International Women's Day

I am so grateful to be back in the US with my family. I am excited about this time for us to do some of the work that we need to do as a family to prepare for a return to ministry later this year.

I am also excited to watch, even from afar, as International Women's Day is celebrated by the Emmanuel Center for Women and Children. When we started three years ago the dream of changing how a village viewed and treated the women and children that make up such a large part of the population and did not make up a proportionate amount of the leaders and decisions makers on a family or community level seemed so far fetched. We started small by building relationships, starting small income generating projects, and proving ourselves trustworthy in the eyes of the village. Now, almost three years on, the Emmanuel Center took the opportunity afforded by International Women's Day to start the community wide education that we have wanted to do for so long. The discussion and education on women's rights, female circumcision, gender based violence, marriage rape, child marriage, and many other issues that affect women all around Gamasara that was long awaited started today.

 T-shirt says, "Women, stand up for your rights"

And the best part is that I wasn't even there. I wish I was. I wish that I could have seen it, this small, yet incomparably important step. I wish I could share with you the taste, smell, and feeling of such an important day, to stir you up through my writing to the same level of excitement that I myself feel, yet I can't. I am not there. And yet one of the most exciting parts of the day is that I am not there. This event, planned, organized, hosted, and run by the Emmanuel Center was planned, organized, hosted, and run by local leaders in Gamasara, women standing up in their own community and saying that we have an important voice that needs to be heard. I am personally not a fan of the concept of being a 'voice for the voiceless.' I much prefer to work to give the voiceless their own voice and move them past feeling like they have no voice worth listening to. That has happened today. Women planning and creating their own platform in order to talk about their own issues, and over 80 people showed up. Not bad in a village that doesn't exceed 2000 people.

Now, if I had to guess I would say the day was probably not flawless. Simply the fact that the request for approval for funds to be withdrawn in order to purchase t-shirts for the event came less than 12 hours before the start of the event itself gives a small pictures of how the overall day went. However, it still happened. The community still showed up. And women who were once considered to hold unimportant opinions where today able to speak on their own issues in a public forum. It may be a small forum and I am sure there are some things to work out before we do it again next year. Yet any progress we see in the future would have built on this first day and I could not be prouder of the women involved in the Emmanuel Center than I am today.

Many blessings to them and all women celebrating their worth and importance today.

How Bad Indicators Put Joy in My Heart

One of my classmates has put up a countdown on-line to encourage us as we get close to finishing up our master’s program. We are now in the double digits and it is pretty exciting to be coming close to the end. I will have to say that I have learned so much about development, its real implementation in the world, and how development and faith intersect in people’s lives. That last one has come largely from the lives and testimonies of fellow classmates, professors, and others practitioners I have met along the way. I have also learned that sometimes the textbook way of doing things isn’t necessarily the most faithful.

The first class we ever took was on project planning and management. We learned how to write a good indicator, something that was specific, time bound, and measurable. Indicators are the targets that you have to meet that tell you whether or not your program is being carried out successfully. Indicators let us know whether or not we are doing a good job. Earlier this week during a meeting with the Emmanuel Center Executive Committee I heard an indicator of our work in Gamasara in trying to change the attitudes of the community in regards to women’s and children’s rights. It was not specific, time bound, or measurable, yet it filled my heart with joy as if we had passed a major milestone, and I guess in some ways we have.

A woman said that she had attended a church activity, returned home after dark and her husband had not beat her…First of all we need to pause there and look at the fact that this was something worth mentioning, which means that most other times that is exactly what he would have done. It is also worth observing that the woman expected to get beat when she reached home after dark and yet still found church a worthwhile place to be. However, what I am most excited about is that she was not beat by her husband, specifically because he had seen the benefit of the church and the benefit of the Emmanuel Center, and what these places had done for her life. His respect for the changes taking place as a result of the church and this program was enough to change his behavior and he is not even directly involved.

When we first started even we ourselves felt like we were taking the long way around the issue of women’s and children’s rights, but instead of rushing headlong into something that complicated we decided to take the slow path. We decided to economically empower women, then educate them, and lastly start working with the community only after our heart for them became evident. While we still have a long ways to go and while my trained mind knows that this is a bad indicator in that it is not transferable to others, meaning we don’t know if we have affected this kind of change on anyone outside of this one family, it still feels like a huge victory and something to praise God for.

Dreams = Words = Reality

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Yesterday a small group of women and a few men gathered for a long meeting at Gamasara UMC. It was supposed to start at 9 am, actually started at 11 am, and ended around 3 pm. It involved budgets, suggestions, deciding to return a defective sewing machine next week, and me mispronouncing the Swahili word for “constitution” so many times in one day that it became a running joke.

At the end of the day though, before leaving, we had a special moment: we were able to take a picture of most of the founding members of the Emmanuel Center. Approved constitution in hand we are a few steps away from being officially registered with the Tanzanian government as

a community based organization.

Emmanuel Center for Women and Children is a new organization, operating out of Gamsara UMC that seeks to reduce gender-based violence, promote children’s rights, and bring peace to families in Gamasara.

This has been an almost two year journey that started as an angry discussion at a funeral, proceeded to be a teary eyed response to an untenable situation, and has grown into a living reality. It has proven to me that words have power, and that ideas really can drive our lives. It has also been my own version of a shirt I once saw that said, “Everyone wants a revolution, but no one wants to do the dishes.” These past two years have been hard work, making time for this project that was only an idea and feeling in a few hearts and minds of a small church. As the picture shows we are not a group of professionals working out of an office with a nice starting budget. There is almost no budget, heck the church building isn’t even finished yet. And I have discovered the harsh reality, that while a commonly shared, occasionally well articulated, dream that refused to die has resulted in the Emmanuel Center, that the real work, and true transformation will live or die in the daily details of the work and the daily pressure of making hundreds of small, correct decisions. At times it is even possible to lose site of the bigger picture as we get lost in the daily accounting and questions of time tables and group dynamics.

We have not arrived. We are nowhere near where we want to be, and I cannot even say with any confidence that we have yet transformed or even affected anyone’s life. The amount of learning we as an organization still have to do is staggering. Yet, I wanted to pause and with this article take a short breath and look back at how a need, expressed in one of the most heart wrenching ways possible, has given birth to a community within a community, a community that we hope will give birth to the dreams of many more people in the years to come.

Dreams = Words = Reality