Dear Friends,

Greetings from Tanzania. In our previous link letters we have listed some topics for which we would like prayer; we thank you for praying for us. Now, with a certain urgency, we ask you to JOIN us in prayer. A prayer for rain.

In the Swahili order of service we have the response " Oh Lord hear our prayer; and let our cry come unto you". The word used for "cry" is "kilio". It is a strong word used also for a funeral mourning. I think of it like a cry from the heart when you can’t quite make sense of things, when words fail you and all you can do is to cry to God.

Below we have written 4 paragraphs describing the situation in Mvumi. I ask that after you read each paragraph you pause for a moment and then join in the response couplet and cry a "kilio" to God.

With love,

David and Liz McKelvey

There is a blue sky today, like yesterday, and the day before, and the day before. Blue skies are not always good, in fact what we long for is a sky filled with big black thundering clouds that drench the earth with life. Two years ago the poor rains brought a poor harvest and people "slept with hunger". Last year El Nino visited with a field flooding fury, and in it’s wake brought myriads of insects that decimated the crops leaving a famine worse than the first. We are in that now. Now, as we look the maize shoots sprouted by the first rains are wilting under the hot blue, blue sky. If more rain does not come before the month is out…………….. [Pause].

People are hungry, there are not yet the famine skeleton-like figures that get shown on the BBC, but the effects are real.

Esteri collapsed after she delivered her baby boy. She had not eaten for the previous two days. Stanley (aged 3) is struggling with dysentery because his body is weakened with malnutrition.

People have been fighting about the unfair distibution of the small amount of government food aid. Houses are being broken into and women are walking home in groups from the grinding mill with their maize flour for fear of being ambushed. Children who can’t pay their fees are being sent home from school, and parents are being taken to court for not sending their children to school. The Secondary School has so few students that it wonders how it will survive. [Pause].

Leader: Oh Lord hear our prayer.

People: And let our cry come unto you.

Without the rain there is no labouring work tilling the fields to get money to buy food. There are no leafy vegetables which can be dried and sold. The bottom has fallen out of the cattle market as there is little grass and the weakened cows deliver prematurely. Some people have sold their fields, others have taken to crushing stones by hand to make gravel, others cut grass and walk 30 miles to Dodoma to sell it for 60 pence.

Old men get into debt and sometimes arrange marriage of their daughters in lieu of the debt. Some men have left their wives and moved away to look for food. Sometimes whole families move away; houses can now be seen closed up for months. [Pause].

Leader: Oh Lord hear our prayer.

People: And let our cry come unto you.

Joeli didn’t sing in the choir on Sunday because he said that his stomach would rumble too much. Others leave the service before the collection, or have left altogether. Today the churches have called a day of prayer for rain, and they are going to the top of Chihembe hill. They plan to stay there the whole day. Mama Eliza said " What is there to say? We can only wait on Almighty God." [Pause].

Leader: Oh Lord hear our prayer.