually every day to get some support to our children in Sake.
So it's really in a tough situation. We have a major crisis in our hands on Goma, which means we are going to have to look for emergency support for medicine, food, tents, ablutions. We don't want our children to go to the traditional refugee camps because it's a very, very dangerous place in the DRC, a refugee camp. A huge amount of trafficking happens there. Boys get taken for military reasons, and girls get abused, and they get trafficked. We have 60 of our children gathered at one church and we expect that number is going to grow rapidly. Most probably close to 150. We've got the food stored in our office, which is only about three kilometres from this church. But our prayer is that there will be an intervention from the international community.
Thank you for your support. Thank you so much for praying and for speaking on behalf of the children and the grandmothers in Goma.
Bless you.