Sawubona! (Hello in Zulu!)
I hope I am finding you all well while you read this post! I am doing very well here in Swayimane, Africa. This month we are working for an organization called Zimele. Zimele is a community development organization with the goal “to confront the root causes of poverty and remove barriers to economic self sufficiency for women in South Africa’s rural communities.” They do this by “empowering women and men with skills, resources and support networks to start businesses and social service projects to sustain themselves, their families, and their communities”.
Zimele means “people stand on their own feet” in Zulu. I absolutely love Zimele’s process and vision! They don’t give monetary aid to these communities. They give education, resource, and encouragement. These women lift themselves up out of poverty. Zimele moves at the pace of the community. They desire that everything they teach to be adopted by the culture of the community. Zimele’s approach is slow but SUSTAINABLE! They are making a big difference by not just giving the community what they need, but by giving the community ownership for the improvement of their own community. Zimele has done amazing things with these communities!
I am going to give you a VERY short description of what this looks like. They start with forming a savings group. Each member saves 5Rand per week (about $0.42–not a lot for some of us, but it can be for them) which they bring to their meetings and accumulate all together. They can then start to borrow money from this big pot! They learn to borrow money wisely, considering their income and interest (they have one month to pay it back or interest doubles). Savings groups usually take 2-3 years before they can move on to the next phase. The next phase is business. By borrowing money from their savings, these women are able to start businesses such as a bakery, selling produce, chickens, catering, crafts, jewelry, guesthouse, and many more! What these women hope to see is that their rural community can supply all that the community needs instead of going into the city for their necessities.
Zimele also does spiritual retreats for the women and support them in their personal lives. These women have found hope; because of this new hope, they are inspired to make a postive impact in their own community. Zimele encourages the women to start social service projects with their savings as well. These women WANT to do these projects. These projects are their ideas and organized and carried out all by the community. Projects like feeding/clothing orphans, taking care of sick patients the government has turned their back on, and starting preschools affordable for the families. There’s so much more to this organization and their process but this blog post would be really long if I tried to explain it all! If you want to check Zimele out, the link is below!
How does my team fit in here? Well we are working alongside these women in whatever they do. My team is in a rural village, so agriculture is our main focus. So far we have done lots of gardening: hoeing, fertilizing, watering, planting, picking, and pulling weeds. We’ve also worked in their home care program. We take food to those who are sick. We go to their house, see if they need any medical attention, give them food, and pray for their healing. When they get a new patient they educate the family on how to best take care of their sick family member. Zimele has been able to send some of the women for nurse training, which has helped this program tremendously!
Not only is working alongside the community important, but the relationships we are making are also equally important. The women are touched that we are even here. Shocked that they are noticed, cared about, and thought of. Half way through the month we changed host families. When I said goodbye to my host mom, Mama Doris, she started to tear up. Through our interpreter she told us that since her husband died three years ago she hasn’t felt like she was needed. She enjoyed just having us there, cooking for us and taking care of us. Some people won’t understand why this is meaningful to her. But it is.
Mama Doris has two daughters still living with her. Even though communication was limited, there was so much laughter: dance parties in the kitchen after supper, singing songs walking on the road, chasing chickens, dogs and cats out of the house, running out of the bakery after scoring some snowballs! … and just being goofy.
We also get to just sit with them and observe. Observe their culture, their way of life, their history. Their life is slower. Much slower. And that’s okay. There’s beauty in the slow life, there’s beauty in the fast life. They’re just different. In the World Race we have a saying, “it’s not weird, it’s different”. It’s so easy to see something about a culture that is unlike your own and say, “oh, weird!… they do that?” But no, it’s not weird, not for that culture… it’s just different.
What I also like about working with Zimele is that not all the families are Christian. Zimele is a faith-based non-profit and do share openly about their beliefs, but not all of Zimele staff or the families involved are Christians. This creates a great opportunity for us to be Christ-like examples and show Christ’s love to those who do not know him. Some of my squad-mates have had the opportunity to share the gospel and have had really great conversations with the community members. People are curious. They see us doing what we are doing and wonder why? What makes us want to do this? And our answer is Christ.
I love being here. It will be sad to leave. But this is the nature of the World Race. 11 countries, 11 months. For better or worse, that is the way it is. And you know what, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Each month there’s another place to fall in love with, more people to meet, more hands to shake, more hugs and laughter to give. If anything, this race is growing my capacity to love well. To realize that I have brothers and sisters all over the globe working for the Kingdom who I have had the pleasure of working alongside. Each month hurts near the end but the anticipation of the next grand adventure awaits and always delivers more love!
