A Letter from Debbie & Del Braaksma in Sudan
January 29, 2010
Dear friends,
Greetings from Yei! It’s a busy time here. We have 29 students here with us at the RECONCILE Peace Institute (RPI) attending courses in “Community Based Trauma Healing” and “Peace Studies & Conflict Transformation.” It is an exciting group of students who come from 17 different ethnic groups and a great variety of church backgrounds including Presbyterian, Africa Inland Church, Catholic, Sudan Interior Church, and the Episcopal Church of Sudan. But what unites them all is their faith in Christ and their strong passion to build peace and heal the wounds of war in Sudan. They are an enthusiastic bunch! By the grace of God some beautiful things happen when you put people from ethnic groups that are having serious conflicts together to study, worship, eat, and live together for three months.
The Rev. John Tubuwa with a new found friend at the Peace Institute.
Last week, the second week of classes, I looked out of the door of my office and saw one of our students, the Rev. John Tubuwa, a Presbyterian Church of Sudan pastor who is Murle, walk past my office tenderly carrying a little 15-month-old toddler who was sleeping in his arms back to the dorm. It is a bit unusual, though not unheard of, in Sudanese culture for men to carry little ones, but what really touched my heart was that the little girl he was carrying was the child of one of our Nuer students, Sarah Nyadech. As many of you know, the Nuer and Murle have been engaged in serious inter-ethnic conflict this year which has claimed between 1,200 and 1,400 lives and included many abductions of children, so how wonderful it was to see that within two weeks time such trust had developed between them: that this Nuer mother trusted this Murle man with her most precious possession — her little girl. John said to me, “for some reason this baby likes me, wherever I go she wants to follow me.” We are excited not only about what is going on in the classrooms, which is amazing indeed, but the relationships that are formed between these students, who are leaders in their churches and communities, which are breaking down the barriers of ethnicity and serving as foundations for building peace. This is truly of the Spirit!
There are a lot of exciting things going on out in the field as well. Due to the generosity of the Reformed Church in America and Presbyterian Women Milcah Lalam and one of our RPI instructors Violette Rukundo, a Christian Counselor from Rwanda, will be heading up to Pibor in a week to lead a women’s peacebuilding meeting between the Murle women and the Nuer women (from Akobo). Oh how I would have loved to be a part of it! But as many of you know I won’t be able to because I am ending service as an RCA/PC(USA) mission worker with RECONCILE and this next week I will begin serving in a new role as the Africa Area Coordinator for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). It’s always bittersweet leaving work you love and colleagues and friends that have been like family, but I am very excited about this new position, which is very similar to the work I did with the RCA from 1998 to 2005, and feel strongly called to it.
Milcah Lalam (Reconcile) and Violette Rukundo (Christian counselor from Rwanda) planning to go to Pibor in a week to lead a women’s peacebuilding meeting between the Murle women and the Nuer women.>/p>
God has also been teaching me some lessons which have helped to ease the pressing concern one has when they know their departure is leaving a “hole:” that when God calls you to something new he will provide for the work you leave behind in amazing ways and your leaving also opens doors for others to follow God’s call to serve. Had I been staying on in this assignment with RECONCILE it would have been Milcah and I to lead this women’s peace building meeting. But because I was not able to go with her, we wrote a letter to invite the most qualified person we knew of to help Milcah co-lead this very delicate meeting. Violette not only has a Master’s in Counseling from Nairobi Evangelical School of Theology, but she has been “in the thick of it” doing trauma healing and reconciliation work in Rwanda — a situation of intense inter-ethnic conflict. We sent her email invitation off with a fervent prayer. Violette told us that our prayer was answered because as she went to the computer to write the email her full intention was to decline, but she felt the Spirit encouraging her to say “yes”. I know that Violette and Milcah will be a great blessing to the Nuer and Murle women, and it has been a beautiful reminder to me that we are not indispensible. God cares more about the work here at RECONCILE than we ever could, and God will supply the need for other people to come and carry on with the work we have been doing since 2005.
We would encourage you to keep supporting RECONCILE with your prayers and gifts; the ministry needs this support more than ever. On February 20, both the Rev. Derrick Jones, the RCA Africa Mission supervisor, and the Rev. Michael Weller, the PC(USA) Horn of Africa regional liaison will be coming to the RECONCILE’s Partners Meeting here in Yei where plans will be discussed on the way forward for supporting this important work.
Please pray:
- For Milcah Lalam and Violette Rukundo and the Murle and Nuer women (36) and the men (12) as they meet together in Pibor February 8-11. Please pray for: safety in travel, security on the ground, God’s Spirit to empower Milcah and Violette as they lead, and for the Spirit to bring reconciliation and lead the delegates in making plans for peace to end the violence between the two groups.
- For the RECONCILE Peace Institute to be blessed by God and for the students to gain practical skills through their classroom work and field work in the community so that they might go back to their communities well trained and equipped by God’s Spirit to heal the wounds of war and serve as ambassadors of peace.
- For the staff here at RECONCILE, particularly Milcah Lalam and Dele Emmanuel, who are taking on additional responsibilities as Del and I leave, and for God to call and provide the means for others to serve with RECONCILE.
- We are facing some major transitions. Pray for Del as he continues to tell the story of RECONCILE in our supporting churches and looks for a job in Louisville that will be a good fit for his skills and experience, and for Debbie as she begins her new position and is in need of God’s grace, strength and wisdom.
- For Del’s parents as they make the difficult adjustment to his father’s placement in a nursing home due to declining health.
In Christ,
Debbie
The 2010 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 47
