Once more: Kalimantan

For a number of years, I have been working into West Kalimantan, Indonesia. We have a team of people from a number of local churches in Germany and Australia, that ministers to a group of churches in West Kalimantan.

The people there live under very primitive conditions. We started out by encourging church workers and helping to train leaders. We normally go to a village which is central and hold seminars periodically for two years and then move on. We have been working in this area for four years and during this time 350 people have gone through the process of being trained. Also ten churches have been planted.

However there is a continual struggle to sustain the churches. Demonic activity is strong. Each village has a witchdoctor. This is a real challenge. Perhaps the bigger challenge is financial sustaining the churches. The people are very poor and despite teaching on the tithe, little is happening.

God gave us a good contact. We met a retired German businessman in Malaysia. He is a young Christian with a desire to serve the Lord. "But I can't preach." These were more or less his first comments on meeting him. Why people think you can only serve the Lord if you can preach I don't know. But to make a long story short, he is at present trying to form a cooperative with the pepper farmers in Kalimantan. If it works it will give the farmers a better deal for their work and also generate some funds for our mission there.

The first project that we want to support is a hostel for young people. We are working in a village that is kind of central (it only takes 8 hours by boat to access it form the nearest city). There are schools in the village. Parents send their children to the village to go to school. Unfortunately the children stay in the village until the school goes into recession. The children have no one to look after them and live in what look like larger dog kennels on stilts!

Of course as all young people are, the are mischievous and get into trouble without having parental guidance. But they also lack parental protection. A number of the girls have been raped. And the witchdoctor has a field day in putting spells on the children etc. Most of then, while having enough to eat, are undernourished because they ear mostly rice. They don't drink enough water and are not trained in hygiene.

In "our" village there are 350 such children. We are employing someone to do what he can to serve these children. Building a hostel would provide the protection and we could give guidance and help. We envisage doing training about hygiene, nutrition and discipleship. The cost of such a hostel is around 70 000, which we could raise through the cooperative.

We just hope and pray that this will happen!

The next step is a medical mission. People from the village need to travel the 8 hours by boat to get to see the doctor. Theoretically anyway. The boat trip costs them nearly a month's income. Then they have to pay the doctor.

So we would like to have temporary clinics in a number of villages in West Kalimantan. Around our network, we have made an appeal and asked medical personell to come forward - about 40 people have shown interest. We wanted to start in September but that is proving to be two short notice. We are postponing our start to March 2009. We have four doctors and a medical student who are kind of committed for that time.