Action Alert: Response to deadly drought in East Africa

(Photo courtesy Bright Hope International)


Kenya (MNN) ― Rising food prices are adding to the problem of growing hunger as the Horn of Africa grapples with its worst drought in more than half a century.

According to the United Nations, the famine has yet to peak, but  hundreds of thousands of people are likely to die without a massive global response.

More aid is getting through in critical areas, but there are many related problems. According to Bright Hope International, children are dropping out of school, and high inflation is making it extremely difficult for poor families to buy food, especially in Kenya.

Craig Dyer with Bright Hope International says responding wasn't the question. It was how best to help the sheer number of refugees on the move. "Somali refugees are placed in government and internationally-run camps. You can't work in those when you're an agency like Bright Hope. We're not given access, and so we have to look for other opportunities--surrounding areas, people in Kenya."

As a result, their response has to be carefully crafted, Dyer explains. "We've been a little handicapped in Kenya and overwhelmed, so we are in the beginning stages of it."

Rather than "reinvent the wheel," Dyer says they will do what they do best. "There are other agencies that are bigger than us, that have come in with immediate needs. So we immediately go to the next level and say, 'What can we do for longer-term needs? Water needs, agricultural issues, even jobs training and especially evangelism and church training."
750,000 refugees have already left their homes, and 9,000 more are streaming into Kenya every week from Somalia.

There are many cases of severe malnutrition, and Kenya alone says it has 2.4 million people at stressed and crisis levels. Dyer says, "The heart of it is: what is the church able to do to not only relieve the suffering of those from the famine, but also use it for the eternal purposes of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?"

In Kenya, they help a ministry to Somalian refugees as well as serve thousands of the poorest people in the country. They're asking, "Where is there opportunity to say, 'This is a place where we can share the Gospel?'
Dyer says if the Ethiopia famine taught them anything, it was that meeting physical and spiritual needs change the landscape of the country. After the Christians responded to the famine over a quarter century ago, he says that many Gospel seeds were planted, resulting in evangelistic growth that grew to include 20% of the population.

The conditions are ripe for the Horn of Africa. Says Dyer, "The same thing could happen now in Somalia, where there's been such persecution of the church, now such a crisis in the country, sending people fleeing. It's our opportunity to minister to them in the name of the Lord, share the love of Christ, and hopefully have them go back to their homes and see the spread of the Gospel."

Bright Hope continues to plan out its second wave response. In the meantime, Dyer asks believers to pray that God would use the tragedy to strengthen His church. For the ministry, "Pray that the resources would come in and that the people on the ground in Kenya would be protected and find real strategic efforts that will build the kingdom of God."
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