wfn.org | ABCUSA: American Baptists Aid Congolese Tornado Victims

["SCHRAMM, Richard" <Richard.Schramm@abc-usa.org>]

American Baptist News Service (Valley Forge, Pa. 2/12/03)-A health team
supported by American Baptist International Ministries missionary personnel
responded within hours to aid victims of a tornado that devastated Bandundu
Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo last week.  

The Feb. 2 tornado destroyed more than 2,500 houses, 10 schools, two health
centers and a church.  Seventeen people died, including two women who were
in labor, and thousands were injured and left homeless.  

American Baptist International Ministries missionary Bill Clemmer reported
that, in response to an urgent plea for help from the district medical
doctor, the SANRU health project dispatched a plane with medicine, relief
supplies and a disaster response team to Yumbi.  More than 1,500 persons in
that town of 40,000 were treated for injuries sustained largely as a result
of falling structures and debris.  

Clemmer, who later toured Yumbi with other response team members, noted: "It
is sobering that a people who have suffered so much continue to undergo
trials.  The Congolese are a resilient people, and continually look toward
the future with hope.  What I saw, behind the destruction, were thousands of
people, homeless in the light of a tornado, but forging ahead with the
little they have, with hope and faith, not in man or in nature, but in the
promises of God."

K/2003ABNS/03ABN26

American Baptist News Service: Office of Communication, American Baptist
Churches USA, P.O. Box 851, Valley Forge, PA 19482-0851; (800)ABC-3USA x2077
/ (610)768-2077; fax: (610)768-2320; www.abc-usa.org;
richard.schramm@abc-usa.org