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South Africa
For me, poverty is closely related with abuse. I am saying this because it starts from childhood when a baby girl is taken as a minor at birth. She has to do everything for her brother e.g washing his clothes, his plates and sometimes even carrying him on her back. For me that is the start of abuse. This little girl cannot decide for herself what she wants to do with her life; always she has to be told. She even has a husband chosen for her and when she is married the husband takes charge of her life.
Women then become vulnerable in that they have little or no skills at all for anything. Mostly, men die earlier and leave these poor women with nothing but lots of children to raise. Most of the women are illiterate because going to school is a privilege for boys. They need to be educated from nothing.
The other challenge we were faced with was the relocation of families because of violence, which made people leave the land where they could till for survival and crowd into big cities. Women don’t run away from their responsibilities like men do. With men, once it becomes tough, they run away. It is easier to train women because they are keen to give food to their children and share evenly amongst them.
The Church and the Government are working so hard to empower women to be self-sufficient. A lot of women take their children to school but unfortunately they die from AIDS even before they can help their parents out of poverty. It is a vicious cycle.
The Mothers’ Union provides literacy classes, garden projects, sewing classes, bead work lessons, baking lessons, poultry farming. They are taught that a person can live from the soil. We want to provide what Christ had promised us, and we feel it is our duty as the Church to do that. We also teach parenting skills so that children are brought up properly to become responsible Christians and to get life in its fullness.
In response to the challenges of poverty women in the Anglican Church in Southern Africa have opted for positive initiatives and asked themselves the question: “What would Jesus have done in this situation?”
Here are some of their practical responses:
- Awareness-raising programmes on the role of women promoting family life have been conducted through running conferences at Diocesan and Provincial levels.
- Skills audits are done at parish level and trainings conducted to empower women and to encourage sharing of skills. Leadership and financial skills-training is done to ensure sustainability of the projects.
- Adult basic education and training classes are conducted by trained women and this benefits many women and girls with low literacy.
- Church buildings are used to run soup kitchens for destitute and street children. In some areas, members of the Mothers’ Union have creatively fund-raised for their projects by donating R10.00 per year, per member, and saving this for five years or until enough capital has been raised to build a structure. These then become centres of training in the community, ‘drop in centres’ for orphans and vulnerable children, a small factory for income-generating projects like sewing traditional outfits. It is fashionable to wear a proudly South African product.
- Food production initiatives have been started in partnership with members of the Anglican Women’s Fellowship and other community based organisations. All Dioceses have promoted a vegetable garden project in home areas, church grounds and on sections of land donated by the municipalities or chiefs. In some areas, women have been so active that after feeding families and the needy, they have started vegetable markets to generate income with the surplus.
The passion in which these initiatives are conducted is amazing. All those involved take their God-given responsibility of caring for families seriously. Women have felt very fulfilled and empowered. The outcome of their efforts is visible and the feeling of being the feet, the hands and the eyes of Jesus on earth gives tremendous satisfaction.
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