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Bishop Andrew and Climate Change

The bishop sees with his own eyes the effect of climate change on the poorest people:

“In the Gambella, the far west of Ethiopia, it usually rains a lot at this time of year. It’s now the end of August and it has hardly rained at all. The soil here is rich and fertile and could produce a magnificent yield. But the maize planted in April sprung up only to wither and dry on the stems under the relentless sun. In the heat, tempers flare, too. Fights break out, often with fatal results, and cattle raiders start to slip over the border from South Sudan. They burn homes, steal the few remaining cattle and, in a recent and chilling development, even stole some of the children. They say the children are sold as slaves in Khartoum, which means there must be a developed market there. If the rain does eventually come there will be so much of it at the wrong time that the newly planted crops will be simply washed away in the floods…as happened last year.

In the north and east, the topography is harsher, more spectacular. The rugged mountain peaks of the north give way to vast stretches of empty, rocky desert in the east. Here, pastoralists roam for hundreds of miles, to graze their cattle or camels. In the markets, women sit over small bundles of twigs that they’ve gathered somewhere in the vast landscape outside the town, tied with bark and offered for sale as kindling. In one place, it hasn’t rained for several years now. For the past three years, there has been no harvest, of any kind. Someone offers food for work – a common enough relief strategy – the people laugh, “Look at us. We’re too weak to work.”

Liturgy and Language

From Reformation times Anglicanism has been committed to worship in the vernacular. But this is not always straightforward. Bishop Andrew and the Local Assembly have difficult decisions to make. Bishop Andrew writes:

“The Local Assembly also marked the use of a new liturgy. Prior to the Local Assembly, teams had been finalising the translations of Holy Communion and Morning Prayer services into seven local languages: Nuer, Anuak, Dinka, Mabaan, Opo, Amharic and Somali. A common liturgy will allow regular patterns of worship in all the churches in the region. Previously if translations existed, they were either antiquated or not available in published form. Few people speak English and for many this was the first liturgy that they had experienced, let alone in their mother tongue. Worshipping together emphasises Christian Unity over tribal differences and helps to build a common life. Having the same liturgy in different languages enabled almost everyone present at the Local Assembly to participate in the final Holy Communion service. The communal responses were said simultaneously in eight languages! It is thought that the liturgy is the first ever written document in the Opo language.”

The Church Centre in Gambella

The bishop reports the building progress:

“Despite the difficulties we are making good, steady progress on building our Anglican Centre in Gambella. And despite a general shortage of cement in the country (there is none, anywhere) and the elephant grasses that have shot up all over the vast compound in the last few months, the office is nearly finished, the Guest House is well under way and the footings for the Library/Reading Room are firmly in place. But a huge, unresolved question hangs over everything. With the Irish economy in steep decline, Irish Aid has had to cut its support to Christian Aid in Ethiopia by as much as 33% this year. We are waiting to see if our second and third year grants will be cut, too. But there is some good news. The Anglican Relief and Development Fund in the US is seriously considering our application for top-up funding, to allow as much of the build to be completed as possible and then roll out the programmes. And we think we may have found a Project Director, from London, to replace the Addis-educated Project Director who left earlier in the year when his life was threatened in the tribal conflicts that we live with.”