People & events

MCC News photo: Mark Beach

The first Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) shipment of AIDS care kits to Chad arrived in early January for use by an MCC partner organization in N’Djamena, Center for Family Life Education. Andre Dingamyo, an AIDS caregiver with the centre, regularly visits Georgine Nepidimbaye, a widowed mother whose health has been declining for five months due to AIDS. Dingamyo helps Nepidimbaye’s family with the task of caring for her and uses supplies from a new MCC AIDS care kit. MCC shipped 825 AIDS care kits around the world in 2004. Read about how to assemble and donate AIDS care kits online.

—MCC release

MCC News photo

Ed Martin, left, MCC’s director of Central and Southern Asia programs, and Dwi Listiyanti, representing two Indonesian Mennonite synods, visit Mr. Barahudin, right, as he rebuilds his home in Indonesia’s Aceh province. In three days of touring in the tsunami-ravaged region, Mennonite Central Committee team members found themselves stunned by the enormity of the devastation. The death toll continues to mount. The latest figure is 216,000 for Aceh province.

MCC’s response has grown to more than $15 million Cdn., making it the single largest humanitarian effort by MCC and its constituents since World War II. Funds will be used for relief, trauma counselling, village reconstruction and economic development. Proposed efforts include rebuilding three villages in Sri Lanka entirely. MCC continues to accept contributions but now recommends donations for other MCC projects supported by its general fund.

—MCC release

A container loaded with blankets and school supplies for Malakal, Sudan left the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) warehouse in Plum Coulee, Man. on Jan. 17. The 7113 blankets, 5820 school kits, and 2258 pencil cases are going to people displaced by a conflict in central Sudan, in response to a request by the Sudan Council of Churches. MCC continues to provide aid to the Darfur region as well.

—MCC News

Eighty percent of Canadians now live in cities and 20 percent in the country. This is an exact reversal of the urban–rural split at Confederation in 1867. Vancouver and Toronto have become “multicultural super-cities,” with Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton following on their heels.

—Maclean’s

Construction of Cuba’s first Russian Orthodox Church is underway in Havana. Metropolitan Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church’s foreign relations department, said it will be “a monument to Cuban–Russian friendship,” and pay homage to thousands of Russians who cooperated with communist Cuba for three “glorious” decades before the fall of the Soviet Union.

—EP News

The woman behind the 1973 lawsuit making abortion legal in America is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the decision it made in her favour at that time. Norma McCorvey – “Jane Roe” in the Roe vs. Wade case – has since become a Christian. Two lower courts in Texas rejected her request last year, but she is persisting. Her attorney says he will bring evidence that abortions may harm women.

—EP News

A retired couple from Burrton, Kansas has been putting the miles on their motor home in pursuit of Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) relief sales. So far, John and Deloris Gray, long instrumental in the Kansas Mennonite Relief Sale, have attended 28 relief sales in 21 U.S. states and in B.C., donating and purchasing items along the way. They hope to continue as long as their health allows.

—MCC News

Arvid Loewen, a marathon cyclist from Winnipeg’s North Kildonan MB Church, will bike across Canada during June to raise money for the work of Mully Children’s Family orphanage in Kenya. Three children from the orphanage will take turns riding with him on a non-pedalling tandem seat. Loewen has also done long-distance cycling to raise money for MCC and Family life Network.

—release

The tsunami crisis has highlighted the problem with federal rules that require charities like Canadian Foodgrains Bank (CFB) to buy food aid in Canada and ship it overseas. Designed to help Canadian farmers, the rule requires that 90% of food aid funded by the Canadian International Development Agency come from Canada. CFB is pursuing a change to 50%. What is important is flexibility, they say; shipment is expensive and takes time, and can adversely affect local economies if foodgrains are available there.

—media reports, CFB

Forgery charges have been laid against three antiquities dealers and a collector in Israel involved with a number of biblical artificats, including the ossuary said to have contained the remains of Jesus’ brother James. The ossuary aroused huge interest as evidence for Jesus’ life. Two years ago it was displayed at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum.

—Maclean’s

Conservatives in the 4.9 million member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ECLA) are disappointed in a much-anticipated report on dealing with homosexuality in the church, released Jan. 13. The study recommended church policies on marriage as “a lifelong covenant of faithfulness between a man and a woman” and on clergy not participating in same-sex “blessing ceremonies” be upheld, but added the caveat that local churches might choose not to discipline those who violate the standards.

—EP News

Scores of people gathered to celebrate the 41st birthday of Terri Schiavo, who is at the centre of a bitterly contested right-to-live case in Florida. Schiavo suffered severe brain damage in 1990. She breathes on her own but is fed through a tube. Her husband has waged a legal battle to remove the tube; her parents are fighting to keep her alive. They are hoping for a new trial based on Pope John Paul II’s recent statements declaring the withdrawal of food and water from a disabled person a sin.

—EP News

The latest edition of Rolling Stone magazine will carry an ad for the Bible after all. Zondervan, a division of HarperCollins and the largest publisher of Bibles in the U.S., purchased space several months ago to advertise a Bible edition aimed at youth. It was later informed that ads for religious materials are not accepted. Still later, the magazine reversed its decision, citing “internal miscommunications.”

—Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Anwer Masih has been acquitted of blasphemy in Lahore, making him the first Pakistani Christian ever acquitted of such charges in Pakistan’s lower courts. Masih, now 32, was arrested in 2003 when a neighbour who converted from Christianity to Islam claimed Masih had derided Islamic beliefs. Although cleared, Masih remains in hiding, because extremists have vowed to kill him.

—Compass

Blessings Christian Marketplace, a Canadian “Christian retail chain,” has been experimenting with Sunday shopping in 6 of their 23 stores. It was “an extremely difficult decision,” the company says, but has been “very well received.” In the U.S., the Family Christian Bookstore, a chain of 326 stores, introduced Sunday shopping last fall. Writer Jamie Dean noted there were no titles “specifically about the Sabbath” in FCB inventory.

—Faith Today, Sightings