60 mins
Journeying together
COVER
Journeying Together – Empowering Teenage Mothers
EVERY three years the Church of Scotland Guild selects six projects to support, both prayerfully and inancially.
Relecting the national strategy, ‘One Journey, Many Roads’, the new projects for the years 2018 to 2021 have been selected to encompass efforts being made at home in Scotland and across the world.
Three projects from overseas and three home-based ones have been selected.
The projects from abroad are Seema’s Project from India, ensuring that the children of sex workers are cared for; Malawi Fruits where young farmers are helped to develop more sustainable farming and use solar powered water pumps; and in partnership with the World Mission Council, Journeying Together, a project designed to help teenage mothers in Zambia to gain education and training.
The ‘home’ based projects selected for the next three years support are Join Up The Dots from CrossReach, the Boys’ Brigade’s Faith In Young People, and A Chaplain For Our Ports run by the Sailor’s Society.
“The final choices reflect a desire to have a range of ‘client groups’, a range of locations at home and abroad and partnerships that don’t replicate too closely things we have done in the past”, says Iain Whyte, General Secretary of the Guild.
“Every three years, we invite applications from Christian charities who would like to engage with us in prayerful support of their work, in the raising of issues that are often challenging to the church and to help raise funds for their work. We feel that these partnerships display a real sense of the Guild working out its commitment to learning and service, and we are excited by them.
“We know the Guild will embrace and support this work and we hope that the wider church may as well, perhaps supporting projects even if a congregation has no Guild.
“Indeed some may look at the Project Partnership Scheme and get an insight into how they might beneit from having a Guild!”
Three of the projects feature in this issue and the remaining three will appear in the October issue of Life and Work.
Seema’s Project – The Free To Live Trust
Seema’s Project is run by the Free To Live Trust.
In an interview last year Dr Pam Cairns described meeting the extraordinary Christian woman, Seema Waghmode when she visited the country with a group of Tayside Girl Guide leaders.
“Seema is an amazing woman”, says Pam. “She began to work initially with the street prostitutes, bringing sexual health clinics to them where they lived and worked, but as she worked, she realised that there were large numbers of children – the children of the sex workers who had become pregnant by their clients – living in and around the places the women stayed and worked. The children were left to their own devices for much of the time.
Seema saw the need and began to look after the children as well. They had miserable lives living in the slums of the city of Pune while their mothers took in their clients.
“Seema and her husband developed a plan to take some of the children to their farm in the countryside at Bori, where the youngsters could benefit from the air, the space, education and be cared for.”
The Tayside women, having checked out the farm and confirmed that everything was as they’d been told, decided to set up the ‘Free To Live Trust’, to raise money to support Seema’s work and also to allow oversight of the charity and how the finances were used.
They worked through lots of red tape to construct a home for the children, including setting up a proper perimeter fence before any young girls could be moved in. Thanks to a particular donation from an oil company, they were able to build one and finally things were ready to go. Last year, the first children moved in. The Guild help will allow the project to move further and help even more children.
“This project is the practical side of the Trust’s work”, Pam says. “It helps combat the evils of modern slavery and together we will change the lives of some of the most exploited women and children in the world.
“With the help of the Guild, we aim to start a lunch programme for the children of the red-light district; double the number of children cared for at the Bori home; rescue and rehabilitate some of the traicked sex workers themselves and provide practical and useful training for the teenagers when they leave home.
The Free To Live Trust is delighted and excited to partner with the Guild from 2018 – 2021.”
Growing The Future – Malawi Fruits
Malawi Fruits CEO and Project Manager for Growing The Future, Kevin Simpson, described the background to the project.
“Eighty per cent of Malawians are subsistence farmers but young people are rejecting farming because they see it as hard labour for no returns, especially since climate change has made the rains very unpredictable.” he said.
“However, the Malawian economy depends on agriculture and there are few other jobs for young people, so agriculture remains the best option, especially if it can be modernised.
“Our project aims to inspire the next generation of farmers to do things differently and adopt modern farming methods including mechanisation and irrigation. In particular, we are making solar powered irrigation pumps available to the young farmers along with training that gives them the potential to double the income from their farm and protects them from the effects of climate change.
“We have been supporting small-scale farmers for seven years and focusing on young farmers for the last 18 months. However, for the Guild Project, we are working in partnership with the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian (CCAP). There are many historic links between the CCAP and the Guild and our project builds on this. We are working with Church youth groups to identify and support the young farmers in their membership and in this way, we hope they will see the help they are receiving as a hand of friendship from the Church in Scotland and the Guild in particular. Youth groups in churches provide a great forum for training and for the young people to share their own experience and inspire others. As we identify and support the initial group of young people, we expect enthusiasm to grow throughout the project.
