December 22, 1999
Texas gifts bring milk
and honey for Bedouins
___By Robert O'Brien
___Standard Correspondent
___Desert-dwelling Bedouins come straight out of biblical history, but they don't live in a land flowing with milk and honey.
___They eke out a hard existence, either as rootless nomads living in tents across the Middle East and North Africa or as cultivators who have gravitated into a more settled life in concrete and stone structures.
___But Baptists focusing on the large unreached people group are laying ground work--with direct aid from the Texas Baptist Offering for World Hunger --for real milk and honey to flow into their lives.
EGYPTIAN BEDOUINS from the al-Azazmeh tribe cross from Egypt into Israel last spring as they walk across the border separating the Egyptian Sinai Desert from the Israeli Negev Desert. Some 600 Bedouins and their animals crossed the border loaded with possessions seeking refuge as they escape a tribal feud, according to Israeli army sources. (RNS/Reuters)
___From 1997 through 2000, the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission has approved $151,000 in hunger funds for work among the Bedouin.
___Children will receive milk to drink as part of an early childhood education project. Other ministries include improving milk and meat production in goats and teaching low-income families to keep bees and produce honey for food and sale.
___But Bedouins won't live by milk and honey alone in these projects supported by contributions and volunteers from Texas and elsewhere. Various projects focus on helping Bedouins establish self-sustaining income projects, water resource development, livestock and poultry development, drip-irrigation home gardening to conserve water and increaseyields, and planting olive, fruit and nut trees.
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___"That kind of effort shows how Christians of all kinds can zero in on the real, felt needs of unreached people," said a representative of the Network for Strategic Missions, an organization that transcends denominational differences and cooperates with a variety of "Great Commission" Christian groups, including the Southern Baptist Convention and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
___The Network, based in Virginia Beach, Va., operates in eight world regions with 50 countries to connect prayer and resources of evangelical churches to a variety of ministry, relief and church-planting opportunities in the vast unreached world known variously as "World A" or the "10/40 window." Strategy coordinators from across the Baptist spectrum of faith and practice, including a Texas Baptist, head Network efforts in three of the regions.
___One of the eight regions is the Middle East and North Africa, home to about 13 million Bedouins.
___Few Bedouins have avoided hunger and hardship. They wear lightweight, light-colored, loose-fitting clothing--cinched with a leather belt--to protect them from heat, sun, wind and sand. The belt is said to reduce hunger pangs when tightened.
___Baptist projects seek to help weaker elements, such as children and widows trying to support a family. One such effort for widows is included in projects for drip-irrigated gardens and raising poultry and rabbits for food and income production.
___Water resource development projects include restoration of a cistern built in Roman times and construction of new collection, storage and distribution systems.
___Historically, Bedouins have been camel-caravan desert nomads. Today, roads and pick-up trucks have largely replaced camels. Animals of choice now mainly include sheep and goats.
___Many Bedouins have given up a nomadic lifestyle--typified by black, goat-hair tents--for a more settled life because of economics, population pressure, politics and scarce resources.
___But they still call themselves Bedouin, and their nomadic past shapes and dominates their mindset and world view. Their customs have roots dating back to the biblical times of Abraham, said one Baptist observer who cannot be identified because of security issues in the country where he ministers.
___"Some still live in tents the year 'round, but their range of movement is measured in a few kilometers each year, compared to migrations of thousands of kilometers by their ancestors," he said.
___"The Bedouin mastered the desert partly out of a fierce devotion to hospitality to strangers. Any visitor was entitled to a feast, accompanied by tea and coffee and no questions asked. Not even an enemy was to be stranded in the desert."
___That trait of generosity and hospitality continues today and is one of many ways "provided by God to reach hard-to-reach people, people on the move and people in transition," a Baptist worker said.
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