Church Picnic

Yesterday, Community Mennonite Church gathered on a beautiful, grassy hilltop and enjoyed worship, fellowship and food. Our annual church picnic is always a highlight and this year, we were pleased to celebrate the high school graduation of four members.

After the service and blessings to the youth, we shared in the wonderful victuals of summer menus. Our tummies filled, the afternoon brought games and races, driving competitions and a water slide to boot!

Winter Wheat

Here is what one of our Canadian Foodgrains Bank fields of winter wheat looks like today.

For more information, you can check out the Canadian Foodgrains Bank website and Richard's post about the CFGB below.

Stay tuned and watch the wheat field grow!

Derek in Colombia - Part 2

Hey everyone!

Sorry for the long wait.
I have been in a rural community along a river called the Opon and they don’t have electricity or running water, let alone internet. I could easily spend a couple hours talking to you about all I have seen and heard over the last couple days but I will be brief and give you a more detailed account on my return.

We started out visiting the pipe line that takes gasoline from Barrancaberja, where it is refined to the rest of the country. The country’s national gas company produces 50% of this region’s income and 80% of it is produced here in Barrancaberja. There is an illegal group called the Gas Cartel that taps holes into this pipeline and siphons out as much as 25% of the gas passing through it. This gas cartel was originally controlled by the Guerrilla and has recently been taken over by the other illegal armed group called the paramilitary.

The guerrilla armed groups are socialists, desiring to change the political system to a socialist one. They were sort of the voice for the people trying to be heard by a government who wouldn’t listen. They would fight the military and that was the cause of the violence for quite a while. However, over time the military was being accused of causing large amounts of human rights abuses. Mass murders of innocent people were led on their quest to destroy the illusive guerrillas. So with this, the paramilitary was formed. They are sort of a secret arm of the military that carries out the brunt of the human rights violations. They are pretty much the same group though the military denies any connection to the paramilitary. This might be a better angle to look at it. If there is an action that the military wants to do but doesn’t want to be accountable for, they remove their uniforms and go under the alliance terrorist name of the paramilitary. Therefore when accused they can say it wasn’t us it was the paramilitary. And any time they kill anybody they dress them up as guerrillas and say, “Look what we have done…we have killed another one of those horrible guerrilla members.”

That is just the tip of the iceberg, there is still a whole lot of politics in corruption that links to all this. But I won’t get into that in this article. Basically the pipeline is a secret way for the government to finance the paramilitary group, that isn’t traceable.

After our visit to the pipeline we stayed in a Hamlet called la Florida. It was a very pitiful site, merely a bunch of small metal houses, donated by the government, which were mostly uninhabited. There was a once vibrant store, though now abandoned and in decay and also an empty school. Most of the people had left due to the violence. The person who fed us breakfast that day left and moved to the city after she had fed us. The river was in a flood state as it does every rainy season and the whole place was a mud bath.

Peace every one,
Derek

they have decided to follow Jesus...

Today we celebrated with Linda, Jeremy, and Ben, who made a public declaration of their faith and were baptized and welcomed as members of the body of Christ.

And in the afternoon we "showered" Ruth and Krystan as well, in anticipation of their upcoming wedding.

A glorious day!