With great joy, I share with you my participation in Giving Tuesday. If you are looking for a worthy charity that is not already raking in millions of dollars, where there are no administrative fees taken out of your gift, then please consider joining me. I’ll explain.
Young surviving widows of horrific wars, murders, and unknown diseases are some of the most impoverished women on Earth. And because job opportunities in Rwanda are nearly non-existent, these women support their children by picking up after construction sites — a hard-labor job with long hours and too little pay to cover both food and school.
In Rwanda, there is no free school. So if your income cannot cover both food and school, the children forego education, don’t learn to read or write, and the cycle of extreme poverty continues.
In addition, many of these surviving women are taking care of the orphaned children of their murdered brothers and sisters, in addition to their own. In Rwanda, there is no foster care program, welfare program, food stamps, or any other way to keep children from becoming street beggars, if their auntie doesn’t take them in.
Then along came Handspun Hope!
Handspun Hope is a registered 501(c) nonprofit organization. They purchased land, sheep, and rabbits. They employed these women and taught them to care for the animals, sheer sheep, clean and dye the wool, and spin the wool into yarn.
They sell yarn as well as garments they handknit from the yarn.
There are other products they produce as well: embroidered tea towels, cotton skirts, buttons made of scraps of horns, leather items, and more.
But sales are not enough, especially during this worldwide pandemic, so they need donations as well to keep these women employed and their children in school. Today only, Facebook is matching donations made here. People can also donate on their website here.
Personally, I have purchased the merino yarn, and the sweater I knit is as soft as cotton. I think it may be the highest quality wool I’ve ever owned. I also donated funds from my book sales, because…
… what could be more important than putting surviving women to work and sending children to school?
Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. ~ James 1:27, New Testament
www.HandspunHope.org to read the stories of these women, see projects, and much more
