A handful of rice goes a long way
Myanmar's war refugees, Xi's speech, lettuce and Liz
More than a million residents of Burma, also known as Myanmar, have been displaced by fighting since a 2021 coup returned the country’s long-ruling military to absolute power. Military attacks on ethnic enclaves like Chin state, which is majority Christian and at the forefront of the pro-democracy movement, have forced tens of thousands to flee, spilling across the border into India. India normally closes its borders to refugees, yet in Mizoram, the Indian state bordering Chin, locals have set up a de facto asylum regime to welcome an estimated 48,000-plus refugees.
According to one report—
the state government, local NGOs, local churches, international humanitarian organizations, and sometimes the refugees themselves, [are] working in tandem to ensure that those seeking asylum are at least provided with the basic amenities.
Mizoram is a majority Christian area of India and has a unique backstory. In 1910 Mizo families began a practice called Buhfai Tham, or handful of rice. Each family sets aside one handful of rice every time they cook a meal. They gather the handfuls of rice as an offering to the church each week, and the church in turn sells the rice to generate income. From mere dollars a century ago, today Buhfai Tham raises $1.5 million annually, supporting thousands of missionaries at home and abroad. (Read more at Tearfund and Practicing the King’s Economy)
Welcome to this Oct. 21 edition of Globe Trot. Mother Teresa said, “Obedience well lived frees us from selfishness and pride and so it helps us to find God and, in Him, the whole world.”
China: In his opening speech at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), President Xi Jinping praised the crackdown that put Hong Kong back “in the hands of patriots” and said the CCP will use “all measures necessary” to “reunify” Taiwan with the mainland.
“Security,” a word Xi used 89 times in the speech, justifies his tight rein on speech and religion, foreign policy, the economy, and public health. According to scholar John Delury:
Mao Zedong promised to make people revolutionaries. Deng Xiaoping promised to make them rich. Xi is promising to keep them safe.
And as religious liberty analyst Elizabeth Kendal adds in her report:
In reality Xi’s interests lie not in keeping citizens safe, but in keeping the Communist Party, and himself in particular, safely ensconced in power.
As the Congress ends on Saturday, China will enter a new era, notes Kendal, “one in which the repression and persecution of the past decade may prove to have been little more than preparation.” With human rights lawyers and key Christian leaders already jailed, a raft of legal measures bans all religious practice not pre-approved by the CCP.
Hannah Nation, director of the Center for House Church Theology, reminds us that in 1970 most observers thought Christianity in China was “essentially dead.” And over the next 40 years, it grew to number between 80 to 100 million believers.
I spoke to Nation about Faith in the Wilderness, the Center’s collected sermons from Chinese church leaders. Its Faithful Disobedience, a collection of writings from jailed pastor Wang Yi, is due out in December. (Full disclosure: I serve on the Center’s advisory board.)
UK: Tabloid Daily Star had a live feed charting whether Liz Truss’s time in office or a 60-pence head of lettuce would last longer. esterday the lettuce won. Truss resigned, saying, “I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected,” after members of her own Conservative Party refused to support her call for unfunded tax cuts. The shortest-serving prime ministry in British history, Truss’s departure comes six weeks after she took office, with the also-recent resignation of her predecessor Boris Johnson, and the Sept. 8 death of Queen Elizabeth.
Canada: In the past five years, the number of Canadian patients dying with physician assistance has grown tenfold, from around 1,000 in 2016 to more than 10,000 in 2021. As the practice has grown in frequency and social acceptance, writes Ewan C. Goligher, assistant professor of medicine and physiology at the University of Toronto, the restrictions intended to safeguard vulnerable populations have been progressively eliminated.
The available data suggest that patients are not being coerced against their will into physician-assisted death, and yet the “culture of death” (a term I initially resisted as needlessly provocative) has taken hold in insidious and surprising ways.
Iran: Elnaz Rekabi, the Iranian climber who competed in South Korea without wearing the compulsory hijab, or head covering, received a hero’s welcome from a chanting crowd awaiting her at 5 a.m. as she landed at Tehran’s airport. But her future remains unclear, after reports she went missing after the competition and a public apology where Rekabi said she had forgotten her hijab.
Here’s a timeline of events in Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini just over a month ago. Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran is a classic about women living under the Islamic regime that’s well worth pulling out again.
I’m reading… Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan.