A blog post by Nicholas Pande, Anglican Alliance Disaster Resilience & Response Adviser
Friends, please join me in prayer and lament for the children lost in recent tragedies disasters and atrocities. My heart is breaking and my soul rages at the tragic and horrific loss of innocent young lives.
A deadly shipwreck off the coast of Greece has left at least 78 people dead, among them children, and hundreds of others still missing. The overcrowded fishing boat left the port of Tobruk in eastern Libya, carrying an estimated 400 to 750 migrants mostly from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt and Syria and was sailing for Italy before its engines malfunctioned, causing it to capsize and sink near the deepest parts of the Mediterranean Sea in the early hours of Wednesday 14 June. The Greek coastguards have rescued 104 people who have recounted the traumatic situation on the high seas and reported that there were over 100 children, who together with women, were in the hold of the vessel.
This tragedy exposes the untold sufferings of children who bear pain and lose their lives in disastrous situations caused by adults. On 30 May, the world received the horrible news of more than 50 babies who had died of starvation and dehydration in Maygoma orphanage in Khartoum since the civil war started in in Sudan in mid-April. “They needed to be fed every three hours. There was no one there,” Dr Abeer Abdallah told news outlet Reuters.
In yet another diabolical act, 39 school children were killed by members of a rebel group in Uganda on the night of Friday 16 June. A total of 41 people were killed in the attack, carried out by Allied Democratic Forces militants, who have been operating in eastern DR Congo where they have carried out similar attacks in recent years.
Please join the Anglican Alliance in prayer for the families and communities impacted by these disasters and particularly lift to the Lord children currently living in contexts of conflict and vulnerable to disasters.
Nicholas Pande
