Chris and Suzy, working with refugees in camps in Ethiopia, have recently shared about a small, but exciting, new project they’d love prayer for.  

One of the limitations of their preaching course is that it is necessarily limited to individuals who can read, most of whom are men.  This is a significant limitation because the majority of people in the church, and the overwhelming majority of active members of the church are women.  Whilst they strive to encourage female participation, this is not easy because education and literacy rates amongst women in the camps are very low.  For instance, a lady on their course is the only woman from her entire ethnic group to have completed Grade 12 (i.e. finished high school).

Through her, Chris and Suzy have met with a number of groups of women who have expressed a strong desire to be able to read in their mother-tongue.  This is less straightforward than it sounds because their mother-tongue has only existed in written form for a few years (at this point, only two books of the Bible have been translated) and so there’s only a handful of people in the camps who are able to read it. 

Thanks to the generosity of one of their supporting churches back in the UK, they’ve been able to help these churches to set up a small project where they bring a local teacher to teach small groups of women. This is new territory for everyone—for the women learning to read and write, for the teacher teaching literacy for the first time, for the local churches learning to manage a project, and for Chris and Suzy as they strive to move from being those who deliver the training to those who enable these churches to run their own training. They ask: “Please pray for God’s blessing on us all as we set out on this adventure together!”