I am thrilled to share with all of you the latest and greatest of God’s miracles! As many of you know we have been looking for land for the Dorcas Widows since July 2007. The search has been long and taken us down many a winding road, however, we remained steadfast that God would, at the right time, provide just the right place. In late July this year (exactly one year after our search began), I went to look at a beautiful piece of land about 40 minutes outside of Kampala. It was 100 meters from the main road and the soil was rich and ready for planting. We immediately put in a bid and began to go through the process of bartering. During this process, another buyer came forward and offered to buy the whole 20 acre plot thus forcing us out of the running. At that point we were sorely disappointed that another exceptional piece of land had slipped through our fingers. However, about a month later, after I had returned to Minneapolis I received one of the best calls of my life.
Joyce, one my dearest widow friends (pictured above), called me and told me the most exciting news. She said that the buyers who wanted to acquire the whole 20 acres were not able to come up with the funds, so the sellers contacted our representative and asked if we were still interested in buying the property. After that it only took a week for us to purchase 2.85 acres of prime land in Matuuga. When Joyce told me that the land was now ours, I started to scream “yes, yes, yes!!” and she started to laugh uncontrollably. After over a year of waiting, God had given his widows a beautiful piece of property. We both laughed, cried and thanked God together. It was a thrilling moment and I will never forget it! (For those of you in Minneapolis, we will be having a bazzar/fundraiser next Sunday, Sept. 28th—come and hear more of the story!! Check www.dorcaswidows.org for details!)
As many of you know, I have physically returned back to Minneapolis, but my heart and my soul remain in Uganda with the women I love. However, one of the greatest blessings in being home has been to see how my partners in this ministry, Lisa Tschetter and Carol Daly Vogt have used their extraordinary spiritual gifts to create a structure and a solid base for The Dorcas Widows Fund. I have never seen God bring together a team so perfectly suited for each other and for this ministry. So, in this public forum, I wanted to thank them and tell them how much I love them both. God is doing mighty things through them, through me and through the ladies. I can almost feel it pulsing through my veins at times and I love it!
In being home, I have been asked so many thoughtful, interesting, creative questions about the Dorcas Widows Ministry, so I have decided to post a copy of an interview I did with an online magazine called Wrecked For The Ordinary (www.Wreckedfortheordinary.com). If you are one of the people who have loved these women through prayer or though financial giving, then please read my answers to these thoughtful questions. It may give you a better glimpse into the comprehensive nature of this ministry. Just scroll down and see if they asked me some of the questions you would have loved to ask me! It is a good window into what God has developed over the last year. Enjoy! If it raises any other questions, feel free to contact me at karimillermn@gmail.com
Interview questions:
Can you tell us a little bit about your ministry, Dorcas Widows Ministry, and your involvement with widows in Uganda? How did you get started? What do you do now?
I went to Kampala, Uganda in May 2007 not knowing what I would do or whom I would meet, but I knew I wanted to love the poor. I knew I wanted to learn what it means to follow the teachings of Jesus. After I arrived, I met a widow named Joyce who introduced me to the Dorcas Widows Ministry. The Dorcas Widows Ministry is a Ugandan based group for widows who have lost their husbands due to the war in northern Uganda, HIV/AIDS, malaria, TB, or other diseases. It is a support group that helps widows cope with the loss of their spouse and the devastating circumstances they find themselves in. I began to create friendships with these ladies and to learn about their challenges. I saw how hard they worked just to stay alive. I spent weeks visiting them in their homes, talking with them, praying with them and sharing my life with them. It was out of a deep love and friendship that our partnership began.
My involvement with them is and always has been one of friendship and love. I looked for ways to love my friends in their pain. Their biggest needs were feeding their children, paying school fees, house rent and medical costs. At first, I just gave my own money whenever I felt God nudge me to do so. I didn’t tell anyone, I just did it. As I began to tell the stories of my friends on my blog, other people began to email me and ask how they could help. Suddenly over a period of one month God had raised $20,000 for these women. I asked them what we should do with the money and they decided we should build a widow’s community where they could live rent-free and grow their own food. Still other donors began to give me money to help those in the most desperate circumstances, which is how our emergency fund began.
When I arrived back in Minneapolis in August of 2007, I knew I had to organize a better and more secure way of collecting donated money. So, with my best friend, we created the Dorcas Widows Fund. The Dorcas Widows Fund is an American based non-profit 501c(3) that financially supports the Dorcas Widows Ministry in the areas of income generation, emergency feeding, school fees and health care.
When I arrived back in Uganda in February 2008, I was so excited to see my widow friends again. It is the relationships we have that are the cornerstone of our partnership. In coming back, I have formalized our emergency fund program. When a widow is in a desperate situation, we help fill the gap for them by providing some emergency money. Most often we help women feed their children or pay medical expenses. It was out of one of the most critical emergency situations with a women in the end stages of HIV, that I first asked those that read my blog to consider paying school fees for this woman. A donor came forward to do so and that sparked others to support the children of other women who are HIV positive. So, in March of 2008, we began a school sponsorship component to our ministry. We now sponsor 13 children.
