Newsletter 07/2016
As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another,... 1 Peter 4:10.
Dear friends and co-workers at anamed! In Eritrea I was travelling unusually to an anamed workshop on a camel! However when the camel sank deeper and deeper into the sand, even the camel refused to go any further. Moreover, the camel driver without hesitation let me know his view in no uncertain terms that the camel had reached the limits of its capacity and could not continue the journey any further. I therefore had no alternative but to continue my journey on foot. In Zaire / Congo, I was allowed to visit an anamed clinic currently under construction. Whilst I was explaining the limits of our finances, four men arrived after walking 10 km through 20 cm of deep sand, in order to bring an unconscious woman, suffering from malaria and sweating profusely. The four men said: we are willingly doing that for free, but we are at the end of our strengths!
As much as I would help our anamed partners in northern Nigeria, but they had to flee from Boko Haram. As much as I wanted to send rain to our anamed groups in Malawi, but rain has not come. As much as I would love to build solar technologies in Tanzania, but the uranium industry is more powerful. As much as I would give thousands of street children in developing countries local employment opportunities, but multinationals are flooding the market ... they cannot get a visa either, thus remains only the recommendation to escape??
If we don’t go to the misery, misery comes to us! A poor man who has a piece of dry bread in his hand, surrounded from starving people in his home country, is overjoyed and thanks God in his village church for his privilege of having a piece of bread. But having escaped from his country of origin and having now the same piece of bread in Germany, surrounded by people with cakes, he becomes sad, disappointed, depressed, plays killer games on the Internet and takes eventually up weapons as revenge against "Christians" because they are better off than him. Another example is the weather pattern of El Nino which brings in its wake climatic catastrophe. In fact 40% of Malawians will suffer from hunger this year; 30 Euros of aid per person per month would mean doubling of their GNP! But no, we wait until he is in Germany, then he costs us 1500 Euros a month as a refugee ... 50 times more.
Therefore I want to thank you all! The more darkness surrounds us by helpless politics and vicious attacks, the more the contrary, the divine action becomes visible as a precious light! Since our last meeting in September many of you have given your time and efforts to shed little lights all over the world. Africans, Asians, Europeans have all held seminars: so for example our collaborator Flory from Adi/Congo has just finished three one-week seminars in Burundi, conducted without any recreation break, which is an absolute record. And just before those seminars he had one in Congo on the border with Central African Republic in a town which is attacked by rebel groups weekly. At my urging he got personal protection by pygmy-soldiers ... and that for an allowance which came from you donors! In Lilongwe, Malawi I could inaugurate an anamed hospital this year, with 6 treatment rooms partly including television, led by a vegetable scientist (!). This gentleman who repeatedly visited anamed seminars has now founded this anamed clinic for conventionally incurable patients (from very poor up to very rich). The contribution of anamed was limited to Artemisia seeds, a few books and posters; incredible! The interest of some few governments … ; incredible! The German Ambassador of Burundi dared to drive more than 100 km in this country facing a civil war to open our anamed seminar; incredible!
A patient writes that her oncologist advised her about anamed recipes after he himself was healed of metastatic prostate cancer, incredible! A seminar participant surprises us with a multilingual homepage about anamed without our intervention; incredible! (www.malaria-cure.it). Parishes in Germany produce 150 kilos of Artemisia annua for free which means manual work for weeks....and an airline transported it for free (!) to Mozambique, where Myriam Wahr has just opened her sixtieth (!) anamed center (www.obomsamaritano.org). Recently when I was at an anamed stand on a Christian conference, another exhibitor came along and asked me: You have so many people here, is it true that you are only with volunteers here? And I said yes, and the day when this won’t be possible any more we will then simply remove the stand!
The space here does not suffice to thank you all for a donation which has enabled us to realize large projects in 2015 in Congo, India, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda... many thanks for this! And because all that is so incredible, I am looking forward to seeing you one day in our conferences!Yours, Martin!