How South Sudan became an independent country. Frontline Fellowship has been operating for 38 years, serving persecuted churches throughout Africa. Our vision is Africa for Christ. And as part of the Henry Morton Stanley School of Christian Journalism, the story of how the youngest country on earth came to obtain its independence is quite a remarkable one. So how South Sudan became an independent country. In this historic picture, Kenneth Beringua gave me the Macedonian call stands on the far right. He, 25 years ago, tracked me down, 1995. He had written to me already. He had heard of my ministry in Mozambique and Angola, working amongst the resistance movements, and thought that I could be a friend in the Eden Sudan. And I was in the East African mission. I'd just been in Rwanda and taking Bibles, distributing them to people in prison, including the inter-hombre mass murderers in Kigali, and had hitchhiked into eastern Equatorial Sudan with about 250 bibles, didn't have a vehicle of her own yet, and when I came back to Nairobi, Kenneth Beringa tracked me down. Now this is many years later, but here we've got the governor of Equatoria on the far right, we've got Bishop Bulun Duli, who was the first bishop consecrated in the liberated and free Sudan, and a board member of our mission later. And this is Commander Selvakia. Commander Selvakia at that stage was second commander of the SLA. Today he is the president of South Sudan. Back in 2001, we were arguing with him over the need for South Sudan to go independent. And he said that's not possible. In fact, I've been arguing with the founder of the SPLA, Colonel John Goring as well, about the need for independence. And he said, we'll never get it. They've never redrawn the map since Berlin Conference 1885. And the African Union will not alter the maps, no matter what the ethnolinguistic mix of the people are. And I said, well, they must redo it because you will have non-stop war. You've had already 2 million people killed in this over 50 years war going since the British left in 1955. Muslim Arab North, Christian Black South, different calendars, different alphabets, different languages, different religions, different worldviews, different racial makeup. How could you expect this country to work? There must be a redrawing of the map to recognize ethnolinguistic and religious realities. And I said, you will always be a minority if you stay in Arab-dominated Sudan, because the black Christians are a minority in the whole of Sudan, but they're a majority in the South. Well, interesting that he who said to me it was not possible, just a few years later, was president of an independent South Sudan. The Muslim world is the biggest, most resistant, most difficult closed mission fields on earth. In the 1040 window, which is missionary shorthand for the most unreached, neglected mission fields on earth, from the 10th degree latitude north to the 40th degree latitude north, going from the Atlantic across North Africa, Middle East, South Central Asia to the Pacific Ocean. In that 1040 window is most of the world's population. Four billion non-Christians. The least amount of missionaries, the most amount of wars, the most amount of terrorism, the most amount of persecution, the most of everything bad and the least of everything good, basically, in the 1040 window. And that's the final mission's frontier. And part of that 1040 window is Sudan, which is the subject of tonight. In Isaiah 18, verse two, we read, go swift messengers to people tall and smooth-skinned, to people feared far and wide, an aggressive nation of strange speech, whose land is divided by rivers. Sudan is a land of Arab rivers, the Blue Nile and the White Nile amongst others. This is Kenneth Bringo who gave me the Macedonian call in 1995. We walked hundreds of kilometers together through the bush, distributed tens of thousands of Bibles. Sunday school books, hymn books, catechisms. Trained pastors from one side of Sudan to the other. Met with key leaders. Here's Kenneth Brink on the far right. And Governor and Bishop Willem Dooley in the middle. Governor of Equatoria. And Sylva Kier and the leadership of South Sudan that we were working with at that stage. However, in 1995, the greatest political force in the country was Sheikh al-Tarabi. And this Sheikh al-Tarabi, he is like the modern godfather of Islamic terrorism. A really aggressive and horrible individual who was calling for jihad, extermination of the Christians in the mountains in South Sudan. And he is bringing up a very fundamentalist, radical, Sufi sect of fundamentalist Muslims in Sudan. And in 1989, Omar al-Bashir, this character here in the military uniform, he seized power. And in fact, he's only thrown out just last year on about the 30th anniversary of his coup. They've had six, now seven coup d'etats or revolutions, successful revolutions in Sudan since the British left in 1955. And so Al-Turabi is like his false prophet and he's sort of the beast over there. He's wanted for war crimes, he's wanted for genocide, all sorts of hideous things. The reality of Sudan is you've got two Sudans, not that that was recognized at that time. Today you get the Republic of Sudan, so Kordan and South Sudan, but the problem is the oil fields straddle the borders. And that's of course a tremendous source of conflict. Here's the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. This is where we've done a lot of our work and of course there's a lot of oil nearby in the south of South Kordofan and the Janjaweed and the Mujahideen militia are coming and you can be flying in Sudan, you can see burning villages and of course the resistance fighters are seeking to protect their areas and they capture weapons from the enemy. There's a lot of destruction, warfare, fighting, burning. There's reality. And here's just one picture of a MiG jet provided by Red China dropping a bomb on a village in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. So we've walked through the smoke and the fire and the ash and the wreckage. and seen many churches destroyed. Now I've conducted something like 1,200 church services and meetings in Sudan over the years. I don't think I've ever been at a single church or school that hadn't been bombed at least once. Sometimes 10, 12, 18 times in a 12 month period. Many of the people who moved mountains when I was going there lived up in the caves to find some protection from the bombing. And here these children have piled up some rocks to kind of get some more protection in the cave, hopefully when they get bombed. This is not unusual. And you can see the records of interesting types of whatever this was. So for 38 years, our mission's vision has been to work in war zones, to evangelize combatants, help persecute church, to go behind enemy lines for Christ. Our Lord Jesus said in John 4.35, lift up your eyes and look at the fields for they are already ripe for harvest. Now this is a map that we designed on a mission to kind of show the spiritual reality of Africa. The green represents where Islam is the majority. The yellow were witchcraft, the majority, and then a cross where at least 20% are evangelicals, a crest moon where at least 20% are Muslim, and a skull where at least 20% are animist. So this gives you a bit of a feel. And the red men, where the wars were, we're talking about back in the 1990s when we started work in Sudan. So that gives you a bit of a feel. redrew the map. This is the first time that South Sudan was being delineated separate, the Christian Black South being separated from the Muslim North. I think this map might have been the first time that treated South Sudan as an independent country, even though the leaders of the movement in South Sudan didn't believe it was possible at that stage. This is one of the first posts we put out, pray for Sudan, back when color printing was not affordable or an option for us. Pray for Sudan. Kush will submit herself to God. Psalm 68, verse 31. This is a famous picture. This picture dates back to 19... It won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for photojournalism. Kevin Carter, a South African photojournalist, took this picture and went to New York and received this Pulitzer Prize, which is like the Academy Awards of photojournalism. And after he got the picture, people start to ask questions. What happened to the little girl in the picture? Well, I don't know, said Kevin Carter. Well, what's the story? Where did you, how did you get this picture? Well, he was on his first visit to Sudan, his only visit. He had chartered a plane, his plane was only gonna wait on the airstrip for about an hour or two. He had to find a photographic opportunity nearby, and he's about 300 meters from the airstrip, and he saw this little girl crawling, stumbling, obviously malnourished and weak, so he positioned himself in the shade of a tree, he took a light reading, he focused up, and he waited an hour. But when that vulture hopped in the background, I clicked the shutter and I knew I had an award-winning picture, he said. So what did you do after you took the picture? Well, said Kevin Carter, I smoked a cigarette and I cursed God. He cursed God. He blamed God for what he was personally responsible. This little girl weighed less than his camera equipment. He could have carried her 300 meters. She could have gotten flown to the Red Cross Hospital in Loka Chokyo, a neighbor in Kenya, been put in a drip, maybe she could have survived. But all Kevin Carter took into Sudan was his cameras. All he left behind in Sudan were cigarette stubs. All he took out of Sudan was this picture. When you look at this picture, you think of the words of the Lord Jesus, whatever you did not do unto one of these my brethren, you did not do it to me. And so, starting in 1995, start to go up into Sudan. Of course, the first thing you notice is some of the people there dress very similar to the Maasai that you would get in Kenya. Some are very tribal still. You found the Kasipa people in Eastern Equatorial still have their lips and the ears stretched to fit these saucer-like bits of pottery. There's all kinds of body modifications and body scarification as part of animistic rituals. Some of the people were really seriously into body painting. And most obnoxious of all is the Dinkin where people had the children have these lines and of course the pattern of scars across their forehead would indicate what particular tribe they're in. and the people dying of starvation. This is the Sud. The Sud is a swamp about the size of the Free State. And it can take you three or four days to cross the Nile River in some points because the swamp is so big. But one thing that strikes you is you get to some of these huts and you can see a cross on their hut. And even here on top of that. By the way, I thought this was a church. This is an upper Nile in Nuwera territory, but actually this is where they kept the cattle. It's the biggest and best building in the village, but it