Packed into a minibus in stifling heat, weaving left and right to avoid enormous potholes in the dirt road, surrounded by strangers from across the world and not at all confident about what was around the corner, I wondered if everyone that talks to Jan Ransom realises what they could be getting themselves in to!

I had only just arrived back from visiting a friend in Uganda when, together with my husband, daughter and her two children we went off to experience the New Wine summer conference for the first time.  Arriving in Shepton Mallet I had no idea that I would be back in Uganda within just a few months.  The conference was excellent; we loved the seminars and Bible studies but also took time to relax with church friends and to browse through the book store and mission stands in the market place.  I was recovering from my trip nicely and trying to put thoughts of desperately wanting to go back to Uganda out of my mind and had decided that if it were to happen I would wait for God to arrange it.

And that’s when it happened.

An African poster on a small stand run by Flame International seemed to be calling me over and I couldn’t resist going to talk with the two ladies about their work.  “We take teams of volunteers into Africa to facilitate trauma healing, forgiveness and reconciliation for post-conflict communities, along with opportunities for prayer and ministry.” Well I stood there agape for a while and finally managed to explain that I was a qualified psychiatric nurse and counsellor and that I had just returned from visiting the wife of a Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) pilot who had arranged for me to do some counselling  for missionary wives in Uganda.  “That’s funny,” they said “we work with MAF regularly and we’re going to Uganda for our next project.”  The sense of our hearts burning together was tangible and it wasn’t long before Jan, Val and I were making plans for my joining the team in November.  The project turned out to be much larger than I had realised with conferences, workshops and counselling as well as evangelism and prayer ministry for thousands with the local church providing intercessors and all arranged by Jan and Val at Flame International.

It’s hard to describe in these few words the scene that met the team on our first morning at the conference location in Aloi – hundreds of intercessors surrounded us as we got off the minibus, hugging us and shaking our hands with shouts of welcome before leading us off to march and dance around the conference site declaring the Lord’s praises!

That first day we learnt that nearly all of the attendees were internally displaced people (IDPs) and had suffered at the hands of the LRA, a brutal rebel group.  Many had walked for days to be at the conference and wasted no time in asking for prayer after the teaching on trauma, forgiveness and healing: they came forward in their hundreds.

During the prayer and counselling times, the women were telling us their stories of having seen their husbands shot and having their children abducted and killed by the LRA. Their homes had been razed to the ground and they had to move into the IDP camps.  It was strange to hear them ask for prayer to relieve headaches and stomach aches when really they were desperately traumatised.  The whole team felt the pouring out of God’s compassion and we held them in our arms as we prayed for them.

One moment I will never forget was standing facing a sea of people that had stood for prayer with their beautiful faces turned upward with eyes closed and arms reaching up to the Lord.  I could not stop the tears from running down my face.

Over the following days we saw God move in amazing ways with people released from the curses of witch doctors, healed physically and perhaps even more significantly forgiving those who had caused so much pain and trauma.  Each of us on the Flame International team saw God for ourselves breaking into these people’s lives to set free, save, heal and transform.  This was experiencing Jesus Christ performing the same works today as he did in His Earthly body.

I came home with something more than the renewed passion for Uganda that I might have expected: Planted within me was a new desire to tell other ‘older’ Christians that they are not too old to be called by God to mission.  I can’t get over it – who would have thought that God would send a little housewife like me on a mission to Africa at my age!!!  I realise now that far from sitting down and learning how to knit, I see God doing something new in my life and my husband has now been invited to Kampala so I am excited to see what the Lord has planned for us both.

So, thank you Flame International for making me part of the team, and thank you Lord for not being finished with me yet!

June McLellan

I had read reports and guidelines as preparation for my trip to southern Sudan with a team from Flame International in May 2009.  I read of children in the area being abducted by the LRA and learnt that some of the only credible information about their tactics and structures was provided by the small number who had managed to escape and find their way home.  I had no idea when I was doing my research that I would soon meet several of these ‘escapees’.

James was brought to the Flame International team by his father six weeks after his escape. The UK based charity works in partnership with the Church in areas where people are suffering the effects of post-conflict trauma.  Trained volunteers equip local church leaders, teaching trauma counselling through forgiveness and emotional and spiritual healing.  In turn, those leaders pass on what they have been taught and experienced for themselves to the wider community. But on this occasion a Flame team was in the area and able to give direct support.

After his capture, James was marched day and night by the LRA without food or water to the point of collapse.  This is standard practice for the LRA who then subject the abducted children to a regime of brutalization to turn them into ruthless killers.  The forced execution of siblings or friends is common and designed to cut all their ties from family back home.  James told us that nothing happened for a couple of days after the two boys had tried to escape but then they and others were called to go and collect honey from the bush.  Fifty yards from the base James was forced at gunpoint to carry out the killings.  Weeks of marching, moving base, raids on villages, looting and abductions followed before James managed to flee.

The LRA, lead by Joseph Kony since the mid 1980s, has been fighting for a new government in Uganda based on their own twisted view of spirituality with Kony himself claiming to be channelling several spirits who direct his actions.  In the last 30 years it is estimated that they have abducted between 30,000 and 50,000 children to become soldiers and sex slaves and killed more than 100,000 people.  They are now fighting for their survival against the joint forces of Sudan, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) who recently forged an alliance in an attempt to end their reign of terror.

