Support the ACT appeal for Zimbabwe

Today I attended a small reception by the Zimbabwe Geneva advocacy group. Both Marlon Zakeyo of WSCF and Michael Hyden from ACT International spoke movingly of campaigning and practical efforts to protect people in Zimbabwe from starvation and disease. We collected money for the ACT Zimbabwe appeal and will continue to do that tomorrow at our evening Advent service. ACT works particularly with Lutheran World Service and Christian Care in Zimbabwe.

Meanwhile the Rev. Ishmael Noko of the Lutheran World Federation has sent a letter speaking of anguish and outrage at Zimbabweans’ suffering to church leaders in southern Africa. ENI has also reported this:

The general secretary of the Lutheran World Federation, the Rev. Ishmael Noko, has in a letter to Lutheran church leaders in southern Africa expressed anguish and outrage over the increasingly worsening crisis in Zimbabwe.
On Robert Mugabe's current leadership role in the country, Noko noted that while many Zimbabweans paid the ultimate price during the struggle for freedom from colonial rule, the "independent government that they fought for has turned liberation into repression, and finally into calamity".
Noko appealed to heads of LWF member churches in the Southern African Development Community area to push the region's governments "to take the further steps necessary to bring an end to the suffering of the people of Zimbabwe, which is also the suffering of the whole region", the Geneva-based LWF said in a 16 December statement.