was reserved for the cattle, which is super important to them. Their churches didn't look this good. And here's some Nuwera people coming to a feeding center. You can see some of the food piled up. And we brought Genesis and Exodus books for them. Genesis and Exodus in the Nuwera language. It was the first time they had received books of the Old Testament in the Nuwara language. I mean, when did you last read Genesis and Exodus? The first time they read it in their language was 1995. So you'd see signs of Arabization. Friday's the day of rest, Sunday's a market day and a school day. Arabic's the official language of the country and so on. They called it Arabization. We saw evidence of desecration of graveyards, smashing of crosses by the Arab forces, and a lot of churches burned down. This Episcopal church was destroyed by helicopter. No, this one was actually MiG fighter bombers coming past, and some of the hot shrapnel incinerated the thatch, and the whole Episcopal church burned down, beautiful wooden thatch church. The Episcopal pastor and his deacon standing in the ashes of what was once a very nice church. This church was destroyed by helicopter gunship, as was this one. And during the dry season, bombing would ignite bushfires which would kill lots of domestic or wild animals, destroy crops, homes, farms. Devastating. Exterior decorating by Muhammad and sons. And this is Loi, the birthplace of Christianity in Southern Sudan. As you can see, the churches in Sudan are built on the graves of the missionaries. In this case, Reverend Dr. General Kenneth Fraser and his wife, Aileen. And so, one of the first things we'd be shown when we got to any of these places was the bomb shelter. Like, good hospitality, here's the bomb shelter, here's an AK-47. Sort of like we might show people a bathroom and give them a towel or shut the kitchens on. That's just standard Sudanese hospitality. For very good real reason, because the bombings were constant, regular. incessant. This is damage done to the church at Lui, the birthplace of Christianity in Southern Sudan. This church has been bombed 10 times. while I was there, destroyed three times, rebuilt each time. Pastor Vasco examining the West Wall. And Reverend Geoffrey Kernaghan, Pastor Vasco, with me, examining the damage done by a bombing just the day after Christmas, 26th of December 1999. The mosque nearby, has never had anyone worship in it. It's overgrown. The only thing moving in there is insects and snakes. But what's happened, but it's never been desecrated by the Christians. The Muslims planted mosques everywhere, even where there were no Muslims. And they sort of hoped Muslims would come, but nobody got converted, nobody ever used these places. And interestingly, the Christians didn't take it down, although it's some pretty good building material. I've preached in this church maybe more than any other outside of South Africa. This is the Episcopal Church in Cotterby. And after my first mission there, I came back and it was destroyed. Helicopter gunships had destroyed it. Came there in 1996 and there it was, destroyed by helicopter gunships. Five people had been killed in the attack. And these pastors had walked for many miles to come to have a Muslim evangelism workshop. The venue was destroyed, but they still stood with the Christian flag in the ashes of this charred remains of the church. They still wanted me to teach them how to win their enemies to Christ. Here's Canon Rubin, the oldest man in the district, helping to rebuild the church. Interestingly enough, he was part of the equatorial corps. British trained, they were the Black South Army. And the Equatorial Corps, his unit, B Company, actually fired the first shots of the war. As the British were leaving in 1955, before even the day of independence, they'd already evacuated the south, they were getting ready to leave Khartoum, the Arabs came and told the Equatorial Corps to stack all their weapons up in the armory and to come without their weapons and come north, they're coming on a train. And the Equatorial Corps said, no, we know you Arabs, you will just treat us like you always have as slaves. We're the guardians of the South, we're not laying down our weapons." And so a confrontation occurred, they killed the Arab officers and that was the beginning of Ananya I, or the First War of Liberation, which started already in 1955. Before the British had even left, the civil war between North and South, Arab and Black, was on. While we were rebuilding this church, this is the church at Cotterby, we rigged up a screen and we showed them different films, the Jesus film, Ben-Hur, Khartoum. Last week I spoke with General Charles Gordon, this is one of our library copies of this great classic and it was there that I had someone come to me after the showing and said, it seems to me that Ben-Hur is Gordon Parsha. I had to explain, yes, well, that's good observation, but you see, they're depicting events 2,000, 3,000 years apart, but Charlton Heston is an actor, and these people really got confused. When we had finished the church, we had infected in thatch season. There was no thatch to harvest. And so we had to put plastic on the roof for the first few months before there was a chance to actually harvest some thatch for the roof. But anyway, this was the church at Cotterby, and this is now fully rebuilt, a bit bigger than it was originally, actually. And we've had a lot of service there. Well, since 1988, the United Nations had been operating in what they called Operation Lifeline Sedan, OLS, and as I document in my book on Sedan, Faith Under Fire on Sedan, it is nothing but corruption and incompetence. They poured billions of dollars into Operation Lifeline Sedan. As somebody calculated, If they had, in the 10 years that they'd spent so many billions, which is in Faith Under Fire in Sudan, if for that same money, they could have built a McDonald's in every village in Sudan and given them Happy Meals and Burger Macs and fries and Coke three times a day for everybody and it would have been a lot cheaper. And in fact, they reported that people were starving in Sudan at a greater rate 10 years later than they were before. despite the UN's involvement. In fact, I'd say because of the UN's involvement. Because the UN was extending the war by providing an efficient air force for the Sudan government. The Sudan government had been overrun by the rebels in the south and they were just besieged in these main towns like Juba, Malakal, and so on. And so they couldn't get support, and the whole goal of a siege was to starve the enemy into submission, so you don't need to fight, but you can capture the stronghold. The UN was flying in big C-130s like this, flying in massive amounts of relief aid to the very forces who were bombing the south and doing the scorched earth and causing the famine in the first place. The hypocrisy of the UN knows no end, but I can safely say they extended the war and increased the suffering. But this was a logistical problem, because the UN controlled Loka Chokyo. This is Loka Chokyo, the northernmost point in Kenya. You can see the very famous rock which delineates Loka Chokyo. Just north of there is Sudan. And on my first attempt to fly into Sudan as opposed to driving in, because I had to reach West Nekotori, which was cut off by road, the Arabs controlled, there's no way to get in except by air. And my flight, our charter flight, was canceled. British Special Air Service chap who had served in the Rhodesian Sea Squadron was running security for the UN, so I sought him out in Loka Chokya, identified myself as a Rhodesian, and my brother had served in the Rhodesian Army and had some friends, and yes, he knew Chris Schillenberg and this and that, and we were Schillies. We were chatting about different people from C-Squadron and there was a good camaraderie and instant recollection and even people I knew from the South African Army, he had met some of them and so on. So there was a good chatting away and then I said, I need a flight clearance, your people have cancelled my flight. No problem, he says. Whips out his pen, clipboard, what's your cargo? Bibles, I said. He put his pen away, his face fell, he said, Bibles. There's 14 helicopter gunships in Tuba. I said, no, that's why I need the flight clearance. He shook his head at me and he said, you take off with Bibles, we will blow you out of the sky. And all that camaraderie and all that bonding just dissipate like that. And I said, does the blue beret suck your brains out? You're threatening my life for Bibles? He said, it's against the law. I said, so is brandy and whiskey, but you're flying in boxes of alcohol into your people's places in South Sudan. He said, that's different. I said, I know it's different. The Bible's actually going to help someone. And anyway, he just was threatening and turned his back on me. And so we had to... go in illegally. In fact, I can say that the UN cancelled every flight I ever organized for Sudan at the New York. And so we had to fly in surreptitiously and we had to find those kind of mercenary pilots who will risk their lives and their license and their aircraft to fly in low, below the radar net and so on. And, of course, this is the kind of thing we were worried about. Juba, Malakal, they had Sudan Air Force bases with heavy equipment like this. But here's one of our first Cessna caravans A ton of Bibles flown in. And here's some of the Dinka Padang, Dinka Bora, Bibles that we're smuggling in. Canon Kenneth Baringwa, to the far left. And you can see how tall these Dinka people are. You really have to look up to these folks. And some of the hymn books, prayer books, catechisms, Bibles, and some of the pastors we trained. Some of these pastors, five, six, seven churches to care for. Many serfs were held outside because the buildings were destroyed. And also, to be honest, it was very hot anyway. So sitting outside in the shade of a tree was often better than in a building. Some places, like Meridi, still had a cathedral operational. Being Episcopal, Church of England, they had the gowns and the processions and all of that. But in some places, the people carried their own chairs because The church building in town had been bombed, so we went out in the forest and people carried their own chairs to do so. How many people do you know would walk to church carrying their own chairs when there's a chance you might get bombed while doing so? So this is a typical kind of church service in the bush. You can see the processionals and the people bring their own seats. They're sort of camouflaged in a forest type of venue in order to hopefully escape detection by the Arabs and escape bombing. This is a church conference held back in 1996 in eastern Equatoria near Cotterby and Mundry. And wonderful people, past, look at these past, you know, tough, travel long distance, eager. This chap with the broken glasses, notebook, pen in hand, eager to learn. And this is the pulpit