It was this conflict that gave James his chance to run when the LRA unit he was with was bombed.  In the panic James fled and was chased by older soldiers who at one point ran right past him when he had fallen and given himself up for dead.  He ran again when he encountered Ugandan soldiers thinking they would kill him for being LRA.  21 days later he stumbled barely alive into an empty Ugandan army camp and was eating their food when they returned and arrested him.  He held up his hands and shouted “Sudanese, Sudanese!” For two days they carried him on their shoulders to a base with a field hospital where he was treated for a week before being returned to his family in a camp for internally displaced people in Sudan.

Flame’s team of volunteers had not anticipated meeting someone like James but, filled with compassion, members of the team spent hours with him and his father in prayer and counselling.  While we were with James another escapee was brought to us for care: Nelson had met James in the bush; they had been taken on the same day but were used by different units of the LRA.  We met James again the next morning; he had a large smile and reported that he’d slept peacefully for the first time in months.

In a separate location we were introduced to John by the local Anglican bishop.  He had been reunited with his family only two days earlier.  The LRA had carried out a large number of raids, murders and abductions on Christmas Day, 2008 in a coordinated retaliation for the very bombing raids that James had used to escape.  John was snatched from his uncle’s mud hut and saw his uncle being killed.  In his five months of captivity John was used by the LRA as a slave and a soldier and witnessed terrible atrocities.  It was too early for John to share details of his experiences but he did tell us of his miraculous escape – the children were guarded each night at gunpoint as they slept but one night he had a vivid dream.  In it he saw his Uncle (the one murdered in the raid) slapping him on the leg and urging him to wake up. “John, John, get up, you’ve got to go, quickly!”  The dream was so real that John felt his leg being hit and woke up to discover that he was temporarily unguarded.  He rolled over and crept out of the camp.  He then spent two days scavenging for food and water in the bush before being discovered by a local elderly man who took him to a nearby army camp.  The unit helped him recover before transporting him back to Sudan and then to his home town, finally walking him into his family compound to be met by shrieks of amazement and a tearful reunion.

The team was reminded of God’s word in Ephesians (2v10) that “…we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”  We continue to pray for these miracle boys to experience a full restoration and with it a life free from the unimaginable horrors inflicted upon them by Joseph Kony’s LRA; and for those children he still holds in captivity.

I was visiting the area with a team of volunteers on a short-term project with Flame International, a UK based charity that works in many war-torn countries. They assist the Church in supporting the spiritual and emotional health of local communities suffering the devastating effects of post-conflict trauma.  As a photographer I had been looking for an image that might communicate the wide range of issues and emotions that were prevalent in the area.  When I met Betty I saw that she was very much like Sudan in so many ways.

Like Sudan, Betty is staggeringly beautiful but also very poor. Her face was muddy and she was dressed in an old and dirty inside-out homemade shift dress.  Like Sudan, she has a traumatic past.  Years of civil war with the predominantly Arab northern half of Sudan have kept her family in poverty.  Since the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed in 2005 they have striven to regain stability with simple subsistence farming, but with no medical support the people are vulnerable to very curable ailments and Betty’s own mother had recently died of measles.  And like Sudan she is now fearful of a new threat which just adds insult to injury.

The Ugandan rebel group, The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), in fighting for their cause just across the border, have taken to raiding villages in the nearby Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and in Sudan.  Dispersed by the recent bombing of their base by the joint military forces of Uganda, DRC and Sudan, the LRA now hunt in small packs, killing adults, looting for food and supplies and abducting children to be conscripted into their ranks (estimates range from 30,000 to 50,000 taken since 1987).  Those most at risk are families living in remote rural locations away from the towns – families like Betty’s in the shade of the Gumbiri Mountains.  Fear of attacks has forced her family and others to relocate to the outskirts of towns to find safety in numbers within the IDP camps.  The mountains are only about 10 miles away and their spectacular presence on the horizon serves as a constant reminder of the home that she has left behind.  Now she eats boiled leaves while waiting for the recently planted crops to grow until the harvest which is still months away.

But like Sudan, Betty, her family and all those you meet demonstrate a determination to be joyful.  Against all the odds and alongside their deep emotional and spiritual woundedness they choose to smile, laugh, dance, sing and worship God with gratitude and wholeheartedness.

The efforts of Flame International are focused on working with the local church.  It trains the leaders and offers them first-hand trauma counselling through forgiveness, reconciliation and healing in the knowledge that they then in turn will minister more effectively to their communities as a ripple effect.  The hopes that children like Betty have for peaceful and restored lives are subsequently given a realistic prospect. During the team’s two week project they taught and ministered to nearly 200 church leaders, over 500 soldiers and many local churches filled with families, all at the invitation of and in partnership with two local Anglican Bishops.  As we left Sudan from a small dirt airstrip another Flame volunteer team was already on its way to Rwanda and yet another to Burundi carrying the same message of hope.

‘Betty with Bullets’ represents the ‘Why?’ that lies behind all of Flame International’s work: to help broken and traumatised people walk forward holding the symbols of a hopeful future and not those of a violent past.