August 2012

My dear praying friend,

What an honor to intercede together for the physical and spiritual needs of women in East Africa this month.  Prayer is a high calling!  Thank you for taking this faith-stretching and heartbreaking challenge as you join this higher work of intercessory prayer.

Last year I was in East Africa.  I saw the poverty, I saw the tears.  But I also saw the result of our prayers when I attended a parliamentary session in Tanzania, where the urgent needs to stop sex trafficking and to implement laws that protect women from abuse were being discussed.  Certainly it was no coincidence that the Project Hannah prayer calendar was focused on exactly those issues that month!

I had the honor and joy of singing and dancing with the women as they do when praising God.  I laughed and cried listening to their stories of transformation; children coming out of drug addiction; husbands freed from alcoholism and released from demon possession; stagnant churches becoming alive; and so on.  They boldly witnessed:  “This is because women reached out and prayed together joining the rest of the world using the Project Hannah prayer calendar!”   So true!  This is happening because God is at work through your prayers!

Please pray daily for Ruth Mbennah, Africa regional coordinator, and for the Project Hannah Africa teams.  These godly and hard-working women are giving sacrificially of themselves to rescue, empower and bring the gospel to African women.  They need encouragement, stamina, and human and financial resources.  

Africa is such a needy continent, but in Ethiopia, Project Hannah is creating a program helping fistula patients and women in general to learn to prevent, as well as to live with, this medical condition’s terrible consequences.  In Zanzibar, we pray for funds to keep the prayer movement growing and put radio programs on local stations serving a 97% Muslim population.  I encourage you to pray even knowing that while circumstances might not change, these women can be changed! By believing the gospel, they will experience how the One in them is greater than the one in the world!  After all, “Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him?” (James 2:5).

Trusting God to do far beyond our requests,

Marli Spieker
Global Ministry Director/Founder
Project Hannah
TWR