COUNSELING HELP FOR TRAUMATIZED KOSOVO REFUGEES

MISSIONARIES ARE OFFERING listening ears and helping hands to some of the hundreds of thousands of Kosovo refugees left homeless and hopeless by the latest wave of "ethnic cleansing".

Counseling experts from Youth With A Mission have been training other staff and lay members of local churches to help adults and children traumatized by their experiences. Many who fled the country have reported seeing others killed as they were forced from their homes by Serbian forces.

"It's a huge need and there is nothing else being done," said Debbie Reeve, director of the Mercy Works relief program at YWAM's Tyler training center in Texas, United States. "A lot of United Nations workers have identified people with real traumatic needs; many people need to tell their stories, to talk, to be able to vent."

Thirty-five YWAM staff from 18 countries have been working in several of the refugee camps over the past few weeks. They are due to be supplemented by short-term teams from several countries over the next few weeks. In addition to offering counseling help, the YWAM volunteers are supporting the UN's relief effort by assisting with aid distribution and running programs for children and young people.

"Half the refugees are young people and children, stuck in the camps with no school and nothing to do," said Reeve. "We want to provide some activities and take the opportunity of sharing the truth with them."

Andy Broom, part of YWAM's national leadership team in Albania, said that churches - all still relatively young, having been established in the few years since the end of Communism - had responded "quickly and well" to the refugee crisis.

Gleanings for the Hungry, a YWAM recycling ministry in California, United States that processes discarded fruit for distribution overseas, donated a 12,000 lbs load of dried peaches and nectarines to an emergency relief shipment sent last month.

American missionary Martha McComb experienced one of the first NATO bombings in Nis, where the home in which she hid with her Serbian friends was rocked by an explosion just 200 meters away.

Involved in church planting in Serbia and Bosnia for the past three years, McComb initially ignored the advice for foreigners to leave the country. "I knew I was called as a missionary to the Serbs and didn't want to leave them just when times got difficult," said the YWAM worker.

But she eventually decided to evacuate because of growing anti-American feeling, with threats against her Serbian friends - many of whom opposed Milosevic's actions. "It just got real ugly... I realized that for me to stay was actually endangering the lives of the very people I was there for," she said.

Relocated in Budapest, Hungary, McComb has since been helping organize YWAM's response to the refugee crisis and keeping in contact with the friends she was forced to leave behind.

"They are coping, but it has not been easy. Many are angry at the West and don't understand why they are being bombed. There have been many civilian deaths due to NATO bombings and they don't understand what is happening."

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