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So as the question lingered
in the air, I saw the imploring looks from my LWF colleagues
to make the case for education and delayed marriage. And so
I explained how I had been able to go through college, how I now
owned my own home and was not financially dependent on
anyone. How I wanted to be married, perhaps even soon, and
eventually have children, but that for now, of all the
paths open to me as a woman, I had chosen this one.
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A
Ugandan girl at a well.
Photo by Kathryn Sime, ELCA. |
As I waited for the
translator to finish telling my story, I saw a few nods of
understanding cross some of the women’s faces. At the end,
I understood better that this community was not just a
recipient of our World Hunger funding, they were true
partners in our common mission of ending hunger.
In
our church’s fight to end hunger and poverty around the
world and close to home, we take a broad approach. Education
is certainly a key strategy in this fight, but it’s not the
only one. Micro-finance, women’s empowerment, vocational
training, agricultural training, irrigation, animal
husbandry — all are proven development strategies that
reduce hunger and poverty around the world and at home.
Relief efforts address daily hunger, often in conjunction
with development projects that seek to end long-term hunger.
We advocate on behalf of our neighbors living in poverty to
our government, and we look inward through education and
awareness efforts that ask us to consider our own relationship to
people living in poverty. Our gifts to
ELCA World Hunger
Appeal make possible all these transformational strategies
through our support of key partners in our fight against
hunger.
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Milly Muyinga. Photo
by Sue Edison-Swift, ELCA |
One of our partners is Milly
Muyinga from Kakinzi, Uganda. She has eight children of her
own and is now the guardian of two orphans who lost their
parents to AIDS. It is both cost-effective to care for orphaned
children in family structures as opposed to an orphanage,
and, most importantly, it’s much healthier for them to be
raised in their home communities. Milly was eager to help
these two children orphaned by AIDS, but she needed an
additional income source to keep her new larger family from
falling into hunger and poverty.
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