Dr. Berhane spent 11 months in prison in Eritrea because of his Christian witness. The following is edited and excerpted from an interview with Dr. Berhane by VOM Radio host Todd Nettleton. I was working in hospital when one day the secret police came and arrested me and sent me to prison, and I stayed there for 11 months. So, at that time [I was arrested] I was a new believer, but still I believed that my future is in God’s hand. I wanted to use the opportunity to share God’s love to the prison guards, the fellow prisoners, the inmates, and God opened this opportunity. Every day I was clapping my hands and prisoners would come forward and I shared the gospel. When you are in prison, what you see is harassment; everybody screams at you, the prisoners fight each other, and the prison guards are not nice to you. But, you can keep this inner peace; it is because of Jesus. You wanted to share that peace to the guards and to the prisoners. Sometimes you see people being touched by that and they want to hear more about it. So this encourages me to do more and
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When North Korea was established as an independent nation after World War II, its leader, Kim Il Sung, outlawed all religions except the worship of himself as the “Great Leader.” Churches were destroyed, Bibles were confiscated and teaching children about Jesus became very dangerous. For Hae-won, however, gospel seeds planted at an early age would not remain dormant. Something roused 10-year-old Hae-won from her sleep. When she raised up from her sleeping mat and looked around the one-room apartment, her eyes fixed on her grandfather’s white hanbok (traditional Korean clothing) glowing in the moonlight. His legs were crossed, his eyes were closed and he was swaying back and forth. “How strange,” she thought as she watched his quiet movements. “That must be something old people do.” It was the early 1960s, more than 10 years after Kim Il Sung’s communists had taken control of North Korea, and decades would pass before Hae-won would learn the significance of what her grandfather was doing that night. Gospel Seeds As a young girl, Hae-won struggled to understand the conversations she overheard between her two grandfathers. They frequently used unfamiliar terms like resurrection, second coming and Red Sea, terms her teachers never used at
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Jong-su grew increasingly nervous as she sped away from the North Korean border in the smuggler’s vehicle. She had crossed the Yalu River into China the previous night, after her boyfriend had threatened to report her illegal trading business because she had rejected his marriage proposal. If convicted of illegal trading in North Korea, she faced the possibility of 15 years to life in a concentration camp. Although Jong-su also had a legitimate job, the devastating famine that had begun in 1993 as well as her country’s poor economic policies meant she had to earn additional money illegally or starve. “Leave the country for two years,” her mother insisted, hoping Jong-su could return after her boyfriend got over his anger. Taking her mother’s advice, Jong-su turned to the only person she knew who could help her — a next-door neighbor who was in the smuggling business. The neighbor assured her that she could arrange to smuggle her into China and that Jong-su could live near the North Korean border so she could occasionally see her mother. In addition to leaving her family behind, Jong-su was sacrificing the honor of singing for Kim Jong Il twice a year in Pyongyang. Her
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As Roberto Santo Gomez looked back on his life, he felt like he hadn’t amounted to much. He was empty inside and his heart was filled with hate. As a member of the leftist Zapatista rebel group, his work involved shaking down people for money, running drugs and fighting the government. But that hadn’t given his life meaning, and now he felt trapped by the Zapatista “cause.” After considering his options, Roberto decided he would go north to the United States and try to make some money. As many others had before him, Roberto hopped the train that runs from Chiapas in southern Mexico to the U.S. border. The trip didn’t go as planned, however. Roberto fell from the train, severing his left arm and leaving him with multiple fractures. As he lay on the ground in agonizing pain, he suddenly recalled the words of a street preacher he’d once heard in a park, and his thoughts turned to God. “God, if you exist, give me another opportunity,” he prayed. “Give me life, and I’ll get up and I’ll look for you and I’ll speak about you.” God answered Roberto’s prayers. He survived the accident, returned to his home and,
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“Give us more!” the robbers demanded. It was 9 p.m., and Faisal’s Bible distribution team was eager to be home. After delivering Bibles to eleven Pakistani villages in three days, they had taken a shortcut to get home faster. But as the team slowed their old van to navigate a bumpy stretch of road, they found themselves surrounded by a band of robbers notorious in that part of Pakistan. Rajehs, one of the workers riding in the van, tried to reason with the six armed men as one of them pointed a gun at the driver and another held a gun against a passenger’s leg. “We’ve given you everything,” Rajehs told them. “Why do you want to kill us?” But even as they were rolling down their windows to hand over their valuables, he knew that the robbers would likely force them out of the van and shoot them one by one. “We have Bibles,” offered 13-year-old Amber, the team’s youngest member. “Please take a Bible.” “We don’t need it!” a robber screamed, throwing the Bible down. A mile and a half ahead of them on the road, Pastor Faisal and the rest of the team waited nervously in the
