Inspiring CHE

A group working on fencing "kitchen gardens" right outside their houses.

At our CHE internship I’m learning alongside a young man who has been working in rural northern Uganda, his native country.  He’s been working mostly with groups of women.  Like too many traditional cultures, the women in this rural culture are looked at as possessions.  It’s so common for men to go and trade in the family’s supply of crops for alcohol to go on a binge for a few days.  The culture insists that women sit on the dirt floor when men are sitting on chairs.  My young friend was working with a group of women for six months before they would venture to even answer the questions out loud that he was posing to the group.  Husbands keep saying he’s wasting their wives time.  But eventually the women are getting the ideas of self-development from CHE.  They planted vegetable gardens beside their outdoor kitchens in the cement-hard ground during the dry season.  They watered with waste water and by carrying sauce pans from the village well multiple times a day.  And then they saw the success of eating good food in dry season.  Even being able to sell some vegetables to replace some of the small income their husbands waste.  They have always opened their meetings with prayer.  But now the women are asking to learn how to pray themselves.  After three years of work in the community, now the council of elders called this young man to come before them.  They said they were revising the community’s by-laws and are seeing from his work that they need to elect some leaders for the women.  Did he think this was a good idea?  All the women leaders ended up being from his CHE group.  Now they have some community authority to gather women for trainings and continue to pass on what they are learning.  Stories of progress like this small vignette are what push us all along in this way of hope.

-- El Padre