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AFGHANISTAN: Lack of security is undermining post-war economic development. Between January and August last year, the UN documented more than 70 incidents involving aid agencies, including cases of rape, looting and firing on UN vehicles. Agencies charged with reconstruction and development have been reluctant to build or repair roads, communication networks and irrigation systems, and slow to undertake land reclamation projects.

ARGENTINA: Interim President Eduardo Duhalde has halted the economy’s free fall, but living standards have crashed since the government declared a debt default and devalued the peso early last year. Unemployment stands at 18 percent, and real wages fell by up to 40 percent last year. Some 58.5 percent of Argentines (22 million people) now live in poverty, compared with 38.5 percent in December 2001; 28 percent are in extreme poverty. The newly-impoverished country votes for a new president on April 27. No candidate has support of more than 20 percent, but five have more than 10 percent. Pundits expect a run-off ballot for the first time.

AUSTRALIA: Christians are praying for rain in the country’s three-year drought, its worst in a hundred years. Wild firestorms burned hundreds of homes and scorched millions of acres of farm land in January. Food and oil prices have increased as the drought has diminished crop production and exports. A citywide prayer event in Sydney’s Sports Stadium gathered 4,000 in early March. More than 200 other groups around the country joined in 40 days of prayer from late January to early March. Rain fell for the first time in more than a year in February. Cattlemen bought back breeding stock and three year-olds saw rain fall for the first time. But growers need ongoing heavy rainfall by April in order to sow fall crops.

BIBLE TRANSLATION: Of the 3,000-plus language groups (380 million people) that still need Bibles, about 90 percent are located in three geographic regions: Africa (940 languages), Asia (700 languages) and the Indo-Pacific Archipelago (1,000 languages).

CHINA: Last year’s 56 percent increase in car sales suggest China’s middle class is beginning to develop an automobile culture. Of 1.12 million cars sold nationwide in 2002, more than 90,000 were bought by private individuals in Beijing. Most buyers are in their 20s or 30s and grew up without firsthand experience of cars. Industry experts say the emerging automobile industry is evolving from young people’s desire for a lifestyle change, rather than a need to get to work more easily. Drive-in movie theater business is growing, and suburban shopping malls with large parking lots have sprouted.

ETHIOPIA: Churches sprung up among the Tsara people after witch doctors welcomed an itinerant evangelist. Sixty-five traditional religious practitioners had announced that a man would come with a black book, and were waiting expectantly. Five witch doctors have believed the gospel, along with many villagers who formerly feared their power.

INDIA: In March, Gujarat State passed anti-conversion legislation ironically titled “Gujarat Freedom of Religions Act.” The bill justifies the legislation “as a deterrent against anti-social and vested interest groups exploiting the innocent people belonging to depressed classes…” Critics fear the law will be used to target Dalits and others who desire to choose other faiths…Some missionaries are taking precautions when they baptize new believers. Baptismal candidates are asked to sign a statement saying that they were not forced into the Christian faith by anyone, but accepted Christ voluntarily.

RUSSIA: Women in a St. Petersburg prison heard Christian radio programs broadcast in their jail cells for the first time in February. Responding to prison officials’ plea for help rehabilitating prisoners, the Association of Christian Churches in St. Petersburg installed a pre-tuned radio in each jail cell. Ministry leaders hope to install similar radio systems in 16 more prisons in the area. Russian prisons hold more than one million inmates in often deplorable conditions, 20,000 of whom are in St. Petersburg…Cultivating separation of church and state is one agenda item of a new program launched by the Institute of Religion and Public Policy and the Volga Humanitarian and Theological Institute in Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia.

SOUTHERN AFRICA: The AIDS epidemic has injected a new deadly factor into the area’s chronic hunt for food. Millions of victims are too weak to grow enough food and too weak to survive with empty stomachs. Food shortages affect 14 million people in six southern African countries—Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique. Decimated by AIDS, families have fewer hands to plant and harvest. The 2.5 million AIDS orphans in the six countries lost parents before they were taught how to farm. More women than men suffer from AIDS, and ordinarily they do most farm work.

SRI LANKA:

The anti-conversion bill passed by India’s Tamil Nadu State last November has incited support for similar legislation among Sri Lanka’s anti-Christian lobby, consisting of Buddhist, Hindu and some Catholic groups. In November the Hindu Cultural Affairs Minister vowed to introduce a bill in Parliament curbing religious conversions, the first time a cabinet minister has championed this call. Evangelicals fear a bill may attract wide support, although the government’s official response has been silence.

UNITED STATES: An estimated 300 black Americans make up less than one percent of the roughly 35,000 long-term American missionaries. But the ranks of black Americans in missions are growing, according to the National Baptist Conventional USA. About 20 of its black missionaries serve in long-term assignments in southern Africa and Central America. Last summer more than 200 black college evangelicals went on short-term missions with Campus Crusade to eastern and southern Africa. Improving economics is a factor in the rising numbers. Since the 1980s as more blacks have entered the professional classes, many feel freer to support foreign missions, looking beyond the domestic ministries they’ve traditionally emphasized.

April 25, 2003