they made for us. This communion being served in the forest. And hymn books. the town hall with the elders of the town, the first chaplain's period that we conducted amongst the SPLA, and the first chaplain's office we set up in Meridi. You can see he's holding Faith Under Fire in his handbook at that stage, the first edition. He's gone through three editions. And one of the first battalion parades at the Meridi military base, which had been captured from the Arabs sometime before. The escort that I was given by the governor to look after us while we were traveling around, And we got to cross rivers because the bridges were blown up. And so crossing rivers was getting your feet wet kind of operation. And getting the Bibles across meant you had to get these people in these watus, which is these dugout canoes. And let me tell you, these people, they torment us. You know, they stand up and they sort of row across. You stand up on your wall and you're just... I mean, these things are round. They've hollowed out a tree stump. It doesn't have a keel. It's totally round. You can only do this sitting down. In fact, honestly, I found it easier swimming in the rivers. But this was the Ye River, the boundary between the Arab North and the Christian South during the war in 1996. But the SPLA did some major offensives in 1997 and won a huge amount of space. In the space of about three months, they conquered 34 bases of the Arabs and extended the territory dramatically, including right up to the Ugandan border so we could then drive in in the future. And these are some of the patrols and anti-aircraft guns captured by the enemy. And these people were concerned that their war was not known. They said, we are hidden people fighting a forgotten war. And so while I'd never considered myself a photographer, that's where I really started taking a lot of pictures. 1995, 96, 97. In Sudan, I was always going around with a camera and trying to document, and I even brought video cameras in, film some of this, because you couldn't find anything, not a picture anywhere, on the war in Sudan. It was like unknown war. And so we made it known. I got these pictures published in many military magazines all over the world to let people know about what the SPLA were fighting. Here they're reading one of the frontline news and seeing their pictures and their stories in them. to know they're not alone, to know they're not forgotten. This is the actual battlefront. And here you can see at the front with a Christian flag holding up the Faith Under Fire in Sudan book. And they were giving cheers and Viva Frontline and all that sort of thing. Not very normal for us, but there we go. And ministering amongst them. I remember on this occasion I had a Nigerian missionary with us. And the Nigerian missionary stood up and he preached from one of these pastures. Joshua, but kill them all, leave not one person alive, women, children. I thought, where's he going with us? And, you know, at the entrance, feverish, belay, and so on. He came back and said, Elton, what are you doing? He said, well, you know, the Arabs are terrible. He said, That's a specific command to specific people. We have to teach biblical principles. We take prisoners of war. We don't mistreat prisoners of war. You don't kill civilians. He said, but they're doing it to us. He said, Elton, we're meant to be lifting these people's stands up. I'm so glad no one was recording that one. It was terrible. But you know, people, he came from the Igbo area of Nigeria and they had no love for the Muslims in Nigeria and he was whipping these people up to war crimes. Had to try and undo that damage. Here we are with some of our friends in the trenches. Frontline news, radio operator, heading off on patrol. Where do you get your weapons from? The enemy is my quartermaster. All the weapons I have are what they captured from the enemy. So where does the enemy get the weapons? Red China, Indonesia and Malaysia. Those are the main suppliers of their weapons. You can see Chinese block weapons all over. And these are pictures that actually have become fairly iconic, published in quite a few publications, military magazines around the world. that I took at the battlefront to try and make the SPLA and their fight known better. And you can see a lot of good Chinese weapons here. So they didn't have a chaplain's corps. In fact the SPLA had been a Marxist revolutionary group that started in neighboring Ethiopia and with the support of Mengistu, the hideous dictator of Ethiopia. And through our ministry and Kenneth Beringuas who invited me, we got them to get rid of the commissars, get rid of the red stars, bring in chaplains, bring in the Christian fags, have Bible studies. I believe it's the only example of a Marxist revolutionary movement being turned into an officially Christian group and ditching the Marxist roots. These are some of the chaplains we were training. We trained the first 50 chaplains. My wife sewed the berets, badges on. We designed the badges for the SPLA, took them in for them, and equipped them with the bibles and backpacks. And these are some of the SPLA chaplains in training. Some of the churches we gathered at. This is right at the battlefront, actually. We came under artillery and rocket bombardment while I was preaching on Psalm 46 here, and that was documented in the three days in St. Anphel, which was done by a war correspondent who was sent in to do a hatchet job on me. He ended up doing a very positive film. Interesting how an artillery bombardment can change a person's perspective. And we took in evangelistic materials, the man in the box who speaks my language, the hand-cranked solar panel powered tape recorders from Bible media or gospel recordings. And these are some of the chapters. You can always get an audience with these man in the box who speaks my languages. And with a flip chart, Sunday School, Outreachers, Chaplain Peter Jonathan, one of our first of the four chaplains we began training. And I think you can see some old South African SADF uniforms that were donated by some of our people up there to them because they often didn't have uniforms and they were in tattoos and had what they captured from the enemy. So you can see some of the SPLA badges that we designed and got printed in Cape Town. Chaplain Peter praying for the espionage troops as they're about to go on patrol. Bibles being distributed to the troops. I'd snap this picture close to the battlefront of a soldier doing his daily quiet time with the new moral Bible we're taking. This is part of our projects of Bibles, Bible bags, boots, berets, and Bible media. A whole bunch of Bs that we were equipping the chaplains with. That's pretty common, yes, to see soldiers walking with slip-slops. They didn't have boots. So, I thought they needed boots. I took their sizes, went to a boot factory in Pardon Island, and got 50 boots made for them, or purchased. And so, I took these back and they were handed over to them, and next thing I saw these chapels walking with the boots around their necks, walking barefoot, or in slip-slops, arriving at church, when they get to church, putting on the boots as they come into church, and I said, That's not the purpose of the boots. It's meant to protect you. He says, but he wants these boots to last. So he's got them in the church. He walks barefoot between them and puts them on when he comes into church. So these are some of our, you can see Arabic, English, New Testament, parallel. Bible media, gospel recordings, messengers, and then God Story VCD kits. This was a really great invention, brought to us. It's a little screen, but those little PA systems were really effective. Battery-powered. We also had solar panel recharging abilities for them. And so we were equipping them with little things that gave a one-hour God Story, which is basically creation to Christ. Very simple. video presentation, and you see masses, a whole church, a whole marketplace all gathering. I mean, they can't see that little screen, but they're listening. That's great intent. And this just gave them opportunities to gather crowds anywhere and taught them evangelistic opportunities. You can see some of the old solar panels we started carrying. Those are actually the the first ones we ever had. Flexible, you could strap them to your backpack, walk all day, getting enough sunlight to recharge, and then you'd have about four hours of battery power from that solar panel that we just attached to the backpack, so they have to charge the video projector, the VCD kits, and all of that. They wanted, of course, communion equipment, so we took in communion kits for the chaplains as well, and most exciting for them was seeing their pictures, their stories, to know they're not alone, they're not forgotten. Here you can see the t-shirts you got made in Cape Town of Espilet chaplains, the berets that Nora sewed up, and yep, marble, beret, and boots. And here we were for a while, training the chaplains with these berets and with the Espilet t-shirts. Later they were able to get proper uniforms, but with the crystal flags we were training them to be real soldiers, not a rabble in the bush. And this is the first chaplains conference that we conducted back in 1997 in Bishop Gwynne Bible College and this is quite an opportunity. Bible teaching materials and bikes. This is another major thing, to give mobility. When we realized how many pastors that four or five or even six or seven congregations care for, giving them bicycles multiplied the ministry that they could get to several churches on a single Sunday, not just to one church a month or something like that. And so the Bibles and bikes, we took in hundreds of bicycles. And here you can see some of the bags, the cryptic Bible bags, gospel recordings, materials. all good, well kitted out, bibles and bikes. This is a major project for a lot of times. Chaplain Moses over here and some of the SPLA chaplains at the training base in Jumbo about to head out on the road to Juba. fully kitted out with VCD kits and gospel messengers. And then there was the need for chaplains' handbooks and chaplains' prayer books, and they've gone through several editions over the years, and now we've got the most up-to-date one, the chaplains' handbook, which combines prayer book as well. And these are being used in other countries as well, but especially by the Sudanese. It was a massive logistical challenge to channel enough Bibles to keep us going. It's like logistics for war. And so we had a container in Loka Chokyo that we would be shipping things up to. And so sometimes when you're waiting for your plane and there's this or that delay for whatever reason, we'd do some ministry in Loka Chokyo. So I went to the local Red Cross official and I tried to see if he would let us distribute Bibles in the Red Cross Hospital. They had apparently over 200 patients, all from Sudan, in a Red Cross hospital in Okachukyo. Many of them were wounded, lost limbs, traumatized, of