A ground-breaking nature-reserve-cum-organic-farm project in Pakistan is restoring people’s relationship with the environment, states Maurice Connor.
Both the threat of environmental degradation and the splendour of God’s creation are vivid in Rattanabad, the village in the Sindh, south of Pakistan, which was our home for nearly seven years.
So it’s appropriate that Rattanabad is also the base of several Christian-led development organisations.
We invited the leaders of such organisations to form a committee to establish and run the Rattanabad Environmental Project.
What future does development work have if the environment cannot sustain the population who are increasing in number, health and prosperity?
As always, Christians need to look to Christ for inspiration – he being the ultimate Creator, Restorer and Sustainer. So I feel that finding out what he is doing, and then joining in, is vital to this area of God’s mission.
Amid great poverty and lush biodiversity, the leaders of these local, well-respected development projects have, each in their own way, felt challenged by God to do something to restore people’s relationship with the environment.
All five projects run rural development initiatives. Two of the five have a specifically environmental element.
Though birds, reptiles and insects adorn the irrigated, densely farmed areas, their numbers and variety are rapidly diminishing. People even dig up roots of trees for fuel!
The Christian conference-centre extension being built around a tree (Photo: © Maurice Connor/CMS) One leader, Padre Shamoon, was inspired to break with this short-sightedness. He extended the Christian conference centre he runs by building around a mature tree.
The trunk is the centre-piece of the entrance hall and the branches provide shade for the roof, but, more significantly, it stimulates positive conversations among visitors.
Another development exponent, Zahid, is pioneering organic farming on his land, which adjoins the organisations’ compounds.
Learning from a lizardGod spoke to me, I believe, through my sighting of a blinded and charred monitor lizard.
It was hiding in some dense undergrowth, virtually the last remaining cover in the area, which was being cleared with fire in order to build a new security wall in response to the rising threat of civil unrest.
The sigting shocked me and, when I prayed about it, I realised that God was upset too and was already working on a plan for the village.
I believe that he wants a change of heart towards the environment and is inspiring and equipping Christians to teach this, together with practical help, to develop more gentle ways in which to live off the land.
The Rattanabad Environmental Protection Project committee, overseeing a joint project, is a place for leaders to share their rural development expertise.
Each runs her or his own schools project, covering between 20 and 120 schools, and making up more than 200 schools in total.
The committee has chosen to protect an area incorporating the organic farm, within which the five organisations' compounds lie. Each compound is about five minutes' walk from the next.
Land will be used for experimenting with coppicing the local trees, increasing biodiversity and a class-room will be built as a field-study centre.
The committee has launched a poster competition, so that local children’s artwork will be included on the sign boards bordering the protected area.
Major donors, including Tearfund and the Catholic Relief Service, are interested in sponsoring the children to visit the nature reserve so they can be inspired and taught the fundamentals of creation care.
Local politicians will visit this project and it is hoped that it will also inspire similar initiatives to be started in other areas.
Laura and Maurice Connor recently returned to the UK from Pakistan, where they worked for the Lower Sindh Rural Development Association, to be given a new mission location. They are presently negotiating the possibility of working with A Rocha in Southall.