In August this year, responding to an invitation from the World Conference on Religion and Peace (WRCP), general secretary Setri Nyomi travelled to Mombasa, Kenya, to join other religious leaders connected with Africa in brainstorming on a new initiative to help children affected by HIV/Aids in that continent.

The WRCP was founded in 1970 to mobilize the world's religions to cooperate against threats to the human family. A global movement with over thirty national chapters and members in more than 100 countries, it provides a base at local, national, regional and global levels for a variety of peace-related activities. The WRCP is the largest coalition of representatives of religious communities who, while respecting mutual differences, work together to take common actions to address critical problems in areas such as conflict resolution, human rights and peace education. It is one of four main organizations (the others are PLAN International, Save the Children and CARE) which have been invited by the Bill Gates Foundation to propose together a project which will be a major contribution to address the issue of children affected by HIV/Aids. The Bill Gates Foundation is likely to give around US$50 million towards the project.

"HIV/Aids and its impact on our constituency are something we are not able to cover programmatically from WARC," Nyomi says. "So when an organization such as the WCRP invites for an input at policy-making level in an interfaith collaboration we can invest that time in a way that will benefit our constituency and will help us point our constituency to where help is available when they inquire."

In his view, the meeting went very well. "We laid down some clear principles that the process should move forward. First, that at least 80% of whatever resources come into this initiative needs to be used on the ground in Africa, to impact the children for whom this initiative has been created - not for the organizations and not in planning expensive workshops and conferences. Second, that credible African organizations dealing with the HIV/Aids crisis should be involved in all aspects of the decision-making and not just have foreign NGOS spending money on their behalf. Third, that we focus on a few countries for this initiative so that we can have maximum impact, rather than spread resources thinly in too many countries and achieve nothing. And fourth, that we utilize already existing national or continental religious bodies, but ask them to create interreligious councils for this purpose. Councils of this sort could also be useful instruments for addressing other issues, such as social or ethnic conflict, or economic injustice."

As part of this trip, the general secretary had meetings in Nairobi with the All Africa Conference of Churches and the moderator of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa.

Other visits

Setri Nyomi's busy travel schedule in recent months also included visits to Indonesia, the UK and the USA.

At the beginning of July, he visited the Korean Presbyterian Church in America and the Lithuanian Evangelical Reformed Church and attended the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), where he was a guest preacher. He followed this with a visit to the general assembly of the United Reformed Church (URC) in the UK.

Later in the month, on his way to the general assembly of the Reformed Ecumenical Council [see separate story], he met in Jakarta with Jonathans, general secretary of the Protestant Church in Indonesia (GPI), and Jona Wirakotan, general secretary of the Indonesian Christian Church (GKI).

"We had fruitful discussions on the Indonesian situation," he says. "They appreciated WARC's quick response to the situation in the Moluccan Islands. We agreed that our concern was to advocate for the protection of both Muslims and Christians. They expressed a need for a multireligious working group, which would have as one of its tasks a vigorous education and community-building programme."

In August, Setri Nyomi had meetings in London with Preman Niles of the Council for World Mission and with Anthony Burnham, general secretary of the URC.