“It’s a daily work, an unfinished work”
SAT-7’s viewer support teams have the very important job of answering calls, emails and social media messages from our audience.
“It’s a daily work, an unfinished work,” says Enaam Haddad, SAT-7’s audience relations manager in Lebanon. “It’s a 24 hours a day, seven days a week work. People will always have demands and needs, and we will always have to be there for them, to answer them, to stand by their side.”
The challenge of answering the cry for Enaam’s small team and their counterparts in Egypt, Cyprus, London and Turkey is growing all the time. The number of people contacting SAT-7 has trebled in the last five years – from around 270 a day in 2010 to over 800 a day in 2015.
Enaam said: “The cries of the children and their parents are mainly for security and for feeding their spiritual needs.
“We get a lot of prayer requests from people who are distressed, oppressed, who are living in a bad situation. They ask us to pray for them, to stand with them in prayer. And we do pray every time we receive a prayer request.”
More and more people are telling us that they have come to know Christ through watching SAT-7, and want to know more about Him and how to live the Christian life.
The support provided through SAT-7’s programmes and the viewer support teams is greatly appreciated by our 15 million-strong audience.
Enaam said: “A lot of people say to us, ‘Among all the violence around us in the Middle East, you are the only place, the only channel, where we really feel our kids are safe’; ‘You are the only church we have’; ‘You are the only source of Biblical teaching for us.’ They tell us how their values and lives have changed because of SAT-7’s programmes.”
ANSWER THE CRY
Our campaign, Answer the Cry, tells some of the stories of our viewers and the challenges they face, living as Christians in the Middle East and North Africa. Every day, SAT-7 receives more than 800 responses to our programmes – and demand is growing. The people of the Middle East and North Africa need your support more than ever before.
Your support can help us to be there for these people – to make programmes that will encourage their faith; to answer their questions; to give them a way to connect with other Christians.