Rescue Iraq

End of the Year Message

Here is some recent video footage of the construction progress on our project in Soran, Iraq.

A Visit to Manal's Village

A man stands at a gravesite. The little girl by his side sheds tears in the early morning fog of the Iraqi countryside. He has just revealed to her the harsh reality that 10 of the freshly covered graves house her mother, her father, and 8 siblings. The other 9 contain her neighbors, friends that were like family, violently silenced in one split second just after midnight on September 10, 2009.

Manal’s father heard a large truck and walked out the front door of his house to investigate. Why would such a large truck come to their mud-brick village, miles from the nearest city, at such an hour?

In their curiosity, the whole family followed, with Manal lagging behind. An instant later the truck lit up in a ball of fire blowing a 10 foot crater into the ground. Shards of metal spread in every direction, the engine itself landing over 200 yards away.

The suicide bomber from nearby Mosul along with his explosive counterpart took 19 lives in the Kurdish village and wounded another 30. They leveled 34 homes and damaged another 100.

I visited the village yesterday to see for myself this somber sight and to check on Manal.

It’s been nearly 2 months since the bombing. The crater is now filled with water from early autumn rains.
What is left of the homes can be easily mistaken for junk piles with hardly one brick found on top of another. Walking where Manal’s house once stood, I spy a large crankshaft.
The villagers tell me that the bomber had loaded tons of scrap metal on top of the explosives to enhance the explosion.

Demonic minds with demonic wills.

Manal’s great uncle is a prominent man in the community with a large family of his own, an aging man who recently had a heart attack. I enter his home. He sits me down next to him and asks, “Why has God created good men and bad men?”

Philosophy and religion seem to be the main trade of this isolated village. As in some bygone era, the elders spend their days talking about their faith as the world passes them by.

Twenty men wait with narrowed eyes to hear what this spiffy, young American in his western attire had to say.

When I answer the first question, there are nods and shakes of the head, some saying, “Good answer, good answer.” Then the next question came.

“There was a man who was perfect in keeping all the laws of his religion, yet his behavior towards others was wrong and demeaning. Was he a righteous man?”

For the first time, it dawns on me why Jesus told so many parables and stories. These men fill their days discussing “fine points of their “law,” desiring answers to life’s deepest questions. To enter into their deductive reasoning debates would take endless hours and would seem, unlikely to cause them to think in any way other than their forefathers.

Stories, like pictures, have the potential to strike to the heart, to create doctrine rather than just hedge it in, and to force us to come to grips with truths that bypass our minds and settle themselves on our very souls. No wonder Jesus spoke to them thus:

There were once two men who went up to the place of prayer. One was a religious leader in the community and the other a tax collector. The ‘pious’ one prayed: “Father, thank you that you have made me a righteous man, not like the heathen, robbers, evildoers, or like this tax collector. I fast, give alms to the poor, and pray 5 times a day. Thank you, Father, that I am a good man.”

The tax collector hearing the man’s prayer felt ashamed knowing that he was not good, he beat his breast not daring to so much as look up to heaven and declared, “God, have mercy on me a sinner.”

“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted,” Jesus said. Luke 18:14

While we talk, I keep looking at two pictures that hang on their wall behind the aged man. One of Jesus, crucified on the cross. The other is of Ali, Mohammed’s son-in-law, the father of Shia Islam.

Manal’s great uncle must see my perplexed look. He motions with his hands, pointing first at Ali, making a slashing motion across his throat. Then he points at Jesus, slapping his cheek on one side then turning and striking the other.

A glaring juxtaposition, yet they didn’t seem to observe any contradiction in revering both.

As the conversation continues, Manal’s uncle now speaks. “You know, we believe in Jesus. We believe that He died to save the world of its sin, but we also believe in the Koran and that Mohammed was a Prophet. Islam is good and right. It’s just that the people that follow it are not good.”

It seems as if the conversation has come to an end, leaving me wondering if I should finally ask the question that beckons. The pause lengthens. I ask, “Why doesn’t your faith produce good people?”

Perhaps in the days to come there’ll be more opportunities to ‘open up the book’ with him and share more stories that have shaped the lives of millions and millions throughout history, bringing sense to this fallen world in which we live, where idle philosophizing has fallen short.

Manal seems to be doing well. However, shrapnel still makes it way to the surface of her skin, like bad memories not to be forgotten. But it doesn’t seem to affect her countenance. She looks much better than she did 6 weeks ago when I saw her in the hospital, shell-shocked, with bandages all over her body.

We will follow Manal’s life and her new family with great interest and with prayer. Why don’t you say a prayer for her too: that God would silence the nightmares that haunt her; that God would grant her joyful thoughts of her lost family; that He would protect her and encourage her heart with hope for the future. Amen.

For more on the Wardek Village bombing click here.

Progression of the Land

Tomorrow we're pouring

Please say a prayer for us as we really get this project 'grounded' with tons and tons of concrete poured into the earth starting tomorrow morning.

Here's a few pics of how things looked on Wednesday as they started putting the rebar into the soil.    

