Stand By Night

We have been praying for the country of Myanmar the last few nights here in the prayer room. There is a team of people from IHOP-KC going out there on a humanitarian effort soon. I didn’t think it was that big a deal until I heard that Allen Hood was part of the team, then I decided to look it up. Allen Hood is the associate director of the International House of Prayer in KC, as well as the director of the Forerunner School of Ministry.

The Country
So, the basics on Myanmar. It’s the largest country in southeast Asia, and though officially (since June 18th, 1989) it’s called the Union of Myanmar, the inhabitants are called Burmese and still call it Burma. It was renamed after the current government group, the Myanma Naingngandaw, which is little more than a violent military regime. The persistence of it’s inhabitants to call the nation Burma is a protest to that regime. Oh, and in the Milton-Bradley board-game Risk, it’s called Siam. Still can’t figure that one out…

The Bad
In 1948 Burma became a republic, and the Union of Burma was one of the fastest growing nations in Asia. They were actually the world’s largest exporter of rice at one point. However, in 1962 General Ne Win led a military coup d’etat (pronounced: koo-da-ta) and in 1974 established the Burma Socialist Programme Party. Since then the nation has been in steady decline in every area imaginable, and in 1987 the UN designated Burma as a fourth-world country.

The Ugly
Protests of any kind, or any attempt to speak out for freedom in Burma, is almost always immediately stamped out by the military/government. There is not a lot of media coverage on Burma, because the military tries not to use lethal force on protesters, preferring to make thousands of arrests instead. And the average prison sentence in Burma is 16,616 years.

Burma is one of the biggest human trafficking and child-prostitution hubs in the world, and the government is not making it a priority to do much about it. For example, in 2006 the government arrested a Burmese woman for selling two girls into prostitution, and she was sentenced to only 12 years in prison. From 2002 to 2007 the government arrested 1484 people for human trafficking and child prostitution; only 748 were given prison sentences (I couldn’t find anywhere that said how long the sentences were).

And So…
Recently, there has been an increasing number of “raids” by humanitarians going into Burma to rescue girls forced into prostitution. We can continue to pray that God will guide and protect those who are going to help, and that He will bring healing to those involved in the human trafficking industry.

-J