Building a New Home

Just imagine living with your wife and family in rented accommodation in the urban environment of an African capital, being forced to flee for your life at dead of night with such possessions as you can hurriedly assemble and carry, in order to escape from the military engaged in a programme of 'neutralising' your neighbourhood.

Just imagine escaping over the border and settling down again, becoming seriously ill with typhoid fever, recovering and commencing to build a home in which to live, only to have to flee again as war breaks out.

Just imagine living rough in the forest, returning home when it was safe to do so, only to find that the home you had so recently constructed was a pile of rubble - the roof sheets removed and all your belongings pillaged.

All this has happened to a brother and sister and their family during the years 1993 to 1998, when circumstances forced them out of Bujumbura (Burundi) to flee over to Uvira (Democratic Republic of Congo - formerly Zaire). The once developing ecclesia in Bujumbura has been reduced to a handful, whereas the ecclesial group in the Uvira region, as a result of such calamities, is growing.

The members of this ecclesia are, for the most part, either official or unofficial refugees. An official refugee is someone who has been accepted by the UNHCR and given refugee status in a country which has a United Nations presence. Of the ecclesia in the Uvira region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which meets in the village of Baraka, the home village of the members mentioned in the previous paragraph, six brethren responded to the call of the gospel while refugees in Tanzania, and five while refugees in Malawi. The remainder are former members of the Bujumbura ecclesia, who must be considered as unofficial refugees, since they are now living in the country of their birth, but where they are without means and have little hope of employment.

However, it is surely no chance circumstance which has brought them together. We read in Acts (8:1 and 11:19) that those who were scattered abroad following the persecution of Stephen took the word with them and preached. Our refugee brethren and sisters, who have no settled home, nowhere to call their own, no fixed point of reference apart from their faith and unswerving belief in God's promises, are ready at any moment to talk to any of their fellow refugees about their hope; outside their homes maybe, or while waiting in queues for food at the market. Members of their families might be almost anywhere in Africa, but messages are sent to them, and requests come back to learn about Christadelphians, from Djibouti, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa - from any country where these escapees have taken refuge.

David Smith
from The Bible Missionary, no. 151, January 1999

Information about Democratic Republic of Congo