BISHOP’S BLOG Sunday 15th August 2010
I want to tell you Olivia’s story. She lives in a remote part of Tanzania in east Africa and I met her there ten days ago.
Our diocese of Hereford has “Companion Links” with four Anglican dioceses in the east and south of Tanzania. We do this so that we can learn from and support one another, but also it’s a “window” into another extremely different part of the world. I have just been out visiting this remote, immensely rural and very poor, enormous region in the far south of Tanzania, near the Mozambique border.
Most of the villagers there live in minute rectangular mud huts with grass “thatch” for a roof, which they have to renew annually. They have a small-holding on which to grow food to live, and eke out what existence they can which is so dependent upon the rain. All the farming is done by hand. In one village of 3,000, the women have to walk 4 miles to fetch water in the dry season, and four miles back with the water balanced on their heads.
The Church out there does brilliantly, within their extremely limited means, at trying to help. One project of theirs has been to buy cows to donate to carefully chosen and trained villagers on the understanding that those who receive them will give away the first calf to another villager, and so on. We are trying to assist them to extend this scheme with goats to help, among others, their fifteen retired clergy who have absolutely no income at all.
And so to Olivia. A few years ago, she was given a cow and has proved brilliant at looking after it. She gave away the first calf but has been able to keep or sell subsequent ones which means that she and her children have milk to drink and sell, which has kept them healthier, and enabled her to pay for them to go to secondary education. She has even saved enough to build a new house of baked mud bricks, and she chose to leave her old mud hut standing as a reminder of where she has come from!
Olivia has discovered real business and leadership skills and, with others, has also started a micro-finance bank for the benefit of the whole community.
Fantastic! There is a story of hope and of practical Christianity working for a better life for all. Oh, I should also have told you that Olivia is a Moslem.