Neighborhood Children

While we were at the project site a few days ago we got a chance to meet some more of the neighborhood children that had just let out from the school next door.

They are enjoying clamoring over our dirt piles, sliding down the slippery rock piles, and walking along the wall that separates our project from the school. Here are a few pics:

          

Taking Shape

On April 1, 2009 we signed an agreement with the local government that gave us stewardship of 1 acre of land in the Freedom Martyr's Village in Soran, Iraq. Up till now, we have not had a chance to take full advantage of this tremendous opportunity, but this weekend all that changed.

Here is a pic of the land on April 1, 2009.

The spring rains make everything look pretty around here, but as of last weekend the land looked liked this.

Not so pretty with piles and piles of extra dirt, we had a lot of work to do.

Here's our contractor with Abdullah and a few of the neighborhood boys -- their school in the background.

But, like I said, this all changed this past week. The land was cleared and dug out for the foundation of the community center as things seem to be taking shape.

 

Praise the Lord with us as we take this important step. Your prayers will be most appreciated as we seek to provide a place, a platform really, upon which we can serve the needs of the orphans and widows of Soran, Iraq.

New 'Project Profile Flyer' for Iraq Project

Download our Iraq Project Profile Flyer to get an overview of our work in Northern Iraq and how you can be involved in partnering with us to rescue orphans and widows in this land.

Click here to Download Iraq Project Flyer

First Annual Conference - Erbil, Iraq

Today, we opened World Orphans' First Annual Conference in Erbil, Iraq for the benefit of the orphanage directors of Iraqi Kurdistan with the help and support of Lake Pointe Church of Rockwall, Texas. It's a 3 day affair seeking to help some 20 professional care-givers to nearly 1,000 orphans better understand and meet the needs of the children in their care.

Caty Sarkes of Cairo, Egypt who has spent the past 20 years in counseling roles for women and children (educated in the United States and Australia) came to give the lectures that have already received praise from the Minister of Social and Labor Affairs who attended one of the sessions.

He said that the subject material was of great interest to him as it involved his select discipline of study and remarked that the session was simply "Fantastic!"

Thank you, Caty, for pouring out your heart that they might better do the same.

Please be in prayer over the next couple of days as we seek to infuse into their lives a love which only God can give for the orphans in their care.

    

A Collective Sigh

Saturday evening as the sun drifted beneath the horizon, the Muslim call to prayer sounded signifying the end of yet another Ramadan – month of fasting (food and water) during daylight hours – which seemed to spark a collective sigh of relief throughout the city.

Supermarkets were invaded and sweets, in particular, were bought in abundance to prepare for the next 3 to 4 days of holiday celebrations, which in Turkey is called, the “Sugar Holiday”.

The average abiding Muslim will actually gain weight during this month of fasting, where each evening meal is crafted to serve a king and a heavy breakfast before dawn is expected. One could even say that if you are not gulping down the ‘iftar’ meal, that you’d be suspect of not having kept the fast during the day.

Rather than teaching self-control and penance, I feel the fasting then gorging during the night hours bespeak of something quite unnatural, if not downright unhealthy.

Proper fasting, I believe, ought to include water as a primary cleansing agent; without it, excessive strain on the entire system, especially in areas of world with as extreme heat as the Middle East can easily lead to pre-mature aging of the body. Talk about a heavy yoke.

But, hey, they didn’t ask me.

While traveling between Mardin, Turkey and the border of Iraq this past summer, my taxi driver and I struck up a conversation. We went on to talk about our families, our children, and finally stumbled upon that age old, ‘how old are you?” question.

[After living in the Middle East for 7 years or so, I’ve come to expect folks to underestimate how old I am, but this time it seemed to mean something more.]

When it finally dawned on the ‘old’ leathery skinned man, looking all of 50 years that he was in fact 3 years younger than me, his jaw just dropped. He instantly asked about my wife, seated in the back seat, and stood awestruck that she was just one year younger than him.

His mind began to work over everything we’d talked about; then whether spoken or unspoken it became clear to me he was asking me why?

I was able to share a bit of the Gospel with him, and how we followed Jesus. How He carries our burdens, that we literally cast our burdens upon Him because He cares for us.

I don’t know what else to say, but following Jesus Christ is just plain smart. It’s the most healthy thing you could ever do for your mind, body, soul, and spirit. Of course, He does demand a lot, like everything, but what is that to trying to “own” a soul we can’t keep anyway?

He takes the brunt of life and breaks it in two. Not that we won’t face difficulties, but the difficulties somehow don't seem to show on our faces. He is our Prince of Peace, after all, and all His subjects are marked with His sign upon their foreheads. It would almost appear to some that His followers hardly age at all.

Thank you, Jesus, for taking all my burdens, giving me your light and easy yoke, making me care-free like a child and able to walk into Your Kingdom with no merits of my own, but simply because you said for all time: “For God so loved the world…”

You have become and remain today the collective sigh of relief for all the universe, for all time.

“Who is a God like you, who pardons sin and forgives … You do not stay angry forever but delight to show mercy. You will again have compassion on us; you will tread our sins underfoot and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of sea.” Micah 7:18,19