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Ten-year-old Christine was at the market in Rwanda while fighters from a warring tribe cut the necks of her family with a machete. Jabeth was twelve when he watched as his parents were shot and killed by rebels from Liberia who forced him to join them. Atrocities like these are everyday occurrences in some African nations.
Elizabeth Hankins and her coworkers at OneTribe People work with local people in their communities to help them find healing and a way forward after years of war. Beginning with workshops to show how conflict doesn’t have to escalate, Elizabeth defines the challenges and gives people a road map from trauma to peace. Then she wrote radio drama scripts and invited voice actors to record them in English. The radio broadcasts and classroom curriculum provide peace training empowering people to build their own peace.
Our team in Uganda met Elizabeth and realized that producing the programs in other local languages would be a game changer! Today, the radio dramas in English and Juba Arabic reach more than eight million people in five African nations.
God is using this program to build peace at individual, community, and even government levels. Elizabeth says, “The listener response to the OneTribe radio program completely undid us.” Students in village classrooms explore the meaning of peace and conflict resolution. Local forums settle disputes. Pastors teach peace. People gather around their radios discussing how to practice what they heard. The Paramount Chief of the Madi tribe, Drani Stephen, advocates for the program because it offers new ways to reconnect the audience with the heart of God with the topics of forgiveness, reconciliation, gender equality, human rights, and trauma healing.
The dramas are also preloaded on solar-powered, handheld radios for distribution in local villages and surrounding refugee camps. To say the local leaders are elated by the arrival of the radios is a wild understatement. The women sang and danced under a mango tree while believers gathered to worship and receive the radios from local pastors. All the people praised God for the access to scripture, peace programming, and local Christian radio.
You are bringing God’s peace and reconciliation into the lives of millions of people in conflict. Would you make a gift towards productions like the Juba-Arabic version and other GNPI projects today? Together we can make an eternal difference. |
