Alison Gill is a CMS Ireland Mission Partner preparing for service in Burundi.

Over the past 40 years Burundi has faced ongoing issues of ethnic conflict and genocide. It is one of the world’s poorest nations and like its neighbour, Rwanda, has been plagued by tension between the dominant Tutsi minority and the Hutu majority. The Church is playing a critical role in helping to encourage forgiveness and reconciliation.

Alison will be working alongside YWAM to train church workers in specific skills of trauma counselling and healing – as together they seek transformation in the aftermath of the civil war that still leaves Burundi broken and scarred.

At present Alison is based in Belfast on a YWAM Discipleship Training School and later in 2008 she will spend time at a mission training college before moving briefly to Les Cedres, near Paris, to improve her French. She will move to Burundi in the spring of 2009.