Saving the animals too

As I was reading the April 13 edition of Time Magazine, I started to cry when I saw a picture of gorillas that had been killed in the Congo. Maybe its because I have a soft spot in my heart for the great apes (relatives of monkeys, I always have had a number of stuffed animals of great apes in addition to my usual monkey collection) or maybe because I have it in my heart to go to the Congo and help the people there. Maybe it was just that I realized that the war there is destroying not only the life of the people there, but also the animals, and it takes much more time to restore a country from ecological devastation than it does to simply repair the bombed out buildings. Or as in the case of Mozambique, to not restore the buildings, and go back to simple village life.

I have read how the war in Moz destroyed the animals-- big game like lions, elephants, black rhinos, leopards, and zebra-- and how they are just starting to be able to bring some of the wildlife back to Moz in some remote regions.

Do we need the same thing to happen in the Congo? The Congo holds such awesome equatorial jungles, they cannot just remain a casualty of war, and we can't just let the people and gorillas and all living things be wiped out.

I know I am trying to find my way to God's heart through this blog, but I am realizing that God made the earth and we need to take such good care of it. Conservation and preserving the environment go right along with what God desires. And it goes hand in hand with sustainable community development.

As a missionary, I can't just go into a country and bring my own seeds from America and tell them how to plant them. I need to find out what grows best there, what the environment is like, and then enable people to grow food that is native to the area.

I believe that missions work, to tell people about God and reach out to help them by clothing them and bringing them clean water, is all related to the environment. How can we bring people clean water when the groundwater itself is polluted? How can we build houses for people if the land is so destroyed that the soil won't produce sufficient crops to live? How can we say to those who work in garbage dumps to leave their livelihood if there is a living to be made by recycling scrap metals there? (I congratulate the organization I worked with in the Quito, Ecuador dump who had made safe conditions for the people to work in the dump recycling things, and to provide an education for their children and to not allow the children to work in the dump anymore)

I think we need to re-think missions a bit for our brave new world. We need to open up our minds that climate change is real, that wildlife is being destroyed at alarming rates, and that saving people includes saving the earth around them so that they can live a healthy life.

If we see that the reef in Pemba is overfished, maybe we should try to teach the fishermen sustainable practices that allow the fish to grow back and replenish the reef. If we see that they are suffering because of overfishing, and now they can't catch enough fish to sell in the market, maybe we need to bring in a few marine biologists and people who know about fish to determine what to do about this problem.

And when the Amazon River floods so high that it destroys all the banana crops, we need to go in and help these people directly by finding other crops to grow or other means to make a living, meanwhile supporting conservation practices that are saving the rainforest. As well as reducing our own carbon loads, since global warming has, presumably, been responsible for these awful droughts and floods in the Amazon.

Which brings me to my next journey, southern Brazil. While there, I hope to visit a rainforest preserve of the Mata Atlantica in Sao Paulo state. This is one of the few places the golden lion tamarin lives, and to see it in the wild would be amazing for me. It also would be just as much of a missions trip for me to visit this conservation project which is run by christians, to learn how to make it possible to have community development and conservation go hand in hand. I believe they do. I just want to see it first hand.

And I also realized in reading the Time Magazine that I saw a really neat starfish called a Red-knobbed Sea Star in Pemba. I hadn't known the name, before. It is not endangered itself, but its habitat is. And I might have taken one of these beauties home. Might have. Which made me feel bad at first, but I think it is important to have animals (or shells, or photos) on display in the US for people to see in order to wake them up to the reality that the world is very big and that there are many other animals out there besides them. Hence why I am not against zoos in general. Although the gorilla house at the national zoo makes me very sad and almost cry.