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Message Magazine Cover

Cover Photo by Tom Kilpatrick

In This Issue

The Original Six

Ross Riggs, Bosnia

Centuries of hatred and lies have divided Bosnia more than any map might show. The war between 1992 and 1996 took the lives of Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats alike…. But the clearest picture of the damage done comes through the eyes of the children forced to live through that bloody time.

My Father’s Refuge

L.W. and P. K.

Prabin, a four-year-old boy in South Asia, was suddenly orphaned and left alone when his mother died of tuberculosis and his father abandoned him. ABWE missionaries* took him in and gave him love and a home. But it took some time for Prabin to adjust to the missionaries’ lifestyle. They remember one morning when Prabin came out of his room wide-eyed and frightened. “Uncle!” he said to the missionary. “There are hands under the bed!” These “hands” turned out to be winter gloves—a commodity Prabin had never seen before.

Seeing the Blind with Compassion

Joan Schmitz with Angela Shuff

In Togo, West Africa, many children are born blind or become blind from cataracts, glaucoma, and childhood diseases that go untreated. The lives of the blind in Africa are not easy. Family members look at this handicap as a curse, similar to how the disciples viewed the man’s blindness in John chapter nine. Parents take their children to fetish priests who put harmful medicines in their eyes and pour animal’s blood over idols in order to appease evil spirits….The problem is heart-wrenching, but at The Village of Light, an ABWE center and school for the blind, children who live in darkness are finding hope.