wfn.org | United Methodists witness life after war in Angola

["NewsDesk" <NewsDesk@UMCOM.ORG>]

March 31, 2003	News media contact: Linda Bloom7(212) 870-38037New York
10-31-71BPI{185}

NOTE: Photographs are available.

By Jeneane Jones*

LUANDA, Angola (UMNS) - "We want you to be witnesses, and go back and share
the reality here in Angola."

That directive from United Methodist Bishop Gaspar Domingos set the tone for
a recent 12-day visit by 17 volunteers from the denomination's
California-Nevada Annual Conference to Western Angola. The visit marked the
beginning of a new partnership between Cal-Nevada and the West Angola
Conference. Bishop Beverly Shamana leads the Cal-Nevada Conference.

J.P. McGuire, the Cal-Nevada Volunteers In Mission coordinator who
spearheaded the February visit, said he "felt overwhelmed to see the needs
facing this country."

Luanda, once a picturesque port city on the western coast of Africa, lies
nearly in ruins today.	The devastation is due to the country's long civil
war, though the fighting never reached the city's interior.

For the past 26 years, rebel and government soldiers battled in the provinces
surrounding the city.  "Everyone in the country lost someone to the war,"
said Sebastian Mzamba, a young teacher at the San Tiago United Methodist
Church school in Luanda.

Mzamba himself lost mother, father, brother, uncle and aunt. Now, at age 26,
he has spent his entire life under the cloak of a war that has devastated not
only the city's infrastructure, but the internal spirit of Angolans.

In the 1970s, Luanda's population was 700,000, but during the war, that
number exploded to 4 million as people from the countryside fled their homes.
The city has literally buckled under the weight of the number. Streets are
pockmarked and rutted. Garbage festers, in some places piled five and six
feet high. Sewers are overburdened or inoperable, and the rank smell of
rotting garbage mixes with the fumes of gasoline in the heated summer air.

Electricity is spotty or non-existent in the tightly packed communities of
mud and tin-roofed shacks. Families of 12 and 16 members share one or two
rooms together. Children mill in the streets or play in dusty gutters. Few
have shoes. Luanda's evening television news includes stories that family
abuse is on the rise. Post-traumatic stress disorder is said to be one of the
growing causes of death.

The West Angola Conference has taken as its task rebuilding both the region's
physical and spiritual body. The conference comprises 11 districts and 250
churches covering about one-third of the country.

The conference's 267 pastors have been working without salaries since last
September. Conference Treasurer Tomas Philippe said that is due to budget
problems facing the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries, which
canceled its commitment to West Angola for all salary support in 2003.
Pastors and church workers, including Mzamba, are reluctant to quit and seek
other employment because there is nothing else.  Unemployment in Luanda
stands at 70 percent.

Joao Matteus United Methodist Church is in Luanda's Maianga neighborhood.
Getting there requires walking about a quarter-mile off the main street
through a puzzle of paths tucked among houses. A stream follows alongside the
dirt path, the murky waters testifying to the lack of proper sewage treatment
for the inner city. When the narrow path finally opens into a courtyard, a
startlingly white building comes into view, and the voices of children,
reciting in unison, can be heard.

Matteus offers schooling to the neighborhood children. Some parents find a
way to pay the small fee for uniforms. Church funds help those who can
neither afford the clothes nor the books. On Sundays, the community fills the
church to overflowing. Children go to different houses along the street for
Sunday school. "We want to enlarge our space," said Joaquin Dias, the youth
director.

Across town at another United Methodist church, the sanctuary has been turned
into three classrooms. Children, 40 to a group, huddle 10 to a bench. Others
crouch on the floor, using their knees as a desk. Besides the altar, the only
other furnishing in the sanctuary is three blackboards.

Most of the West Angolan churches provide a variety of ministries to the
community they serve, such as food and clothing for widows and orphans,
schooling, and vocational and adult literacy classes. The conference has also
started community health care programs, operating from eight centers in the
city. The care they provide is limited, since U.S. funds for medicines have
dried up.

Most of Luanda's churches are in need of repair. Sundays brings overflow
crowds to many churches, while others are filled to near capacity. "We hope
to start seven more churches," noted Luanda District Superintendent Adriano
dos Santos.

On a hillside north of Luanda is the town of Porto Quipiri, where the
California-Nevada volunteers brought medical supplies and expertise to a
community of about 5,000. Most of the townspeople have not seen a doctor in
several years.

Team members also carried in toys for the children. "Over the past 26 years
... our children have been born in the midst of great conflict," said
Isabella Augostinho, who oversees the evangelistic ministry of the West
Angola Conference. "Everyone is still shell-shocked, and smiles don't come
easily to children. A large part of the task is to heal (these types) of
wounds of war. (Many children) have never played with toys; they saw only
pistols. Now, we must teach them to play again." 

"I didn't expect that what we could do here would change a lot of lives,"
said Laura Kennedy, a nurse from San Jose, "but we can show that we care."

For three days, Los Altos United Methodist Church members Lynne McCoy and
Paula Krumm joined their colleague Kennedy and six others to transform a
small community's main street into a medical hub. Nurses Cat Barclay and Liz
Ryder, along with Dr. Roger Boe, a pediatrician, Dr. Don Rudy, a retired
obstetrician-gynecologist and former missionary, Barbara Rogers, a midwife,
and Bonnie Bollwinkel, a social worker, rounded out the team.

"If we can sow seeds of love," Rudy said, "that's the best we can give. It's
not about the aspirin or the medicine; it's about Christian love in action."

The local United Methodist pastor, the Rev. Mateus Chaves, worked with lay
leaders to help the team see more than 500 men, women and children in three
days. Thatched-roof shelters became triage areas and clinics for pediatrics,
women's health and men's health.  The team's transportation, a white 16-seat
bus, doubled as a rolling pharmacy.

"The most critical problem for these families is malaria," Boe explained.
Aside from seeing young patients, Boe's role was to provide analysis of the
region's medical needs.  As head of the United Methodist Fellowship of Health
Care Volunteers, he wants to determine how the organization can help
volunteers respond to West Angola's medical needs.

Malaria, cholera, typhoid fever and malnutrition are the major health
problems. Not even the crisis of HIV-AIDS rates as high as malaria. But
health officials warned Boe that could change now that war has ended.
Families are beginning to move back to their homes in the provinces. Their
return, officials fear, will bring an increase in HIV-AIDS.
# # #
*Jones is communications director of the United Methodist California-Nevada
Annual Conference and accompanied the volunteer team to Angola.

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United Methodist News Service
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