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Inevitably in such a situation, folks will be
interested in the good news of the Kingdom.
Our remit is to preach the Gospel, but it’s
clear that we also have a duty to assist as we
can. We obviously try to ensure that the
welfare component doesn’t distort the
message of the Gospel in itself. But only God
is the judge of human motivations, and such
motivations do change over time. With all
these problems, we tried to do what we could.
We contacted a long term contact, who got a
copy of Bible Basics from us in 2009. We’ve
remained in contact on and off. He shares our
view on many things but hasn’t seen the need
for re-baptism. He is an African migrant from
previous years with a stable job, from when
Africans could immigrate legally to Sicily.
He has a group of other Africans he tries to
teach, pray and sing with and he tries to help
the newer migrants as best he can. We
assisted him in renting a room which can be
used as a base for them. It’s a disused shop in
a very run down area of Syracuse, the port
once visited by Paul.
We provided lots of water, rice and pasta. The
original group he has built up are also settled
migrants, but they are all working on minimum
wage and limited as to how much they can
assist the flood of new migrants. We felt they
were very sincere and set them up to study
Bible Basics as a group and to distribute the
food and water provided. On the food and
some of the bottles we placed our labels.
We also left them plenty of Bible Basics and
NEV Bibles. On a subsequent visit we found
that they have studied them, and we’re so
thrilled that they have indeed become a
refuge for some and that four women studied
the material and wanted to be baptized:
Queen, Joanna, Patience and Sonia.
Most of the migrants are young males and
many of them have terrible stories of torture
in Libya where they were held under ransom
and tortured. The women of course are raped
and kept as sex slaves, often only released if
they get pregnant. If they don’t drown on the
way, these people then arrive in Sicily. They
The Group singing and thanking God
Left: water, rice and pasta being taken to the rented room and above: a very tired
mother feeds her child on out of date ‘Tuc’ biscuits, sitting outside their new shelter
~ continued ...