course, by the war. So I went to the Red Cross official, who's French-speaking, and I asked him if he could just read Bibles, and he said, oh, no, absolutely not. The Red Cross is a secular organization. I said, could you please explain to me the significance of the Red Cross? He started to choke and splutter and cough, and he said, no, no, no, it's got nothing to do with religion. It's simply antiquated. identification symbol, purely an identification symbol. It's the Swiss flag reversed. I said, now you know why Switzerland's got a white cross and red, and you know why the Red Cross got a red cross and white. And do you know that the founder was an evangelical Christian, and in fact, I've been to the Red Cross Museum, the International Committee of the Red Cross Museum in Geneva, and they've got the first things on display. Their founder's Bible, the scripture verses, Good Samaritan, heal the sick, love your neighbor, do as you want to be done unto you, go and do likewise. I mean, these are the first exhibits in the museum. This is the founding of the Red Cross. He said, why are you ashamed of your roots? He hung his head and he said, it's very difficult. Sudan's an Islamic country and so on and so forth. I said, okay, let me ask you a question. I know you're treating people medically, but what are you doing for them spiritually? What are you doing for them mentally, emotionally? Do you have a library for them?" No, he said, we don't have books in their languages. I said, I've got books in their languages. I've got the book in their languages. So after a while he said, okay, I'll tell you what, I'll let you go. but you're not allowed to force the Bibles on anyone, only to those people who want it. Sure, no problem. We went there and we were basically run down by people on one legs and in their wheelchairs storming us, and this Frenchman had to be helping me just reading because, you know, I couldn't cope with the volume. It was just overwhelming. And the people were so excited, dancing, singing. And he said, I had no idea that people went to the Bible See. Always welcome. Anytime you come in. Next time I came back, I found he'd been replaced. I was sent to the hospital. Still, we did manage to smuggle in Bible See on another occasion, too, to the Red Cross Hospital. I remember one occasion we went there and I wanted to get in and there was an absolute no. So I went on a Saturday night. to the Red Cross Hospital and we got to the gates and of course I knew all the Whitey's expatriates would be in town getting drunk. So get them, there's only some black people at the gate, Kenyon's on. I've got some medicines to donate. I said we're going in early tomorrow morning, which is true. And we have to distribute these because these are scheduled for medicines. We don't have anyone qualified enough to administer them. So we need to donate these medicines that were given to us to Red Cross Hospital. Well, can't you come back on Monday? No, we can't. We're leaving tomorrow, first thing, flying in. We've got to leave very early because we've got church hours in there. And so they finally let me in, and while our nurse was taking the medicines to the pharmacy, I stood at the back of the buckee lift and said, anyone wants a Bible? And stampede, people there. And while I was distributing these Bibles, in came this Dutch witch this with a pagan sign around her she was the one in charge of the thing and she just exploded and I said well they saw we had Bibles and they wanted them and her response was of course they wanted them they're Christians all of them they're all Christians So that's the kind of people running the Red Cross these days. Absolutely hostile to the Bible, but the Sudanese got the Bibles anyway. We were kicked out the gate very unceremoniously, but even as we were going out and driving out, one of the people in the back of the bike was still handing Bibles to people on crutches or running after to get their copies of Bibles. It was in the dark. It would have made some good pictures. We could have got pictures of it, but anyway. So youth work, Sunday school work, Look at this. How many children are working on this one coloring-in book that we put in the ground? There's three. But I'm suspecting there might actually be four, looking at the hands there. I only noticed it after taking the pictures, how many worked on the same coloring-in book. They're just desperate for anything. So we started teacher training programs. And this is one of the most ambitious programs we did, providing the schools, first of all, with Bibles. and then providing them with textbooks for teachers. And we provide thousands of Bibles and thousands of textbooks for teachers. And this is, you can see a great improvement. If you look back, do you see the teachers are sitting just on poles here in a very rugged system. But over here, they've now built concrete floor, nice seats with a bit of a desk attached. So this is now formally established teacher training college in Cotterby. We ran a lot of seminars there, workshops. I think in over the years I must have trained at least 780 teachers just in Cotterby. And we provide them with over 5,000 textbooks and a lot more Bibles. Here's some of the Bibles. Those are some of the textbooks. And here are people getting some Christian liberty textbooks for their schools, examining faith in the fine Sudan, certificates for people doing the teacher training program. And here's Wesley, our librarian. He started to ship in lots of good books to provide to the different schools in Sudan. Banner of Truth Trust donated vast amounts of good books for us to give as libraries to pastors and to schools. In fact, here's the Banner of Truth magazine depicting both the handing out of books to people in Equatoria and up in Nuba Mountains, a whole lot of Bibles and books being carried on the heads of the people, obviously in the rainy season because everything's so green. Now, I was told a lot by Kenneth Baringer about Kenneth Fraser, the first missionary who came to Equatoria, to Moorland, and he was Dr. Reverend General Kenneth Fraser from Scotland, married to an Irish missionary daughter who he met in India. He was converted as a teenager involved in the Anglo-Boer War. He was one to Christ in South Africa. He fought in the First World War up in the whole Turkish area, Ottoman Empire. His wife was a nurse in the Western Front in France. And after the war, they finished their medical theological training and went to Muraland and established the first hospital, first church, the first school. And it was from this that all the work in Equatorial developed. Well, I tracked down a secondhand copy of the book, printed in 1938, so no copyright problems. We reprinted. And here you can see in the cathedral, Dr. Kamsaloy being presented, dedicated, and these two men are excited because they're seeing a picture of their grandfather in this book. And in fact, the people there said, you've given us back our history. Just finding a simple book on the first missionary who came to them. Well, this Bible college was called Bishop Wynn College after the first missionary who came to Sudan after the murder of General Charles Gordon, who we were hearing about last week. And so they started the Gordon Memorial Mission, and the man who started that work was Bishop Gwin. And Bishop Llewellyn Gwin, this was the one that they named as Barber Koldroft, and that's our base in South Sudan. Well, we renovated. It was an absolute mess when we first found it, but this is a huge, expensive operation. We renovated the whole place, trucked in from Uganda vast amounts of timber and materials, and we hired all the carpenters in the area, and this was one major operation, and established the first Christian high school in liberated South Sudan. Christian Liberty High School. And you can see an American volunteer teaching them some PT. They don't respond well to things like push-ups, but we still tried. And getting them singing. They liked the singing business. Getting them in chapel, in the renovated, you couldn't believe when you walked in here, this was a den of bats. It was an absolute mess, but we cleaned up, we painted up, we turned this into a great barber college again, Christian High School, and here's the official dedication service. And on this occasion, you can see some of the leaders, including Bishop Bulunduli, coming here for opening up and seeing the best library they had in South Sudan at that time, Christian Library. And one of the favorite days and times for the students would be library time. And here are some of our high school students, some of which now work for the government, and some are actually very high in the government from this initial high school. Of course, I was always trying to rescue animals all over the place. In fact, people got to know this quite well. I'd see people would capture an animal, and I'd give them a bully beef tin or so, and then they'd give me the animal and so on. And then we'd adopt them into our mission base, which had two rivers around it, so we could make it into a game sanctuary. And I remember people coming to me saying, a person came with a baboon, and he said, this baboon's like a member of my family. So I said, how much? He said, $5. I gave him $5, gave me the bird. Wondered how much his grandmother would cost. And then another person came along and had a bird. And he says, I caught this bird. I'm going to eat it. So I offered him a bully beef tin, gave him the bird, he disappeared, let the bird go. And so after a while I thought, this is ridiculous. We've got ourselves into a sort of animal redemption program. People are, ooh, I know where I can get a tin of bully beef from. So anyway, we adopted a whole lot of animals. We also had a lot of air raids. The Arabs came and bombed us and something like one in every eight bombs failed to explode. So we counted. At one stage, we had 14 unexploded bombs just in and around our school and mission base, Bishop Gwynn College. In one town, I went to Littletown, that's 65 unexploded bombs in the town of Chukadam, village of Chukadam, unexploded. Well, obviously we soon had to build air raid shelters and trenches and so on before the school. The school got bombed ten times. Very hard to run a school when the bombing and the children scatter and of course it takes sometimes weeks to get them back. We were then asked to do something about the medical need. That was, in fact, one of the biggest needs of the Bibles and Bible teaching was medical training. So, well, a man's got those limitations, but we are not a medical mission. Nevertheless, seeing the condition of the people, we knew we had to do something. I did a medic's training workshop where we dealt with the four B's, breathing, bleeding, breaks and burns, the basic things I'd learnt in the fire brigade. Not much, but fortunately some of these people had previous medical nursing experience. And we took in the first 50 paramedic bags to