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Shortly after their father died, Amara and her older brother left their village in the Somali desert to live with their uncle in the city. Their family thought it would be a positive change for the teenage Amara to have a male relative in her life, but they didn’t expect the move to lead her away from Islam. Shortly after moving in with her uncle, Amara began speaking with her new neighbors. To her surprise, she learned that they were not Somali — and they were Christians. “I’d always been taught that everyone who is not Somali is Christian,” she said, “that the evil we see on TV and movies is because they are Christians. When I met my new neighbors, they were different. They called themselves Christians, but weren’t drunkards, adulterers or immoral like I was taught.” The Christian family welcomed Amara into their home, even sharing meals with her. She noticed that before each meal, they thanked God for their food in such a casual way that they sounded as if they were talking to their father. “It was different than what I had seen on TV,” she said. “Sitting with them and listening and seeing it, I
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Knowing that a return to Iran would come at great risk, Soro and Ali faithfully followed the Spirit’s call to share the gospel with those who might otherwise never hear it in one of the world’s most restricted countries. Soro drew the curtains against the sun in preparation for the evening gathering. The believers arrived a few at a time, knocking quietly on the door before entering the room and slipping off their shoes. Some of the women removed their head scarves before taking a seat on the intricately patterned blue rug, and at the appointed hour Soro locked the door and placed rolled-up towels at the threshold to block sound. The door would remain locked for the next hour and a half, no matter who knocked. At the click of the deadbolt, those with Bibles brought them out in the open. The group prayed, read Scripture, listened to teaching, celebrated Communion and sang worship songs with muted voices. All the while, other group members stood watch near the windows. As the meeting concluded, the group members left as they came, staggering their departures to avoid drawing attention. After their last guest left, Soro locked the door and she and
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After questions about Islam led her to Christ, Aliyah became passionate about sharing Jesus with the rest of her Somali community in Kenya. Aliyah flipped the black headscarf over her dark hair and fastened the veil across her face. It was nearly evening, and she was going to visit relatives at her former home in “Little Mogadishu,” the Eastleigh suburb of Nairobi, Kenya, that is populated almost exclusively by Somali immigrants. Although Aliyah didn’t wear the hijab in daily life around Nairobi, she was careful to wear it whenever she went to Eastleigh, especially when she planned to visit her relatives. She didn’t want to attract the attention of the local sheikh’s henchmen or of neighborhood gossips, and the hijab and darkness helped conceal her identity. It was dangerous for Aliyah to enter the Muslim neighborhood now that she had converted to Christianity, but it was equally dangerous for her to enter her relatives’ home. Just a few days earlier, her uncle had told her to stay away from his children or “something bad would happen to her.” One relative has threatened her several times. “You need to die,” he said. “You don’t deserve to live because of what you
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One week before Christmas in 2013, Abdi was driving to work as usual in Mogadishu when the sound of gunfire erupted all around his car. As he slowed the vehicle, a group of men armed with AK-47 assault rifles approached the driver’s side and shot Abdi to death before fleeing in a getaway car. Al-Shabab had gotten their man. Abdi was one of fewer than 200 secret believers in Somalia. Like most of the others, he had been raised as a Muslim but later found new life in Christ. His first experience with al-Shabab had occurred in 2011, when they found pages of a Bible in his house while randomly searching his neighborhood. Abdi was immediately dragged away to an underground concrete cell, where he was tortured with a wooden baton and locked in a room with dead bodies. His captors demanded the names of other Christians, but Abdi wouldn’t give them up. Several weeks after his abduction, Abdi took the opportunity to escape after noticing that a guard had forgotten to lock his cell door one night. Abdi ran from his cell and scrambled over a wall as al-Shabab guards fired at him. The militants chased him in two
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Once filled with hate for Christians, today this former imam cannot stop sharing Christ’s love despite death threats. Mahad Birik moves to a new rental house every month. His phone buzzes continually with text messages from unknown numbers: “We will get you!” Mahad was born into a Somali family in a predominantly Muslim part of northeastern Kenya. After receiving an intensive education in Wahhabi Islam, he was appointed as an imam, or Islamic teacher, at age 9. “I learned easily, and in the area where we lived many people are illiterate,” he said. “Because I could read and write, they found me suitable as an imam.” The young imam chose a popular target for his Friday sermons — Christians. “I hated Christians,” he said. “I expressed the wish that Allah would send all Christians to hell.” A Providential Meeting At age 10, Mahad’s parents moved the family to Somalia. In this Islamic stronghold, Mahad had an unlikely encounter with an American missionary in a Mogadishu tea house. Mahad instantly hated the man. “Damn you,” he snapped at him, “tell me what you believe about Jesus!” The Christian missionary gave him a Bible and challenged him to read it. Although the
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