THE AWKWARD MOM

because uncomfortable conversations are the ones worth having

Tag: poor

Helping the Powerless: That Time it Saved His Family

Reading Time: 5 minutes

If someone ever asked me what surprised me about living in Africa, I’d have a million answers. Nearly every day held in its ebony hands something to learn or figure out or shake my head over: a motorcycle carrying a coffin. A girl made to sell banana pancakes for a dime in a dangerous neighborhood rather than go to school. Birds the color of the sky.

But I could never have known how working and living among and helping the powerless would change me–to the point it’s now a vital spiritual discipline in my book–and quite arguably, in God’s.

helping the powerless read more

Why We Can’t Afford to Leave Helping the Poor Up to That Committee [FREE INFOGRAPHIC]

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Hypothetical question. Let’s say someone asked you to help an impoverished family this holiday season. Who would you help first?

Maybe this feels a little tricky.

Maybe like me, your house isn’t really all that close to people who need help. read more

Ways to Help your Giving Keep from Hurting the Poor, Part I

Reading Time: 4 minutes

The stories happened more often than I’d like to admit, and echoed a truth a friend had told me within my first few months of moving to Africa. “The longer I’m here, the more I realize just how hard it is to help without hurting.”

I’ve heard heartrending stories of boxes of early reading books collecting dust. Sewing machines gone into disrepair, sitting idle for years. Business owners possessing the equipment they need, but selling their goods for less than the goods cost, for lack of basic business training. Adoption funding such widespread corruption that an entire nation must close nearly entirely its adoption doors.

When Helping Hurts [You], Part III: When Aisha Died

Reading Time: 4 minutes

helping hurts

The phone connection sounded a bit like Oliver, one of my closest Ugandan friends, was crushing newspapers on the other end; I held the phone an inch from my ear. But I didn’t miss what made my hand fly to my chest: “Aisha…she passed. It was just too late. Things were already too bad.”

Aisha. Perhaps you remember her from this photo, snapped from my phone two and a half months ago, outside a mud hut in the slums of Namuwongo. She’s the young mother of four kids. A twenty-something.

For the days when helping hurts [you]

Reading Time: 4 minutes

helping hurts

At first, I thought she cheated my son.

But when, yielding to my call, she trudged back up the steep grade of our hill, my frustration softened. Her wide black eyes slid up to mine, her forehead glimmering in sweat. Her faded, two-sizes-too-large men’s T-shirt was pocked with holes. She must have been walking nearly the entirety of the morning in those foam shower slippers with the toes long gone and sizeable gaps in their soles. She was thirteen, though looked all of eleven.

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