Sudan... suffering, poverty, conflict, disease

I want to go one day and see it for myself... not because I don't believe it, but because how can you speak passionately about something if you have not experienced it? I speak passionately about poverty in Africa, I have only seen a small piece of what that looks like... that experience has molded me and shaped me in ways impossible had I never ventured outside of my comfortable middle-class existence. But the poverty of Sudan may be vastly different from South Africa's poverty, and always different from America's.

Let's do a word association... and don't peek at what I've written (in fact i will disguise it in white so you'll have to highlight it to see) -- I'll say a word, and you write down everything that comes to mind... ready... go

SUDAN:
civil war, genocide, Darfur, north vs south, oil, janjaweed, khartoum, islam vs christianity vs africanism, black africa vs arab africa, beauty, pain, hunger, disease, turmoil, suffering, MASSIVE, unimaginable, crying, tears, blood, death....

How much did you come up with? How much of it was positive? How much of it made you smile? Therein lies the problem... there is beautiful culture underneath the pain... there is amazing art beneath the scortched earth of war... there is a message of hope and peace and love somewhere in between the despair, the fighting and the hate...

please pray for this nation... pray for peace, hope, love, and deliverance...