Editorial
	Notable Women in Women’s Ministries Jane—An Exceptional Young Woman

Jane is a talented, educated, and personable young woman from Southern Sudan. Jane is a “displaced person,” and lives in a permanent mud and wattle round house, with a thatched roof. She is part of a refugee village where each one has a home and a garden in the Northern part of Uganda. She’s not the typical refugee—living in a tented accommodation and eating food supplied by charitable organizations.

Most mornings Jane gets up before it is light and walks 4 kilometers to the fields to work in her garden. She grows all her own food and her staple diet is cassava root and groundnuts. After about two hours of work, she walks back home, showers, then walks 6 km in the opposite direction to run a sewing school in another refugee village. Jane can cut clothes without a paper pattern. Only after her pupils are proficient in using brown paper can they cut and sew the popular, colourful cotton cloth. She knows the clothing would sell well in the local market—schools would commission uniforms and hostels would need bedding and table linens. But there are few machines and little funding. When Jane gets home it is usually dark and with no electricity in her part of the world, she works by candlelight or moonlight preparing her meal, washing and ironing, studying, and next-day preparation. Several evenings she even leads the young people in her local church choir.

The sewing school has great potential and there is room for expansion. Jane dreams also of teaching the women to be literate in their own language and in English, but there are no resources to start a literacy project. If she taught full time she would not have time to plant her garden and thus would have no food. Jane could have gone to the city and taught in school for a salary, but prefers to help others and has dedicated her life to this work. Income generated from the sewing project is not hers, but the local church’s Women’s Ministries.

How many of us would be willing to walk 8 km a day to raise food for our families and 12 more km to use whatever is available to us to help others? Let’s pray for dedicated women like Jane that God will supply the means, and that He will impress us with ways we can reach out to people around us.

(From Anne-May Wollan, WM Director, TED)

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Upcoming Travel

Ardis Stenbakken
April 29 - May 5 - Bi-division Women’s Congress, Southern Asia-Pacific Division (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)

Heather-Dawn Small
April 4 - 13 - Leadership Training/Women’s Ministries Retreat, North American Division (Ontario, Montreal, Ottawa, Manitoba) Canada

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