Laura Walta (in green) in Uganda.
Global mission partnership coordinators for the Diocese of Massachusetts recently returned from a trip to East Africa, where they met with community organizers, clergy, small business owners and others working to enact sustainable change in their communities. Laura Walta, Project Director for Flobal Mission, and the Rev. Holly Hartman, deacon appointed for global mission partnerships, visited mission-focused organizations in Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya, Jan. 4-18.
Hartman and Walta visited several sites that have received money from the Mission Tithe Matching Grants and Council Grants, which are focused on mission partnerships outside of Massachusetts and made possible by the diocese's Together Now fundraising campaign. The trip was an opportunity for Hartman and Walta to see the work that the Diocese of Massachusetts is supporting, and to be inspired by how these organizations are enacting mission.
“This was a listening and learning trip, for us to see how mission is being done in different parts of East Africa,” Walta said. “We wanted to see the impact [these organizations] are having, because we want to be intentional in our grantmaking, be sure that it is focused on effective mission and real, lasting change.”
Walta and Hartman said they were inspired by the developments they saw in these community organizations, especially because they represent sustainable investment in people and communities.
“I saw what I call ‘healthy mission,’ and I saw a noted absence of charity,” Walta said. “These are investments, not financial but of time, information, resources, networks and human capacity.”
The organizations the diocesan global mission team met with are training community organizers, teaching families about disease prevention, working on business development and much more.
In Tanzania, Walta met with 2Seeds, which works to promote education, food security, income stability and human resources development. 2Seeds works to develop leadership capacity in remote villages, empowering people to enact sustainable change and economic growth in their communities.
A recent 2Seeds project involved coaching the leaders of a remote village to help them find alternative sources of income. The village had once relied on farming, but they were struggling due to a three-year drought. 2Seeds helped a group of community leaders get together to start chicken farms that would yield enough eggs to eat and sell. 2Seeds was also able to connect the village with education about care and disease prevention for the chickens. There are now three operations raising chickens, and each has earned a million Tanzanian shillings, or about $10,000.
“They’ve really developed from farmers to businessmen,” Walta said.
Walta also met with a group of eight women who have started a business processing and packaging snacks such as potato chips, popcorn and peanuts. The women are all involved with the production and the running of their business, and are on a path to food security and income stability for their families.
“These women were housewives, and now they’re busy studying record keeping and accounting,” Walta said.
Several representatives from the Friends of Tanzania, a mission collaboration of Grace Church in North Attleboro, Trinity Church in Melrose, All Saints Parish in Brookline and St. Paul’s Church in Natick, also traveled to Tanzania. The Friends of Tanzania work directly with the Diocese of Tanga, which has been actively involved with bringing services such as potable water and medical care to remote villages. During their trip, the Friends of Tanzania and Walta met with Bishop Maimbo Mndolwa of Diocese of Tanga, attended the blessing of two new churches, and visited a new nursery school that Mndolwa has named the Bishop M. Thomas Shaw Nursery School.
Hartman joined Walta in Kenya, where they met with organizers from Tatua Kenya (formerly Be the Change Kenya). Tatua focuses on human capacity building, with a concentration on child poverty eradication. A small group of paid community organizers works in pairs to put together leadership teams of 8-10 people, who learn the skills to implement their own projects in their communities.
One challenge Tatua recently navigated was school attendance among children in the second-largest slum in Nairobi. Community organizers were able to gather parents, teachers and health workers to discuss the issue.
“They talked about why the kids were not in school and how to get them to come back,” said Hartman, “and eventually they were able to get 70 out of the 140 kids they were targeting to come back to school, and the families were paying the fees.”
Tatua was the recipient of a Mission Tithe Council Grant in 2012, through its relationship with Trinity Church in Boston and the Church of Our Saviour in Somerset. Our Saviour was just awarded a grant to bring youth to work with Tatua and learn community organizing skills that they can bring back to Somerset.
“There’s a mutuality there…it’s not about us bringing something to them, it’s about learning from your partners,” Walta said. “It’s not about America bringing the solution.”
The last leg of the trip brought the global mission team to the Kasese district of Uganda, where they visited the Bishop Masereka Christian Foundation (BNCF). BMCF has been supported by the Diocese of Massachusetts' Jubilee Ministry and global mission efforts for many years. The BMCF focuses primarily on education but has expanded its mission significantly to include resources for parents such as nutrition, AIDS prevention education and legal services pertaining to land disputes. Many individuals in eastern Massachusetts donate to BMCF to sponsor children through school.
“People in these remote areas are not always aware that these [services] are available,” said Walta, “So part of the work [for BMCF] is assessing the family situation and what ways they might be able to help.”
Walta and Hartman also visited the Bishop Masereka Medical Center, which was made possible in part by a $250,000 grant from the Diocese of Massachusetts. The medical center attends to more than 2,000 patients a month, with a special focus on maternal-infant care, immunizations, HIV/AIDS prevention, testing and counseling and urgent care. The center includes the only operating theater in the region, an ultrasound machine, and radiology services.
Walta and Hartman returned with many new ideas for supporting congregations in mission, and they are already developing resources and infrastructure that will support mission at all levels. Walta said that her most significant takeaway from the trip was that accompaniment—presence, prayers, conversation—is truly essential to mission.
“As short-term mission groups, we are not going to change a community in a few days,” she said. “But we can accompany that community, and financially support the organizations that are on the ground 365 days a year working to bring about this development.”
Mission groups, Walta said, should invest time in simply being present with the people in these communities.
“Accompaniment can have a huge impact on a community undergoing change. It validates communities in their successes, it comforts them in their failures, it encourages them to keep working and keep trying. Our prayers do count, and our visits count. [We are there] not to do for them, but to be with them.”
“We talk about the church spreading the good news of Christ, and in the West that means eternal life…but the good news is also fewer women dying in childbirth, more babies making it past the first week of life, more children making it past the age of five, fewer people dying of AIDS, more children having immunizations, fewer people dying of preventable diseases,” Walta said. “These things are happening every day. There are people on that journey, and we’re excited to be part of God’s mission and accompanying them on that journey. It reconciles us to ourselves, to each other and to our God.”
Diocesan-funded global mission initiatives provide support and resources for congregations undertaking mission, as well as the annual grants funded by the Together Now campaign. To learn more about the work, visit the Global Mission page.
--Ellen Stuart