On Monday, Rebecca sent me this article about Sudan. The government of Sudan has surrounded the refuge camps. They are refusing to let in humanitarian aid workers. No medical, food, or water supplies can come into the camps either. The African Sudanese in the camps are afraid that the soldiers will force them back to the villages, all sites of earlier massacres. This will make them sitting ducks for more raids by the government-sponsored Janjaweed – Arab Sudanese “rebels” who sweep through the country raping women and girls and killing the men and boys. Janjaweed means “devils on horseback.” A chilling image.

The conflicts, like those in the Middle East, are very complicated and very old. I heard a reporter say, “There is a Sudanese saying, ‘This is complicated but that’s alright.’” Only nothing is alright because the African Sudanese are being purposefully, intentionally, systematically irradicated by their government. The conflict may be old, but the genocide is only 18 months in the making. Already 70,000 are dead and up to 1.5 million displaced. The U.S. government is not intervening.

Why?

Sudan is an oil rich country. The Sudanese government is Muslim. We cannot afford, either fiscally or relationally, to go into another oil rich Muslim country. So while 10,000 people die every day we tell the African Union to send in peacekeepers to “monitor” the violence. (They cannot stop the violence or even intervene, only “moinitor” it.) The AU can send only 1/50 of the number of troops that would be needed to prevent further genocide.

It’s like watching people be marched into gas chambers.

My heart is broken, because now, today with the morning news, I have no hope of a “quick” resolution to our war in Iraq. And I know that all our military might and resource will be thrown that direction for at least four more years. Just as I know that the African Sudanese have not been able to plant their crops. Just as I know this means that there will be no food for at least another year. (Something that quick intervention by the U.S. or the U.N. might have prevented.) Then again, with the government troops surrounding their camps, there may be no need of food for these people in a year’s time. They may all be dead.

How does one live in a world with these realities?

I light three candles in front of the memorial we built for Sudan. One is for the aggressors in the North. One is for the victims in the South. One is for the governments of our world. I whisper prayers. I hope for change.

But change does not come, and the candles burn out. Only prayer remains, and as many die today of hunger and thirst and filth, I wonder how prayer assists, how prayer mends, how prayer makes change. I have heard people say, that prayer changes the heart of the pray-er, and I’ve known that to be true. But if it only makes change in me, is that really enough? What will that matter to the young dark-skinned boys dying in Sudan…or to the black teenage soldiers recruited in a down-and-out strip mall and now patrolling in SUV’s lined with plywood and sandbags instead of armored plates…or to a generation of brown skinned Iraqi youth looking at a decade of sanctions and two year’s of war?

The mind goes to dark places. It is not a good day to be alone.