Walking through a camp crowded with more than 24,000 displaced Sudanese, Morris is welcomed like a beloved uncle who hasn’t been seen in years. As women and children emerge from their tiny straw and stick homes, the pastor greets them warmly, telling them about upcoming aid distributions. Then, in an explosion of chatty excitement, a woman suddenly appears to renew their old friendship.
“Ah, she remembers me from before,” Morris said, laughing. ‘Before’ refers to a time when the woman visited Morris and his wife, Cabina, in their nearby home, seeking help. Morris and Cabina have been helping people in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains region for three decades. Located mostly in South Kordofan state along the border with South Sudan, the Nuba Mountains are home to several Christian tribal groups in a country that is 90% Sunni Muslim.
Many Nuba Christians have come to know Christ through the legacy of Christian missionaries who arrived in the area in the early 1900s. Today, the region is predominantly Christian and mostly autonomous; it has its own government and defence force. Regional forces have been fighting Sudanese government forces since the 1980s, as the oppressive Islamic government has sought to eradicate Christians from the region.
On 15 April 2023, two Islamist generals vying for control of the country started a vicious civil war in the country’s capital, Khartoum. As battles raged in the city, Christians were specifically targeted. “There has been an increase in the opportunistic killing of Christians,” a Christian leader said.
Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese, including many Christians, have fled Khartoum and other parts of Sudan, taking refuge from the fighting in the Nuba Mountains. Local officials say more than 700,000 people have flooded into camps for internally displaced people (IDP). Thousands have erected flimsy huts in the field behind Pastor Morris’s home, and more arrive on a daily basis.
A Christian woman named Halima fled Khartoum with her three children after her brother was killed by one of the warring factions. She now struggles to survive, and starvation is a real threat because of the war and a recent drought. “We don’t have anything,” she said. “We were eating these leaves.”
When displaced people arrive at the camp, they often seek help at Morris and Cabina’s nearby home. “There are many, many more people who are coming to our house,” Cabina said.
“We don’t have much, but the little that we have we share with them.” A cup of water is sometimes the only thing she can give to those who appear at her door.
But Cabina also tries to point people towards eternal hope. “I tell them that I don’t have enough to give to you, but I want to tell you to depend on God,” she said. “God is what they need. God is faithful. He will give to you, as He says in the Bible, even giving food to the birds of the sky.”
Morris and Cabina have helped others throughout their 33-year marriage. Sometimes that has meant comforting those who have lost family members in bombings by the Islamist Sudanese government. Over the decades, Cabina has opened her home and her heart to numerous orphans who lost their parents that way. Morris saw several friends die when his school was bombed as a child, so he understands the emotions many of his new neighbours are experiencing.
Despite the suffering and death caused by the bombings, which still occasionally target Nuba villages, Morris reaches out to Muslim Sudanese soldiers who are captured by the region’s defence forces. His ministry work among the enemy fighters is controversial, however, and even one of his sons disapproves. “Why do you help these people who are bombing us?” his son asks.
“I tell him because of the love of Jesus,” Morris explained. “He has commanded us to help the people who are persecuting us, also to love them.”
Morris also serves as the lead chaplain at a nearby Christian hospital that often cares for those who have been wounded in the fighting. But the most urgent need he and Cabina see is in the sprawling IDP camp that stretches for kilometres beyond their backyard. The camp has just one water well, and people wait hours, sometimes all night long, to fill their plastic jugs.
They [are] just really looking for what they can eat and what they can drink,” Cabina said. “We also give them the message of hope and tell them about the love of God.”
Cabina said their work is emotionally and physically draining. “[When] I want to try to serve but my house is full and I am tired of these people that come all the time … I ask God to renew my heart with love,” she said.
God has been faithful in restoring the couple’s compassion for strangers and providing them with the strength to continue their ministry, but the work can be overwhelming and fraught with heartache. Just days earlier, several shacks in the camp had caught fire, killing two young children.
“Everyone will be traumatised because of what is happening,” Morris said. “There are people who have been crying, sometimes even asking, ‘What is happening here, God?’.”
The couple tries to provide comfort where they can. “We are telling people that God is in control, God knows everything,” Morris said. “God is loving us even though we are receiving this.”
With VOM’s help, Morris has provided tarps, audio Bibles and other supplies to people in the camp. Sokkari, a 50-year-old Christian woman with 12 children in her care, fled Khartoum just after the war broke out. A relative had been killed in the fighting, and she had heard that girls were being raped and boys were being forced to join the fighting.
Sokkari, who can’t stop thinking about the horrors she witnessed in Khartoum, is grateful for the audio Bible Morris gave her. “I used to pray,” she said. “I know that God has protected us until we came this way, but up to now my mind is not settled. The Bible helps me to leave these bad thoughts and puts the Word of God in my heart.”
Morris and Cabina are committed to distributing God’s Word and proclaiming His Good News. They ask Christians around the world to pray that their strength will be renewed, that peace will come to Sudan, and that God will provide for the multitude of displaced Christians they serve.
“I know that God has given me this job,” Cabina said, “and I am with Him. He is helping me to fulfil the work.”
VOM has been in fellowship with Morris and Cabina for many years. VOM first told their story in 2015.
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