equip them. And the hospitals were pretty pitiful. at first but here we are presenting at the Meridi Hospital now and here in the Lloyd Cathedral these blue paramedic bags we flew in the first 50. My wife Lenore sewed these different armbands and unfortunately she modelled them on my arm and when we put them on theirs they just fell off. The arms were like sticks so we had to get everything re-sewed sort of double it over because the arms obviously do not do press-ups. And here they are getting the Bibles and bags off to finish in the medic training program. This medic training program we took in a nurse and then we took in a doctor who gave him proper training and hopefully undid any damage I did. And one of our more ambitious things was getting an ambulance up there. This is a Transvaal Land Rover that we drove all the way from Transvaal up to Sedan, donated it to the hospital to get people. You can see it even says ECS Mundry Episcopal Church. So that was for the hospital there to be able to get the wounded from the battlefront to the hospital. But they needed a real medical mission there, not just a couple of paramedic bags and an ambulance. And so I knew the best ministry that I knew that worked in these sort of areas was Samaritan's Purse. And I'd seen them in Rwanda in 1995. They were the only medical mission in the aftermath of the Holocaust in Rwanda. And they were cleaning out the gutters and the drainage system of Kigali Hospital, pulling out, we're talking about thousands of bodies and body parts. breaking up the congealed blood, enabling the plumbing system, drainage system to work again. And we were amongst a plague of rats and I worked with them on some of that. And so I knew Samaritan's Purse could do the job. And these are the kind of people we needed in Sudan. These pictures are not taken in Sudan. It's just to show how Samaritan's Purse works. So I wrote to Franklin Graham, head of Samaritan's Purse, to invite him to come to Sudan. And I got a polite reply from his secretary, overcommitted, no time. Okay, then I heard Franklin Graham, just like within the same week, Franklin Graham's coming to Cape Town to speak at Newlands Cricket Grounds for the only evangelistic crusade he's ever done in Cape Town. This is just too coincidental, this is extraordinary. So I wrote again, asked for an appointment with Franklin Graham when he gets to Cape Town, got back from the same secretary probably, polite, sorry, program's full and all this. So I'm sitting at my desk there thinking, there's got to be a way, this has got to be God's timing. And delivered to my desk in front of me was a gold embossed thick letter, opened up and inside was a card in gilt, from the mayor of Cape Town, inviting me to a prayer breakfast, where the special guest speaker would be Franklin Graham. So, I praised God, I made sure I was the first person there, arrived super early, and as I got off my motorbike, parked right close to the entrance tunnel, with my motorbike helmet over my arm, walked up to the front door, and there's the mayor and Franklin Graham. I shook Franklin Graham's hand and I said, I believe you're also a motorbiker. And he beamed and he told me about his Harley Davidson. And then I said, I believe you've been training the resistance fighters amongst the Contras in Nicaragua. Yes, he picked up a smile again. I said, I've been doing the same thing amongst Ranaum in Mozambique and Inuit in Angola. Mr. Graham, I've got one question for you. Why is Samaritan's Purse not in Sudan? We were in Sudan, he said. Yes, I said, four years ago, in Upper Nile. But you were trusting, I know you had a frustrating experience there, but you were trusting the wrong people. Where, Michal's crowd of surrogates for the Arab government? He said, I had no idea. I didn't know that. I said, I know just the people you can work for. I know just the hospital, people you can trust. The first hospital ever established in South Sudan, the hospital established by pioneer missionary Dr. Kenneth Fraser. Well, about this time, a line was starting to form behind me, so he had to excuse himself and carry on greeting people. But later on the breakfast, he brought Ken Isaacs to my table. And Ken Isaacs was his operations man. He said, explain to Ken Isaacs what you were telling me. So here's Ken Isis. In fact, this is taken up in Sedan 2 later. So at first, Ken Isis was leaning back, arms folded, legs crossed, closed body language. But within a few minutes, he's leaning forward, looking at my pictures, looking at the map, asking questions. Well, two days later, I get a phone call from him. We've been given the green light by Franklin. You need to take us in two days' time. I said, two days' time? I've got a program, I've got commitments. He said, Peter, you have a green light. Go through the intersection. So I scrapped my program, canceled everything, and two days later I was in Nairobi to fly them into Sudan. Well, that was quite an interesting situation because we're going into an area, we're wanting to show them the needs and the hospital and all this. Well, I told Franklin, I told Franklin Graham and Ken Isaacs about the moral people and Kenneth Fraser, and I gave all these different stories about the great deception. And one of my comments was, the moral people are so trustworthy, you could leave your wallet lying on the market, outside the marketplace on the main road, and someone would bring it to you and nothing would be missing. This must have really irritated him because on the day we were heading out of Cotterby on our way to Lloyd, to the hospital, which had just been liberated from the Arabs, so it was actually still booby-trapped and minefield and all that, but as we were about to drive out, he said to me, do you really believe that rubbish you'd said about my wallet outside the marketplace? I said, yes, he said, give me your wallet. And he threw it out the window unceremoniously, landed on the road, just to the side of the road, outside the marketplace as we drove around. The four Americans in the vehicle were just roaring with laughter. And I felt sick. Because, well, I believe the more people trust with me, I started to think, well, what if? a person of another tribe's coming past. So I must say throughout the day my thoughts returned, not that there was a lot in the wallet, only a few notes, a couple of cards and my ID card, but it's the principle of the matter. And late that night came back, nothing. So I'm actually getting very nervous. But the next morning on the way to church, Canon Rubin came up to me and said, with two boys next to him, said, is this your wallet? These two boys found it by the marketplace. Handed me the wallet, opened up, nothing missing. My ID card with my pictures there, so it's kind of obvious he's got a wallet to this. But I looked sideways at Ken Isaacson and the Americans, their mouths were open, their jaws wide open, eyes, they were shocked, they were impressed. And within a few weeks they were back in there and they'd set up a magnificent hospital set up and Samaritan's Purse moved in. And Ken Isaac said to me, we are never anywhere more than six months. We never commit to anywhere more than three months. We'll commit to Louis for six months. Ten years later they were still there. In fact, I said to Ken Isaac, I said, Ken, I thought you'd never work anywhere more than six months. He said, it's your fault. You did such a good job fundraising on our Video that we've now got two and a half million designated for South Sudan. We'll be here for years before we can finish it off. In fact, after 10 years to get out of the hospital, they started building churches of the people whose church we moved down to, nice churches. In fact, they built something like 275 churches. And they built a lot of wells. And they did a lot of good just to be able to use the designated funds for Sudan. So they were obviously better funded than we are. But wonderful work here. And here's Bill Baffin. Founder of InTouch Mission, Pioneers Network, 67 years ministering to Periscute Church, mostly in Eastern Europe. And chairman of our board at the time. Took him up on his 71st birthday, 50 years in missions. and took them up to Sudan, right to the battle front. Here you can see one of the bomb craters right next to, close to the Bishop's house. This was close to our vehicle. This shows what happens when you are driving out the window, up, listening to some music or something. Next thing, the vehicle was rocked before they even heard the afterburners or the MIG, because supersonic planes go faster than sound. And so the first thing our team heard was the explosion, felt the explosion before they even heard anything. You cannot travel in a war zone with your windows up and the music on. You've got to have the windows down. You've got to be listening to everything. Anyway, this is a close call. This is what it looks like often, just vast amounts of open territory. And this is the border going from Kenya into Sudan back when I first crossed the border. And I'm sure it's very different now. And on the way, you start to see shot up tanks, shot up vehicles, ambush alley. And when you see that hard-skinned tanks didn't survive, and there you're driving a soft-skinned vehicle, let me tell you, this radically improves your prayer life. This will give you a revival in your devotional life. You want to know that you're right with God when you're driving in that sort of area where landmines are the national plant. And you can see the conditions of the road were often quite bad and the bridges weren't that good either. This is why we need these snorkels on the side of our vehicles and that's why we've got to always plasticize and seal and duct tape our trunks with the bibles and the boxes and the plastic inside to make sure nothing gets wet crossing these rivers. I've driven through with the water up to my chest height And of course you always walk ahead with the cane and work out where the potholes are, where the big rocks are. You don't want to rip out the underbelly of the vehicle. And on occasion we will fly the Christian flag because you don't want to be killed by friendly fire. The Americans like friendly fire, but we don't. And it's not very friendly, just for starters. So because many of the vehicles could be Arab or UN, we just at least like the Christians to know that we're on their side. This bridge had been blown up, so we missionaries built this footbridge to cross over because the hospital was on that side, airstrip was this side, we had to get backwards and forwards, our mission base was on this side too. So we needed to continually be going backwards and forwards over the bridge and this made a lot easier than using a boat. One mission, very memorable mission, went up there and the river had swollen to seven times its normal width and volume. Lots of people had drowned just that week trying to cross, and the bridge had been washed away. And we had to cross hand over hand, ankle over