Is it possible to make a preemptive strike against a potential humanitarian crisis?

Sometimes a humanitarian crisis will come without a warning. 

An undersea earthquake. A combination of dangerous climatic conditions. A lack of understanding in land management combined with the failure of seasonal rainfall.

The Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004. The Victorian Bushfires of 2009. The Pakistan Floods of 2010. The Horn of Africa Famine of 2011.

Earthquakes, landslides and massive flooding swallow up towns and sweep away homes and schools and loved ones. Many ask why people live in such potentially life-threatening places, like the steep hillsides of Central America or the flood plains and delta regions of massive rivers in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. But what do you do when you belong to the poorest of the poor, where higher ground is scarce and costly and where you may be judged and despised as an ‘untouchable’ for bad karma in a previous life?

Or terrorists destroy life and communities and leave in their wake millions of ‘innocent’ people  fleeing the violence and finding refuge with distant relatives, perhaps in your country of origin or on the other side of porous borders.

But what if some potential crises are preventable? What if we could foresee the inevitable and take preemptive action against it? If not to prevent it completely but to minimise its devastation and save countless thousands of lives.

This is the challenge we can be part of in the unfolding crisis in the world’s newest nation; three years young South Sudan, being torn apart by internal divisions, civil war and ethnic violence.

This is the challenge I want Sydney Anglicans to be a part of alongside many other people of goodwill throoughout the world.

Anglican Aid has an established partnership with Archbishop Most Rev. Daniel Deng Bul, the Archbishop of the Episcopal Church of South Sudan. Through the generosity of Sydney Anglicans, Anglican Aid provided the resources for Archbishop Deng and six of his Assistant Bishops to get to and participate in GAFCON 2013 in Nairobi.

Under the Archbishop Deng’s oversight, leaders who have the care and charge for the social welfare of the Episcopal Church of South Sudan have seen the crisis coming. The violence of the last eight months and the associated displacement of hundreds of thousands of people have meant that this season’s summer crop has not been sufficiently planted.  International sources fear that a million people will be engulfed in the famine by the end of the year with tens or hundreds of thousands of people dying, many of them children and the elderly.

But our brothers and sisters in South Sudan are providing leadership and taking action. They are training people take responsibility, to cultivate and to plant. 

And they have asked Anglican Aid for resources to provide seed and training programmes.

The Archbishop of Sydney, through Anglican Aid, has responded by sending an immediate $20,000 as an expression of our solidarity with them and as the first fruit of much more financial help to follow.

Anglican Aid is asking for 10,000 Sydney Anglicans and their friends to participate in the South Sudan Meals for Meal Appeal. 

We are asking you to forgo one eating out or restaurant meal for the month of August and donate that value of that meal (nominal value of $50) to literally provide seed for planting so that meal can be harvested to feed some of the million vulnerable people.

10,000 donations of $50 will raise $500,000. Your donation will go straight to our indigenous partner, our brothers and sisters in Christ who are on the ground, at the grass roots of social, economic and spiritual life. 

If providing the nominal amount of a restaurant meal doesn’t resonate with you, please think of any creative way you can to raise awareness about this predicament, organise a fund raising event that may work for you and your church or simply make a sacrificial donation to this need.

Please don’t read this article as some kind of crass commercial for Anglican Aid’s appeal for South Sudan.

You may have a preferred aid agency. You may have even seen TV footage about the looming crisis in South Sudan with accompanying appeals to help by ringing a hotline number emblazoned across your TV screen. However you help and whoever you help through, a real challenge lays before the watching world.

A preemptive strike against a potent killer.