One of the most exciting things that has developed in the last 2 months has been the Beaded Jewelry business. The ladies are expert craftsmen at rolling slips of paper in beads and then creating beautiful jewelry from those beads. We sent some samples back to the states in March of 2008 in hopes of finding a market for the product. Since that time we have sold about a 1,000 beaded necklaces. Twice a week the ladies meet to roll beads and to pray for more business. God has so far begun to bless the work of their hands as we have had at least one order every week for the past two months. Every time the ladies receive their payment, they tithe 10% back to Jesus. It is like watching the widow put in her “mite’ every week. I see why Jesus thought it was so beautiful.
Since February, we have been actively looking for 3 acres of land to build our Dorcas Widows Community. Due to the fact that house rent is so expensive and that the government is removing them from the slums they live in, we are praying earnestly for a land of our own. This land will contain 30 simple homes for the widows to live in rent-free where they can grow their own food. We are also planning on building a community center where we can hold business seminars as well as other trainings. One of our most fervent prayers was to acquire a piece of land where the women could live without worrying about being chased away by a greedy landlords.
In essence, the Dorcas Widows Ministry seeks to love Jesus and follow his command to take care of widows and orphans in their distress. Our overall mission is to support the widows and children who are members of the Dorcas Widows Ministry in Kampala, Uganda in their journey from poverty to self-sufficiency. If you want to learn more about any of our projects, please check out our website www.dorcaswidows.org
How has your relationship with the widows changed over time? Have you seen a level of intimacy grow between you and the women?
When I first met these widows, I was so guarded. I wondered if it was even possible to have real friendships with women so completely different from me. What does an HIV positive woman in abject poverty have in common with a healthy woman from the wealthiest country on the planet? With a prejudice I didn’t even know I had, I doubted that real friendships would ever be possible. After all, their needs were so enormous, I was sure they would only see me as a gateway to money. So, I was loving “toward” them. I was kind. I listened and prayed with them. I gave them money when I thought it was appropriate. I even expected them to share their deep places with me, but I never let them into mine. I answered their attempts to know me with vague responses turning the questions back toward them. I was so sincere…I really thought I was loving them and protecting myself. After all, the prejudice inside me told me that if I revealed too much they would press me for money. In fact, for many months I kept my phone number from them. I thought I would be bombarded with calls begging me for help. I had this misguided belief that somehow I was their only hope for a better future. When I think of the woman I was just a few months ago, I want to shake her and scream at the top of my lungs, “YOU ARE MISSING IT! YOU DON’T HAVE AN INTIMATE LOVE, YOU ONLY HAVE AN IMITATION OF LOVE!!”
Slowly, God began to open my eyes to the prejudice that had a choke hold on my heart. All of a sudden I saw how grotesque it was. The barriers I thought I set up to protect myself were actually blocking the love I so desperately wanted to experience. As I moved among the women, I saw them sitting in doorways together engaged in deep conversation. I saw them entering each other’s homes to clean the infected wounds of the dying. These women seemed so close, so deeply connected. It was then that I realized that the love they had for each other was always just out of my reach. I had blocked myself from having any real relationships with them, so I was at that point destined to remain an outsider….a foreigner who had come to ‘help the poor.”
It was then that I decided to stop being a helper and start being a friend. Instead of vague answers, I shared my real thoughts. When they talked about the pain in their life, I also talked about mine. When they reminisced about their husband, I listened and laughed with them about the good times that had been. When my phone rang, I no longer braced myself for “a call for help”, but instead smiled as I saw the name of a friend flashing on the screen. More often than not, the ladies call just to say hello or to ask me how I’m doing. I now have several friends that call just to encourage me or to say that they are praying for me. The walls of my heart have now come down and I have laid myself open before these women and they have laid themselves open before me. They are not “the people I am helping,” they are my friends. They are people I like to spend time with. They are the people I call when I am in physical or emotional crisis. They are spiritual companions on my journey of faith. There is a depth to our relationship that wasn’t there before. There is a love that is growing that is intimate and real.
I have now developed many intimate friendships with women who are nothing like me. They are black and I am white. They are Acholi and I am American. They are incredibly poor and I am wealthy. They are sick and I am well. Yet these women hold a piece of my heart and I hold a piece of theirs. Our journeys are now intertwined. They don’t depend on me--we depend on each other. They aren’t calling me begging for help, I am calling them offering to stand with them in their place of need. I am not making appointments to talk to the widows—I am going to visit my friends in their homes. I am not loving “at” them anymore; instead I am just loving them. We are learning to intimately know each other. We show each other our strengths and weaknesses. We speak the truth to one another even when it’s hard. We encourage each other to trust that God is big enough to meet the needs we have. Most of all, we just like spending time together.
What have you learned from these women?