ankle to get from the airstrip over and all of our kit over, which kind of explains why we often have these different clips, carabiners, to be able to get our materials up and down on ropes when we're crossing this sort of way. John, who was a ranger, said, ranger, show the way, but he didn't have his leather gloves. I had my leather gloves, but I was passing bits of his blood and flesh all the way along this 100-meter iron metal frame cable. And there he got to the other side, where he fell in on the way. He just couldn't take it. The punishment was horrific. It's punishing on our tyres, too, those roads. And on one occasion we traveled, oh, probably about 150 kilometers in 12 hours. Just digging the vehicle out of the mud, just unbelievable. Had to walk in the operational area for miles through the night. to get to Yey, the headquarters of the SPLA, where we were going to get help for our vehicle that was stuck, and our person, our driver who was suffering from tetanus at that stage, and in fever. And of course it was dicey, because we were walking through enemy patrols, potential ambushes and all that, and at one point I walked straight through an SPLA patrol, staggered. coming out to the darkness, one on each side. And I walked straight down the middle saying, good evening, good evening, good evening. Carrying my AK. This picture was taken at the end of that night when we finally got to Ye. And they kept moving the other side, the eyes were wide. I don't know what they saw, but they didn't challenge us. We walked through a patrol and operational area without being challenged. Bizarre. And then we knew we had to be getting close to Ye. Then we could smell the smoke Smelt cigarette smoke, smelt smoke of fire, saw the chalk line of the road, stepped over, sleeping soldier, stepped over the barrier, stepped over more sleeping soldiers. Everyone at the outer perimeter at 4am was sleeping. and we were in the Espelage headquarters without being challenged. And then we could borrow a motorbike, get back, bring our drivers, all that sort of thing, organize a casualty evacuation. This is a mission where everything went wrong. I wrote the chapter in Faith and Defiance, and what can go wrong in a mission? We started with aircraft, with vehicles, motorbike, bicycles, end up on foot. But we still achieved our mission. Film evangelism, and here you can actually see Charles Gordon, a cartoon film being depicted here. People on both sides because the screens are able to be seen from both sides. And the Jesus form in Moro, this was really exciting, getting the people the first form in their language ever, the Moro form. We put together the Jesus form people and the Bible translators in Moroland who worked on our Bible translation project, and they did both. And so we took on a form too. The first time any form was Moro, shown in Louis Cathedral, the church had been bombed 10 times and rebuilt each time. Easter Sunday in Yey and here you can see the church roof just in the background where it's been destroyed three times and rebuilt each time. And this tree is called Larro. Under this tree the Arabs used to tether up the slaves, the Moorish slaves they'd captured, to take them to the Nile and up to Khartoum for sale. So when Kenneth Fraser, the first missionary, came there, he said, we'll make this the redemption tree. Started the Bible study. In fact, Sunday school is still held under the tree. And from here, first church, first school, first hospital, all that organized. And here they are celebrating Resurrection Sunday. Between this tree and the church are the graves of the missionaries who plant the church here. And around the church about 140 bomb craters. Tells you a story. Well, renting aircraft, sometimes DC-3 Dakotas, Second World War vintage planes, sometimes Mitsubishis, and Smugly and Bibles, the Cessna caravan, one caravan could take about a ton, but a DC-3 could take in three tons. of course they cost more, but they've got a longer range and we would use those particularly to fly up the Nuba Mountains. Now this is a turboprop conversion, ex-Salafi Air Force DC-3, and we've taken tons of Bibles and books into Nuba Mountains in South Sudan with ex-Salafi Air Force DC-3s flown by ex-Salafi Air Force pilots. And here's our ambulance, Land Rover, and this is the largest shipment of Bibles ever smuggled into officially Islamic country to that date. It's 1998, and first time on this newly liberated airstrip which had been Arab hands a few months before. And this lander I've driven all the way up from Cape Town. This is Pat Matriciana who produced the Sudan Hidden Holocaust film. Quite a historic event. And that record was broken just two years ago by Aubrey, Ben, John, Hunter, and then last year broken again, even more, when they took in over 100,000 Bibles and books into the New Mountains each year. And that dwarfed this previous record. The Moro Hymn Book, Moro Catechism Book, these are some of the early printing projects, and our biggest project to that date was the Moro Bible. One kilogram each. The Moro Bible was translated while the Gospels and Acts were done by Reverend Kenneth Fraser, then Ken Israel O'Reary did the rest of the Bible, and as the Bible translator was on his way to the road to Juba to get the Bibles printed, he was killed in an ambush with Arabs. And we learned about this nine years later, that these Bibles are still waiting printing. And even though we're a small mission, this is way past our budget, I said we'll get it done. We got the first 10,000 printed in Singapore, shipped in, distributed. This is 3,000 Bibles. That's three tons of Bibles, one DC3 load, in front of Louis Cathedral. There's Reverend Geoffrey Conger receiving them. And Kenneth Kenneth Berenger at Cotterby Church. And here on the road to Juba, close to where the Bible translator lay buried, We were running an evangelism explosion training clinic with a team from America, from Fort Lauderdale. It was Dr. James Kennedy's evangelism explosion team was sent to help us run EE clinic. And we had trained them in EE, chaplains, teachers, pastors, And on the Sunday morning, we were at the service and beginning the service saying, if you were to die tonight, do you know for sure that you're going to heaven? And as I said that, somebody screamed, Antonovs! And everyone scattered out the church. I'd heard enough false alarms, so I wasn't in a hurry. I was the last to leave the church. But as I left the church, I could hear the You can see what thick thatch. You've got to double over to go under because it's not exactly doors. You've got to double over to get under the thatch. And the thatch had been screaming the sound, and of course the screams of the people. And as I came up, I heard the high-pitched scream of the bombs, and I knew there wasn't time to look, take another step. I just flattened myself. And I flattened myself on the ground. The whole ground shook. and five explosions, one after the other to my right. And I took this picture lying from picture there and seeing these folks diving for cover. And I actually had whipped out my camera while we were there and I was taking the pictures of this and I thought I'd, you know, this is a nice 35 mil camera. And as I got into the spool, which is 32 spool, I got, and it started to automatically rewind. I got into military mode, pulled out my spare 35 mil film, flicked open the back and exposed the whole reel. And this was the only picture that survived of that particular thing. When I realized what I was doing, of course I shot it, but it was like I was acting like guns out of ammunition slam in next magazine. But of course, automatic cameras in those days didn't quite work that way. So I lost some brilliant war footage of pillars of fire and all that. Well, it came around and dropped another three on us. That was eight 1,000 kilogram bombs. And I was just 17 meters from point of impact. got my ribs cracked, and I must say when I felt that kick in the side, I thought that was it. But it must have been a bark of a tree, because it was metal, it would have gone through me. I'd cracked ribs, I knew about it for the next six weeks, but we've got these pieces of shrapnel that were lying around us at the church, at the front, as part of our ornaments and paperweights. Not only did we not lose anyone, we gained people. I mean, imagine this, you had eight 1,000 kilogram bombs. an area south of a football field. 300 people in church that day. Nobody killed, nobody seriously injured. And more people attend the service after the bombing than before. People came to see it. And the highlights of this service was presenting the first Bible in a moral language to the people. And I point out to people, do you realize that some people hate the word of God so much they're willing to kill to stop it. Others love the word of God so much they're willing to die to advance it. Do you know the first Bible in the English language had to be translated in Germany and printed in Germany and smuggled through the Netherlands into England, bales of cotton, and all 6,000 of the first English New Testaments printed by William Tyndale were confiscated and burned by the Bishop of London. Only two survive to this day. One was sold recently for 5.7 million pounds. I didn't add the money part, that's irrelevant to them, but I point out with just a few miles from where the Bible translator, Ezra Lavery, lies buried. And here we are on the first day we're presenting his translation to your community and we bombed on Sunday morning. How much clearer is it to you that the Bible is a message of life and death? One of the greatest church service I've attended, five hour church service in all. And here's Chaplain Moses and Chaplain John outside the church. And here's some of the shrapnel that we picked up at one of the points of impact. Soldiers came from far and wide to see the church had been bombed but still stood. We continued the clinic, and here's the chaplains and teachers and pastors who completed the clinic with us the next week. And people came to see the trees that were blown over with shrapnel, but the church still stood. Trees were full of shrapnel, but we weren't. One person said, this happened to show the power of God. Another said, the Bibles of the Christians are more powerful than the bombs of the Muslims. Zephaniah 3, 10 says, from beyond the rivers of Cush, my worshipers, my scattered people will bring me offerings. This man said, the Bibles of the Christians are more powerful than the bombs of the Muslims. And speaking of which, another time, another place. This bomb failed to explode, but if it had exploded, it would have taken the church and the compound where we were meeting off the map. So why did Despole even dig it out? I said, why don't you just leave it? He said, oh, we need the explosives to give back to the Arabs. It's more blessed to give than to receive. Matthew 16, 18 says, on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And Jesus Christ is