Healing Lives, Restoring the Earth

Marah International
Attleboro, MA

Imagine growing up as a child in the environmental disaster areas of Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union. From infancy, you are exposed to toxic chemicals from a host of polluting industries.

The air you breathe is filled with soot, irritating sulfur compounds, lead, and other poisons produced by cars and power plants burning brown coal. The water you drink comes from a river polluted with human and animal wastes and toxic by-products discharged by outmoded industrial processes without pollution controls. Pollution combined with cultural and social pressures reduces your life expectancy to less than 60 years.

In ecologically distressed regions of the world, Christians can be “salt and light,” bringing a message of hope while working with the local people to identify and address environmental concerns that affect their health and environment.

It was for this purpose that Marah International was conceived. The name is derived from the miracle that takes place in Exodus 15:22-27, where Moses intercedes for his people and God heals the bitter, polluted waters of the spring at Marah.

Like Moses, Marah International seeks to be God’s agent of healing and restoration to those facing environmental crises as a result of ecological degradation. Marah International encourages the active participation of Christians and their churches on behalf of these regions through prayer, giving, stewardship, and involvement.

For example, Marah International has started ecology clubs for young people in Romania, where 20 percent of the rivers are degraded or lifeless from garbage, untreated sewage, or toxic materials.

On a hot, sunny, day in June 1998, 15 youth from the town of Sighisora gathered along the banks of the Tarnava Mare River to do something about the polluted waters in their community. Having started an ecology club with the help of a retired American chemistry professor just six months before, they were about to receive their first training about watersheds, stream ecology, and water pollution.

Over the next four weeks, the participants learned how to collect water samples and test them for the presence of pollutants with equipment donated by American companies. They collected and identified stream invertebrates, and learned which species could tolerate pollution. When the training was over, the participants vowed to monitor six local streams for one year, then report their results to the community.