3/10/2015 – More Poverty and Preachers

I am always amazed at the conditions of this place when I come to Burma. I am ministering in one of the poorest areas of Yangon and living conditions here would be a shock to most westerner’s senses. For instance, when you pull into the housing area where Biblical Baptist Church resides you are instantly aware of the sheer desperation of the lifestyle.

The cramped narrow dirt roads are lined with shanty home businesses offering such things as bananas, sliced watermelons, whole melons, and a menagerie of personal items like cigarettes, matches, various and sundry vegetables, and even plastic bottles of gasoline for the hundreds of motor scooters traveling the roadways. There are children everywhere along the streets, near their parent’s vending stands, playing with anything they might be able to pick up. Stray dogs ramble along looking for scraps, while people are walking back and forth carrying bundles and bags of who knows what.

Then you begin to smell the open trench sewers and the rotting garbage that simply gets tossed by everyone. There is no such thing as a trash can. The ground is the trash can, and the green areas between houses, shanties, and animal pens are deep with long ago tossed trash that is rotting into the soil. I cannot describe the smell, but once you are in the area, you lose your sense of the odor and simply become part of it.

Today, as I entered the complex I realized that I was stepping over open sewers just yards away from some pigs which will eventually become food for the orphans and others who live here.

How blessed we are in America! We don’t even realize it. Today, it was a great day to be a teacher. The hours in the classroom flew by as the students listened, questioned, and learned. Don’t forget to pray tonight for Burma. It desperately needs more preachers and teachers of the Word. This is the only hope of this country and its beautiful people. This is the land where Adoniram Judson came and loved unto death.

Be Thankful,
Bruce