building his church on Sodom. And in the Nuba Mountains, which is an island of Christianity in the Sea of Islam to the north of South Sudan, we've had to smuggle in tons of Bibles and books and get past helicopter gunships like these horrible flying tanks, MI-8 helicopters, MI-24 Hind helicopters, I should say. And here's a picture taken under fire by our team. This team was being strafed, rocketed, machine gunned by one of these Hind helicopters on arrival in Nuba Mountains in 1997. Some of the people wounded, injured, shot up. This woman had to have what was left of her leg amputated without anesthetic. Can you imagine? This group of SPLA took our team and protected them and got them over to another airfield about 120 odd miles away where we could fly another aircraft and extract them. And so I immediately started to put together a new team. I hired this Hawker Siddeley to fly in more Bibles and books. This is the Bible in Arabic. And this is the inside of the plane. You may wonder why we've got so many empty containers of water bottles, 20 liter bottles. Well, you'll see just now why that's absolutely vital over there. We took in two tons of bibles, one ton of educational materials, one ton of agricultural tools and seed. which included mosquito nets and these water containers. Here you can see the group of people snaking through the mountains. I was way ahead of them and rushed ahead to get this picture in fact. You can see them coming up with their blackboards and the mosquito nets and other things like that, chalkboards for the chalk for schools. These are all volunteers. They weren't paid to do this and there was no money or anything to use money with back there at that time. And back at this stage when I went to Newmounds there was no such thing as vehicles or roads either, so it all had to be carried. Scorched earth, everything necessary to sustain life's being destroyed. Poisoning wells, crucifying pastors, destroying everything. James Cramer, 52 years old, when I took this picture, had his left arm cut off by the Arabs above the elbow. They destroyed his farm, stole everything, chopped his arm off so that he could not join the resistance. Why would you want to join a resistance when you've got a government that understanding? I saw something that just made my mind fail to register. A man without feet. How does a man lose both his feet? And I asked and they said, he's an evangelist. So the Arabs chopped his feet off with an ax. brings good news. This man had no feet and yet he didn't allow the inconvenience of not having feet to keep him from saying the gospel to his neighbours. He still rode on donkey or walked on his knees which are quite careless. The Arabs have established peace camps and they take children away from the parents and they bring them up as Arabs. They give them Arab names. They're forced to speak Arabic. They're beaten if they speak their own language. Forced to stand in the sun holding rocks in each hand and beaten if they lower their arms while they've got to recite Arabic. They're beaten if they speak in their home language. Dar al-Islam's peace camps, they're called. And so 400,000 Nubans had fled up there to the mountains down the valley which used to be the farm of scorched earth, but the Arabs now controlled that. and they were holding out as besieged brethren under siege in the Nuba Mountains, an island of Christianity in the Sea of Islam. Weapons captured by the Arabs. We walked hundreds of kilometers from one side of the Nuba to the other, seeing the Christian flags flying from one side to the other. Well, we did donate them as flags. These men said, we have been fighting the Arabs not for 50 years like the Southerners, but for 1,400 years. Which is not much of an exaggeration because the people of South Kordofan, the Nuba, have a history of resistance against Islam for centuries. Over a millennium for sure. Our fathers fought Islam. Our grandfathers fought Islam. We fight Islam. Our grandchildren will fight Islam. We'll never bow to Mecca. And so chaplains periods amongst these people Isaiah 18 verse 3 says, all you people of the world, you who live on the earth, when a banner is raised on the mountains, you will see it. When a trumpet sounds, you will hear it. Something of worldwide significance will happen in this land divided by rivers. Isaiah 18 speaks of the banner of Christ, Christian flags being raised. And we've been raising trumpet even now. And through the books and videos we've produced in this presentation, sounding out the trumpet to call people's attention to how our brothers and sisters in Christ are suffering in Sudan. and have been suffering for many years. Many Nubans are escaped slaves, descendants of escaped slaves who fled up the mountains and found refugee from the slave caravans taking them to Khartoum. Tremendous needs. Here's a young boy carrying a Lee-Enfield rifle over his shoulder. He's got a very dangerous job. He's got to be the goat herder. He's got to look after the goats, food supply of the village. There's not enough water on top of the mountains in dry season. You've got to come down off the mountains. Sort of like Ploddercliffe Gorge sort of thing. And here we were walking up and down ankle twisting territory. Here you've got a 16 year old girl carrying a 30 kilogram projector. And there, this girl about 15 years old, also barefoot, carrying a 25 kilogram generator on her head. That's before we had solar panels and all this we talked about back in 1996 here, taking in the Jesus film kit. So I asked the men, why don't you carry that? Too heavy for us, I said, the girls have to carry that. So the chivalry hasn't quite arrived over there. The women have to carry every drop of water needed for washing, cooking, cleaning, drinking, and it can take hours each day going down the mountain. And so often you see the women carrying so much and the men carrying nothing. And they're often carrying jugs and calabashes, and of course if you've carried this calabash for a couple of hours, water, then you trip and it smashes. You've lost all the water and all that work. So you see why it's important to take in these about 20 liter cans, plastic ones. Again, the man's carrying nothing. That's very typical. And the women there have a lot of work to do. And for little girls, much of the day can be spent just fetching them a firewood and water. Firewood and water. Think what electricity and plumbing does for them. Well, except in Cape Town they want you to carry buckets as well. And this might not be the grandmother, it might be the mother. I mean, people age very quickly over there. Well, I've always insisted on carrying my own backpack. And they'd come, no, you must give us your backpack. I only once was foolish enough to give them a backpack when I'd actually arrived. And I sort of gave my backpack to some poor girl to carry. So I never allowed that to happen again. And they'd, no, you must give us your backpack. That's our culture. You must honor our culture. You're our guest. And I said, why give you my backpack? You'll give it to a girl to carry. That'll be a great disgrace to me. He said, no, no, you don't understand. That's why God made the girls, to carry the heavyweights. Well, I never let them get my backpack again. And here we are with one of the Coptic churches. You can see they used to have a beautiful stone church down in the valley. Destroyed by the Arabs now they're about 4,500 feet. And you can see this chap's holding a Faith Undefined Sudan book there. Christian Coptic Church. People who came from Muslim backgrounds coming to Christ. Now here's an interesting one. You see a whole lot of metal. We've got machetes, we've got hoes, we've got spades, but only the metal part. Why? During bombings, our team would see women breaking cover during a bombing to run out and pick up hot shrapnel, cutting their hands or burning their hands. Why? Well, I said, the sand in the valley is very fertile, and it's easy to plough. But up here in the mountains, it's very hard, and we don't get metal. The only metal we can get is from the shrapnel. So we started to carry in hundreds of metal pieces of hose and machetes and so on, thought if metal is that valuable, we'll bring them some. Of course, they can find wood and make a handle out of that, because everything that you put in a plane, you've got to pay kilograms. We tried to bring the most barbles in we possibly could, or seed. World missionary press gospel booklets being distributed, scripture gift mission materials, all over. You could see where Frontline is. There's a line of people sitting reading literature. And very popular, the Frontline news, their stories, their pictures, their testimony. And when all wanted a Faith Undefined Sudan book, I worked out a way of doing it. I said, in America, this costs $10. in Sudan has cost 10 commands. You tell me the 10 commands in English, because the book's in English, in order, I'll give you the Faith Undefined Sudan. And so I never had peace and quiet after that. Wherever I was, even if I was trying to shower in the morning, people would be lined up there reciting 10 commands, wanting me to give them a Faith Undefined Sudan book. Libraries for schools. The man in the box who speaks my language, a gospel proclaimer. We equipped hundreds of evangelists with these, with these kits where they could carry them over their shoulders and the flip charts. This rivets the people. They are not in a media-saturated society. And so it was wonderful to get there and to make an impact and equip evangelists. The entire marketplace would just come to a standstill. They'd be riveted to hear the man in the box who speaks my language. and see these colorful flip charts. And then Bible Media in Wellington provided us with these prototype waterproof backpacks to have both the flip charts and the tape deck with the eight hours of cassettes. And we took them in and our only feedback was, look, these are great and so on, but could you have a duller color? Yellow is a bit bright. A bit of beige, please. The Arabs put a price on my head and they actually on the government of Sudan, Ministry of Foreign Affairs website had an article, Why Churches in Sudan are not bombed. It said Peter Hammond is the main source of this lie that churches in Sudan have been bombed. Government of Sudan is a bunch of Democrats that never bomb anyone. But then said, but we'd make an exception to Peter Hammond's case. Peter Hammond should expect to be bombed every time he comes to Nan, he should expect to be shot on sight, because his writings make him an enemy of the state. And last I knew that was still on the Governor's Nan Ministry of Foreign Affairs website. So we'd have to be very circumspect in our travels, and not always go in the obvious direction, and not sleep in the same place twice, and keep moving, because people might get greedy to try and get some of the money on my head to turn these foreigners in. And there were attempts to ambush us, and there