mennonite central committee

Climate change is causing serious droughts that decimate livestock in Africa’s rural areas. Photo via Fredrick Nzwili/RNS.

As climate change devastates communities in Kenya, church leaders are helping to address the crisis locally while also calling on industrialized nations to own up to their responsibilities for spewing greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.

“But we (in Africa) also have a role to play because we have not been very good stewards of the environment,” added Gichira, a poverty and development expert.“I think they (industrialized nations) are responsible for most of the emissions,” said Peter Solomon Gichira, the climate change program officer at the All Africa Conference of Churches. “They have responsibility to support climate change adaptation and mitigation as a moral obligation.”

People living in the Global South such as Kenya are suffering the worst consequences, climate experts say.

Droughts have become more severe and recurrent and are frequently followed by excessive rains or floods. Temperatures are much higher and weather patterns are now unpredictable.

Sheldon Good 1-12-2012
Port-au-Prince church post-earthquake. Photo by Colin Crowley via Wylio http://w

Port-au-Prince church post-earthquake. Photo by Colin Crowley via Wylio http://www.wylio.com/credits/Flickr/4293703467

How does one dig out from under such tragedy? How does one have hope for a better life, for a new Haiti?

In a meditation titled "The Gates of Hope," Minister Victoria Safford writes:

"Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of hope -- not the prudent gates of Optimism, which are somewhat narrower; nor the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense; nor the strident gates of self-righteousness ... nor the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of 'Everything is gonna be all right,' but a very different, sometimes very lonely place, the place of truth-telling, about your own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, the piece of ground from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it might be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle, but joy in the struggle — and we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we are seeing, asking people what they see."

Indeed, we need to plant ourselves at the gates of hope and work toward a just peace, on Earth as it is in heaven.

'Mic' photo (c) 2009, Renée Johnson - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/If you live in Kentucky, Nevada, or Ohio and listen to Christian or country radio, you'll be hearing some of Sojourners' new radio ads calling for legislators to remember the least of these during this default crisis. For those of you who haven't completed your migration over to Google+, you might also start to see some ads popping up on your Facebook page in the next few days asking you to speak out on behalf of those in need. The reason we are running these ads is simple: The rich have lobbyists while those in need don't, and that's why Christians need to speak out and form a "Circle of Protection." If you don't live in one of these areas (or aren't listening to Christian or country radio) you can listen to the ads here.

We met 10-year-old Noor Al-Abid in November during our first visit to Gaza.

Sheldon Good 12-13-2010
Anxiety set in for many people in Haiti long before Dec.

Last weekend I was at a family reunion where I had been invited to show pictures from my sabbatical in the Middle East last spring.

Ben Depp 1-19-2010

Mennonite Central Committee worker Ben Depp offers a first hand account of the earthquake and the devastating results. Ben and Alexis, of Waxhaw, N.C., are based in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. (produced by Silas Crews and Linda Espenshade)

Andrew Clouse 9-21-2009
Earlier this morning Radio Globo -- a pro-resistance radio source -- broke the news that Manuel "Mel" Zelaya, the deposed president of Honduras, has arrived in Tegucigalpa and was calling his suppo

In most cases in Occupied Palestine at this point, Palestinian refugees live in UN-administered camps that are essentially urban slums--overcrowded apartment blocks with high rates of poverty. But there are still some refugees that live in tents.