Happy Mother’s Day to all our friends
and supporters, especially those of you who are moms. Here in Tanzania Mother’s
Day is not as big a day as it is in the U.S., but people here do honor their
mothers in many ways. Often a mom is referred to using the name of her
first-born child. For example, I might be called “Mama Christa,” since our
daughter’s name is Christa.
Mothers in Tanzania and throughout
Africa are often expected to do the main tasks of childrearing—not only cooking
and cleaning, but also providing much of the food for the household and paying
for school fees. This is especially true in the case of widows or those who may
have been abandoned by their husbands.
When our colleague ELCA missionary
Bethany Friberg arrived in Tanzania over twenty years ago, she noticed that
many women struggled to put food on the table and often the family didn’t have
money to educate their children. Bethany and her husband, Dr. Mark Friberg,
live out in Maasailand near the border with Kenya, where Mark serves in
Lutheran health clinics ministering to the Maasai.
Bethany admired the beautiful
traditional beadwork that the Maasai women make. These items are often sold to
tourists, so she had the idea of forming a women’s cooperative to make and sell
beadwork. Twenty years later, some thirty women are working together in the
Naapok Bead Project. Between them all, they have sent over fifty of their
children to school, some of whom have even graduated from university, a goal
that in the past only seemed a distant dream. They earned money to buy goats,
seeds for gardens, and other agricultural projects that have enriched their
families’ diets.
Recently, Joe and I attended the
dedication of Naapok’s new center, where they now have a cement building where
they can meet to work together and can safely store their bead-making
materials. They also built an outdoor shelter, suitable for holding meetings or
church services, and even constructed restrooms with flush toilets—a real
luxury in the Tanzania bush! The women served us a delicious lunch of beef,
goat, vegetables, and rice—typical for this part of the world.
We are happy that as the ELCA East
Africa Regional Representatives we can encourage Bethany and Mark in their
work.
Top
Photo: Bethany Friberg and members of the Naapok beading group. Our ELCA Land
Cruiser is in the background.
Second
Photo: Joe and Deborah receive beaded key chains as gifts from a member of the
Naapok women’s cooperative.
Joe
and Deborah are missionaries living in Arusha, Tanzania, where they are the
East Africa Regional Representatives for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in
America and work in Tanzania, Kenya, South Sudan, and Uganda. Their daughter,
Christa, will be a sophomore at the University of Southern California this fall.
