A few days ago we received a surprising request from the Christian media company ERF for a radio interview. And just one day later Oliver Jeske, ERF's correspondent for the capital city, had edited the following article from the approximately one-hour interview.
On 16.6.2020, a half-hour version of the interview will be broadcast.
(For our English speaking friends: Unfortunately the interview is only available in German)
Love and Greetings,
Stephan
After two weeks of intensive preparation, we were finally able to start the delivery of the food packages on a large scale today.
One thinks that in difficult times it should be easy to bring the food to the people. But you are wrong ... on the one hand you have to respect cultural traditions and negotiate with village elders and representatives of the village communities how, where, when you can give food to which people. On the other hand, however, we also have to apply a data protection law based on the European model when collecting the names of needy families.
It was difficult to get the required quantities of almost 4 tons of food. Due to the shortage of food, the prices have unfortunately also skyrocketed. But persistent negotiation and God's favour brought everything together as desired.
On Wednesday morning, all the men from our OM Lesotho team went to the district capital and bought maize meal, flour, salt, sugar, dried beans, cooking oil, soap and yeast and loaded them into our large trailer. The drive Read more
Lockdown, the national borders are closed, all shops were also closed for four days. No more taxis or cars. Insecurity spread. All people stayed home voluntarily.
Reports went out that the military is very strict and violent to those that are outside and whipping people in the streets.
There was an strange silence over our area, here in the mountains of Moteng (Lesotho). No playing children and their happy laughter anymore. The dogs hardly barked anymore, because nobody passed by. Also it seemed as if donkeys and cows had stopped making noises. All villagers had disappeared from the face of the earth. Only the cows and donkeys stood around at their fields as if abandoned.
A few days later the shops fortunately opened again, even if only for a short time each day. And then our neighbours came out of their houses again very timidly, one by one. There was a certain relief to be felt. Most of them did not know exactly what was going on there. Many don't listen to the radio here every day. And a bit further on in the next villages there is not even electricity, so that they only got to know what was going on in the world by listening-to-say. It was a big mess of information and big confusion with the emergency laws and even more confusion with the implementation.
Well, just five weeks later, everything seems the same. The kids... Read more