“We know the Guild well, having spoken at over 100 Guild meetings in the last two years. We have always been made welcome and the prayer and financial support of individual Guilds has really helped us as a charity.
“We have been supporting small-scale farmers for seven years and focusing on young farmers for the last 18 months.
“We were, therefore, delighted to be selected as a project and we are sure that the increased prayer and financial support will make a huge difference. The money will pay for staff to train the young people and will enable us to supply the solar irrigation pumps.
“We are delighted that in June 2018 we were able to secure funding from the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) which will match every pound raised by the Guild over the next three years. This means that for every solar pump the Guild fund for us, UNDP will give another one – an amazing buy-one-get-one-free offer!
“Our experience with Malawian farmers is that if we can support them to increase their household income, the money will be spent on good things – school fees will be paid; medicines can be bought when someone is sick; they will improve their homes; and they will invest in their farms. And all of this is achieved with great dignity because it is the young farmers who are doing the hard work and earning their own living.”
Worker at Malawi Fruits
Journeying Together – World Mission Council
The third project based overseas is run by the United Church of Zambia, a partner of the World Mission Council. Journeying Together – Empowering Teenage Mothers is centered on the Makeni Mother and Child Centre in Zambia.
“Among the growing number of teenagers in Zambia, teenage mothers (below 18 years of age) and their children can be considered particularly vulnerable and disadvantaged. Early pregnancies leading to premature termination of their school education exclude those girls from further professional careers. Being either without a partner and thus solely responsible for the education of their children or caught in an early marriage, the young mothers heavily depend on the charity of others. Their life is predictably prone to poverty and dependency and so is the life of their children”, says Jennie Chinembiri, the Church of Scotland’s World Mission Council’s Africa and Caribbean Secretary, who is overseeing the project.
“Besides lack of finances (poverty), the second reason for girls to drop out of school is early pregnancy.
“The reasons for early pregnancies are many and range from lack of knowledge (unprotected sex) to economic reasons (poverty, prostitution, dowry), from social aspects (peer group pressure, prestige) to criminal offences (sexual abuse, gender based violence). The consequences of teenage motherhood are widespread, from less offers of formal employment, to less income. This directly affects the nutrition, health, and education of the children of these mothers. Teenage mothers are likely to lack life skills and their children inherit these deficiencies. The unfortunate reality is although these girls will have fallen pregnant due to a variety of reasons, the future prospects for them and their children tend to be the same, a life of poverty and struggle; one journey, many roads.
Journeying Together – Empowering Teenage Mothers
“The goal of the project is to ‘enhance the livelihood of vulnerable young mothers and children in Kanyama’.
“It will do this by setting up a centre that can cater for 50 mothers and their children in the first year, 100 mothers and their children in the second and 120 mothers and their children in the third year. This centre will teach the mothers livelihood skills, parenting skills, health skills and nutritional skills. It will also provide educational facilities for their children. An article released in 2015 states that out of the 170,000 pupils who made it to grade 10 (fourth year), only around 42% were girls. This project seeks to change statistics like these by attempting to stop the cycle of contributing factors to teenage pregnancy, and ending longstanding gender inequalities in education.
“The results we anticipate are that teenage mothers will raise their children in a safe environment and one that will be conducive to maintaining their educational prospects.
“The teenage mothers will have the chance to complete their school or/and vocational training.
“They will have been able to accrue life skills (parenting techniques, health, self-esteem etc) and will have found sources of income through employment or small business.
“The public will have been sensitised and trained at the centre and through outreach activities so that they can recognise the potential these young women have.
“The journey into motherhood for any new mum can be daunting”, says Jennie. “For a teenage mum in the high density area of Kanyama, Zambia, it is even more so.
This area, considered as a highly neglected part of the Zambian capital Lusaka, is often struck by severe flooding during the rainy season. Bad drainage and sanitation means that outbreaks of diseases such as cholera and dysentery are common. These difficult conditions, along with the poverty experienced by this community, mean that teenage girls are vulnerable and more likely to become pregnant at a young age.
“With a lack of financial and physical support, trying to change the future would be difficult for these teenage mothers.
“However, the Journeying Together project looks to give them the support they need to bring about change. It will give the teenage mothers and their children the knowledge and education to take their first steps on a journey that could give them a brighter future.
“We are very grateful to the Guild for adopting Journeying Together to be one of their projects for 2018 – 2021.”
The Church of Scotland Guild’s Annual Gathering takes place at the Caird Hall, Dundee, on Saturday September 1.
This article appears in the September 2018 Issue of Life and Work
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