Love. I have learned to love and be loved, not that I have attained perfection in it –far from it, but I am a greater lover than I was before. I have opened my heart and my soul to these women and they have opened theirs to me. We make sacrifices for each other, putting our own needs and worries behind us, so we can give fully to the one in the most pain. Now when I see a need, I don’t give out of my excess, I give it all. When one of us is sick, we stop what we are doing and we go to them. We pray with each other in our deepest need and our deepest pain. I have learned that you can’t love “toward” someone; you can only love “with” someone. You can’t love without intimacy…without sharing your honest self. I’ve learned that love is about showing your weakness to another person, so that they can love you back. Receiving love is just as important as giving it. I’ve learned that where there is love, Jesus is there in powerful ways that I sometimes can’t even explain. Jesus said that the greatest of these is love and I have learned that he was telling the truth. For when you have love, you also have deep peace, joy and contentment.
What practical strides has the ministry taken to help the environment and physical situation of the widows?
Dorcas Widows Ministry practically helps the widows in the following ways:
• Emergency Funds: When a widow is unable to provide food or medical care for herself or her children, we give funds to provide those things for her.
• Scholarships for School children: We help find sponsors to pay school fees for the children the widows are caring for.
• Income Generation: We have formed two groups of widows who make beaded necklaces. We are finding markets to sell this jewelry in order to provide these women with more consistent income.
• Widows Community: We have just purchased 2.85 acres of land to form a widow’s community where the widows can live rent-free, grow their own food and receive business training at a community center.
• Encouragement: Members of the Dorcas Widows group take care of other members who are sick, praying with them, feeding them and getting them to a clinic.
How have their lives been affected spiritually?
The great thing about Jesus is that we have an opportunity to develop intimacy with him. Each of our love relationships with him will be unique…full of our own intimate secrets, pains and joys. Like a wife talking about her husband, we will share with others about the love we have for one another, but we will not reveal the deepest intimacy between us. It is somehow too special, too tender to share with any other person than our lover. Each of my widow friends has a unique love relationship with Jesus. Each lady has seen her heavenly husband do miraculous things for her and her children. When I look into their eyes as they discuss the love and faithfulness of God, I can sense that there is a greater intimacy between themselves and their savior than I will ever be privileged to know. All I can say is that becoming a widow in country where poverty is as common as seeing the sun rise every day either throws you into the arms of Jesus or into total despair and often times both. Some of my widow friends were lost in despair and alcoholism before being rescued by our Savior, while others have deepened their love relationship with Jesus as the grief washed over them. Even while all of them are in deep poverty and while most are suffering from HIV and other related illnesses, they still see a God that is good…that is kind…that is powerful…that is compassionate…that is a healer…that is a provider…that is an encourager…and most of all that is a lover.
How can we be a source of help for the marginalized women of northern Uganda?
My greatest dream is for people to see these widowed women not as “the marginalized women of Northern Uganda,” but as real people, unique people with personalities, hopes, fears, dreams, struggles, and joys. It is my hope that we would really know them…not as “the poor” or “the sick” but as our fellow sisters in Christ, as part of our extended spiritual family. That as fellow believers in Jesus, we would form a worldwide community with them where out of love and care for each other, we would give and receive as we have need or have plenty.
Here are the ways you can receive from my widowed friends:
• They make beautiful handcrafted beaded necklaces, earrings, and bracelets. You can purchase some if you wish. They are made from discarded paper that is rolled into differently shaped beads. If you wish to order any of these necklaces, you can contact Carol Daly Vogt at dalyvogt@hotmail.com
• They love to pray for you and to know you as much as you want to know them. You can read their stories on the Dorcas Widows web site: www.dorcaswidows.org If you would like us to pray for you please send your request to karimillermn@gmail.com
Here are the ways you can give to my widowed friends:
• You can donate to the Dorcas Widows Emergency Fund. The emergency fund provides money for widows in crisis. It often helps feed a family or pay for unexpected medical treatment due to illness. If you want to donate to that fund you can visit our website: www.dorcaswidows.org or email Lisa Tschetter at lisatschetter@comcast.net
• You can pay school fees for one or more of the widows children. A primary school student is about $150 a year and a secondary student is about $600 a year. These fees are impossible for these women to pay without assistance from a sponsor or an NGO. If you want to learn more about sponsoring a widow’s child through school, please contact Lisa Tschetter at lisatschetter@comcast.net
• You can donate to our Widow’s Community Project. We have already raised enough money to buy 2.85 acres of land and are hoping to build 30 homes and one community center on that property for the most disadvantaged widows to live in. Each house will cost approximately $10,000 to construct. If you are interested in donating or learning more about this project, please go to our web site (www.dorcaswidows.org) or contact Carol Daly Vogt directly at dalyvogt@hotmail.com
• Pray for them. Read their stories on the Dorcas Widows web site: www.dorcaswidows.org and commit to praying for them. If you have any encouraging words for them, you can send it to my email and I will share it with them. (karimillermn@gmail.com)