were times that we had to run all day, and there was traps that we escaped, and there were times I got into riots, like just reading gospel booklets in the oasis there, trying to cross from one part of the Nuba Mountains to the other. And I remember one time getting into a terrible scrap and shots were fired, my escorts came in, knocking people in the face with rifle butts and dragging me out, because Muslims had started to riot because of my preaching. Film evangelism in the old days. You're talking about four reels of the Jesus film on the far left. Stand, screen, all that sort of thing. Projector, generator, fuel, 140 kilograms. If you're talking about three weeks ministry, if you've got enough fuel for it. Of course, batteries and solar panels make a big difference. Can you see the 16 mil projector balanced on a rock over there? and all the people with their third leg. So this is not a drive-in, it's a walk-in. And the people there all come with their hiking sticks. And they got me and the new mounts into a habit of hiking with a stick too. But they said this was the first film they'd ever seen. And I liked the old 16mm projectors, even though they were heavier, more bulky. because you've got five chances to preach before the film and between each reel. And while at the end of each reel we'd have to rewind, people today with DVDs and so on have hard trouble understanding this, we had four reels and between each one you'd have to take the front reel, rewind back to the back reel so they're all still back on number one, number two, and so on, and then go on to the next one and so on. So in between, one of us would be preaching through interpreter, applying what they've learned in the first bit before the next. And this is actually quite nice. These days we get the whole film in one bit, I must say. It's not quite as exciting. But we had people walking from miles to come. In fact, we had the whole Bible College follow us on a whole time around Noob Mountain, going something like 180 miles walking with us. So they could see the Jesus from each night and hear our preaching. You could see them sort of mouthing. It's like they were memorizing the whole Gospel of Luke. from the Jesus form. And I would tell my people, stand around the projector and protect the projector stand when it comes to the snake scene. Because when Jesus is tempted in the desert, the moment the snake appears on the screen, you start seeing... There's a whole lot of kids in the front start to run over the people behind. And you've got to actually protect the screen like a scrum from getting knocked flying from some of those kids who get that screaming. And for many of them, this is the first time anyone had ever seen a film, or for the children in particular. Some people said, when I was very young, I saw a film years ago when I visited Khartoum. But, you know, the Nouveau Mountains, films were almost unknown at this stage. I could give a few stories about when we had to run all day, being pursued by the Arabs and traps that they set for us. There's quite a lot of stories you can give about the battles in the Nuba Mountains. And when we flew in or out, we'd often have people who'd lost a limb, like this poor man, two landmines, and we'd be taking them in or out to get help or get a prosthetic limb. This is the Nuba Mountains, flying in During the rainy season. Looks very different than dry season. And now you can see there's a rainy season. Notice all the people carrying the box of Bibles there are women. They always bring the women to carry the Bibles. This is what it can look like in the rainy season. And we took in the mine clearing metal detectors up there. Three of them. And took in a South African mine clearing engineer to train them. rush hour at the airstrip. This is at Foxtrot. And we actually had two Cessnas. We had ordered a DC-3, but for some reason they couldn't, and they gave us two Cessnas for the same price. And that enabled us in Sudan in the Holocaust to actually have a film of a plane taking off from the air, because we were in two planes. We could actually film a plane landing, taking off, things like this, which was an interesting opportunity. See the crashed plane on that side? And donated food. The planes that came to extract us, we always made sure they had a lot of good things to bring them to. Generally the food came on the second extraction flight, and then we take wounded people out with us. This is the Hawker Siddeley I flew in on, on that earlier mission. But another group had hired it when it crashed. So we went on this plane when it crashed, but I believe it's still there? Yeah. It's not going anywhere. They ran out of airstrip before they ran out of airspeed. This is about the only shade you could get there. So it's one place people like to go and stop. You get the shade. This barbiculture encounter, they were enthusiastic. They'd gather whenever we were coming there and we'd have a week or so of leadership training with him. Sometimes the other side of the mountains I'd walk to there. And hymn books, prayer books, catechisms, otoro, haiban, krongu, unreached people group. And I remember being told, Crongo and Unreached People Group, you must get details of them. And I found out that the Crongo, in fact, had many Christians. And we actually found a Bible that had been translated into Crongo New Testament by Australian, Sudan, United Missionaries, got it printed. And here they are being delivered. And here are some of the Crongo evangelists. You can see a copy of this in our reception area behind glass. It's the same folio size of the old duk-duk-duk typewriters in the 1950s because the missionaries who got translated were then expelled and the Bible was banned and no missionaries allowed since 1962 into northern Sudan. And so we had the joy of delivering these Bibles, I think it was the year 2000 or 2001, that had been translated in the 1960s, finished in the 1960s. Not a head track, but a rifle rack outside a church. hiking in dry riverbeds, walking two and a half hours for a single service and then back up over the mountain again home because we had to go and encourage this church. The church had been bombed 18 times in the previous 12 months and still stood. Psalm 72 verse 9 says that desert tribes will bow before him and his enemies will lick the dust. We need to pray for the Nuba mountains of people under siege. They need our prayers. The people of Sudan have suffered a lot. There's a lot in the Bible about the Sudanese. I've written about this in Faith Under Fire in Sudan and tried to document it in film. filmmaker Pat Matriciana, and we produced three films, Sudan Hidden Holocaust, Terrorism and Persecution, and Three Days in Sudan, which we helped these filmmakers get done, and now they're all available on one disc. South Sudan is now an independent country, which didn't seem possible at the time. My father-in-law, Bill Baffin, when he was 71, we took him up to the battlefront, and the people, when they saw a grey-haired man, they fell on their feet, fell on their knees. and bowed before him because the Bible says to be reverent before the gray head. You can see there's no gray hairs in there. People don't get that old. And to see a gray head man, it's just like, oh, one of the patriarchs or prophets or whatever. They were literally bowing before him and kneeling to serve him and to shake his hands. Well, I was received in as a minister and a member of the Episcopal Church of Sudan at one special service. Our friends, Geoffrey Kianga, Bishop Bulanduli, and Geoffrey Kianga, two of our good friends in Sudan. On this occasion, we end up arrested. It was in Yei. It's an old story. Arrested in Yei, and what a story. And this is the Missionary Aviation Fellowship plane that brought Bishop Bulanduli and I out in the middle of a rainstorm. And there's puddles everywhere, rain everywhere. We went through rain to get there. But the plane came out of the sky, we managed to escape. This was the only block of no rain was on the actual airstrip. And we got out from where we were meant to be facing the firing squad that day. That's quite a story how we escaped that. And this made the news headlines here, city passed a health treason. That was me in Sudan and they're going to get rid of me. But it's a wonderful story how as the South Sudanese stories were made known and we made it known by pictures, by slides. I spoke on well over 1,200 radio and TV programs around the world to let the people know about them and the movement started, let my people go. all for separation and as soon as Sudanese were wanting independence and unity by force of slavery, we need a referendum and in 2005 they got the referendum. And this referendum, praise the Lord, it was to a large extent because George Bush put pressure on him to go through with this. And because America just flattened Iraq and Afghanistan, the Sudanese were a bit nervous, you know, who's he going to attack next? And so they had this unity, secession, and people had to put the thumbprints on their choice. And this was part of the unity. or separation referendum in 2005, and 90-something percent of the people in the South voted for independence for secession, which occurred in 2011. And our friends, Franklin Graham and Ken Isaacs, were there as special guests of the President Slovakia for the independence that he said was not possible just a few years before. And so, 9th of July, 2011, South Sudan got its independence, celebrating Juba, statue of John Gurang, who's the founder, who was killed in a helicopter crash under very suspicious circumstances, just shortly before the independence was going to take place. And so, our friend Salva Kiir became then the first president of South Sudan. All Independence Day celebrations. It would be hot there. And the new flag and the new present. And you might wonder why this present's got this interesting hat. He wears it like a crown. It's a gift from George Bush. Texas hat. And this is now the latest style in Sudan. I think everyone wants those kind of hats. Holding up the new constitution. And doesn't this tell a story? A man who lost both his hands in the war. rejoicing in the independence of this country. The flag, they've got boundaries, there's the emblem, the fish eagle, and currency, free at last. And the churches are celebrating They've had independence celebrations since commemorating this every 9th of July. So it's quite a story and we can praise God for South Sudan's independence. And we continue to take Bibles and books up and film evangelism and minister from one side of the Nuba Mountains and South Sudan to the other whenever possible. We've got teams planned even this year to go back up. Schools now have school uniforms, chaplains parades, they actually have uniforms now and to provide them with reformational study bibles, mega voices, audio bibles, chaplains training. Peter Jonathan won the first four chaplains that we trained right back in 1996. Still going strong.