Gospel For Asia Helping India Flood Victims
By: Allie Martin With a desire to bring the hope of Christ to victims of floods in South Asia, missionaries with Gospel for Asia are assisting many who have been driven from their homes as a result of monsoons throughout India.
It is being called the worst flooding to hit India in years. Record monsoons have a reported 28 million homeless and have claimed more than 2,000 lives. Bangladesh, Nepal, and the adjacent Indian states of Bihar, West Bengal, and Assam have been hit especially hard. Gospel for Asia (GFA) founder and president K.P. Yohannon says he grew up with monsoons every year — “but this exceeds even last year’s floods in terms of the number of victims — and we don’t even have the final numbers yet.”
Missionaries with Yohannon’s ministry are on site, providing rice and beans, cooking utensils, kerosene, and other items to flood victims. GFA’s Chris Brewer says conditions are extreme in flood-stricken areas.
“In many communities there, they have these little bamboo huts that they live in and they have just been washed away. The families have lost everything,” he shares. “You see a picture of a mother huddled with her little boy in the blazing sun, with a little piece of cloth over their head, sitting there for a week while they’re waiting for the waters to subside.”
According to Brewer, some areas that have been hit are not accessible to GFA — but the tragedy, he says, is providing many opportunities for GFA missionaries to minister to the hurting in the name of Christ.
“We’re preparing and planning to go back into those areas where our church members, our pastors, our missionaries have been impacted [by the flooding],” he explains. “But they’re not going to be thinking of themselves so much as they’re going to look for opportunities to minister in the midst of this, and to share the love of Christ [and] to perhaps help with reconstruction of some of these homes.”
GFA was instrumental in helping victims of the tsunami that hit South India more than two years ago.
(Source: OneNewsNow.com)
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