Tag: Religion

Kenya girls saved by Anne & friends

Our daughter-in-law in Kenya, her report on her work with refugee women and girls:

Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2012 1:48 PM
Subject: Nairobi News!

Hello Everyone,

I hope this finds you all very well!

I can’t thank you enough for your patience and understanding with my lack of communication throughout the past several months!  I would like to share some updates with you, and to also thank you for supporting the Yoga Challenge and our second annual Fashion Challenge in October – it is going to be an amazing event!

It has certainly been a whirlwind couple of months for my husband and me since arriving in Kenya last January, but it’s also been amazing to be back and to witness the tremendous impact of Heshima Kenya’s programs.  I’ve worked with refugees for nearly 14 years, and I unequivocally find the refugee crisis in Kenya to be among the most horrifying humanitarian situations in the world, not only in scope but also because the majority of these refugees will never return home – this includes many of the 200,000 refugees who fled DR Congo two weeks ago. I think what is most daunting for myself – and our staff – is when we think about these girls’ lives without our programs and the support network it provides.  It makes us believe more in what we do each day.

131 young girls and women have been supported by Heshima Kenya’s programs since January 2012: 40% are from DRC, 31% Somalia, 16% Ethiopia, 1% Sudan , 7% Rwanda, 2% Burundi and 4 % Kenya.  We get to know the girls on such a personal level and witness their lives with peace; to know the profound impact that education will have on their futures and for their children; to see girls smile after grieving for so long.  Adnan, a 15-year-old girl from Somalia who joined our programs a year and a half ago, couldn’t speak after being assaulted by a gang of street boys.  Not only is she mentally challenged and epileptic, she also was abused by her mother who left her abandoned on the streets after the assault. Heshima Kenya was able to get a placement order for Adnan to stay at our Safe House and she is now attending a special education school during the day. Adnan is writing her name, speaking Swahili, and is helping staff and the girls look after the little kids at the shelter, twelve of whom are children of young mothers in the program. Other girls like Clementine from DR Congo are also thriving within the peace and security of Heshima Kenya’s programs. 17-year-old Clementine came to Heshima Kenya in January after losing her family and fleeing Congo to Kenya.  After finding a place to sleep at a local church in Nairobi, she was raped on the steps and became pregnant. When I first met Clementine, she couldn’t speak and slept for days.  She was completely traumatized, both physically and emotionally, and refused to hold her baby boy after being born. Six months later, Clementine is now one of our leaders – she is still residing at the Safe House but hopes to join the Maisha Collective soon where she will earn money, care for her baby independently, and possibly live with another Heshima girl within Nairobi. The other week Clementine presented a doll she made as part of a larger art therapy project. She spoke proudly in front of a group of 30 peers and talked about what her doll meant to her. It was truly humbling to witness. Clementine is learning tools to recover with peace, raise her baby with confidence, and believe in herself and the possibilities she has in life.

Some updates to share:

Recently Heshima Kenya has been receiving increased referrals of younger children, mainly siblings below 12 years of age, including 4-year-old Flora and her 11-year-old brother, Emilie, who is HIV positive and from DR Congo.  Along with the challenge of identifying safe foster care families, securing education sponsorship has also become an issue because of cost – nearly $600 per year a child because of transportation and general fees. 

The Maisha Collective has experienced exciting growth in the past couple months. IOM, the international organization responsible for arranging travel for refugees to the United States, recently ordered 1,200 scarves for its refugee travel kits. This means you may see a Maisha scarf on a newly arrived refugee in Chicago! We’ve also had a slew of other orders because of the tremendous work of the Chicago team and our new partnership brochure.  This success truly speaks to the grassroots efforts of our supporters in the US and the power and beauty behind each scarf, especially when we’ve done minimal marketing.  We still search for seed support to help manage the overall program in Chicago and Kenya, but with the help of a local Kenyan designer who is consulting with HK twice per week, we are finally on the path to creating new items – most importantly, the girls are committed to balancing their classes in the morning with making Maisha scarves in the afternoon – all while attending to their babies!

We received a $150,000 grant from Bright Future International for our Safe House program in January. This has allowed up to build the resource and staff capacity of our shelter program, including hiring a nurse, additional security guards, and purchasing a second van.  We also received a two-year grant of $100,000 from American Jewish World Services. This grant will allow us to focus on outreach in the Somali community, especially identifying and supporting unaccompanied refugee girls and young women who fled drought and violence in Somalia in 2011 and remain undocumented and without protection in Nairobi.  We will also be mobilizing graduates of our programs to support with outreach and training.

We are in the final stages of completing our customized database that will capture demographic data of the girls served in our programs since January 2008 to date.  We hope to share this information with partner organizations, including UNHCR and the State Department, to help close significant gaps in knowledge about this specific population. We are also preparing to produce a larger research piece early next year about migration trends and violations experienced by girls and young women near the borders of Ethiopia, Somalia, and Uganda/DR Congo.

Imgrad Krop, a local Kenyan journalist, will be volunteering with Heshima Kenya next month to help create a series of video news stories written and produced by the Heshima girls. Our goal is to produce a news piece each quarter and share on our new website that we will hopefully launching next month.

Our Safe House is the first shelter of its kind for refugee children in Kenya to be legally recognized by the Children’s Department of Kenya.  This is a tremendous victory after 22 years of refugee crisis and will hopefully be the first among a handful of wins led by Heshima Kenya in helping the government recognize the specialized needs and rights of refugees. 

Finally, I feel extremely privileged to know first-hand about the power behind the army that got us here — that army is made up of all of you, and I know with certainty that Heshima Kenya could not have grown to where we are today without your support.  There are thousands of non-profits here in Kenya and the US that are built from the bottom-up, just like Heshima Kenya.  They are simply trying to survive and will most likely not make it because they lack opportunities to connect with supporters. Yes, of course leadership and donations are critical, but without Heshima Kenya’s fundamental base of auxiliary members, I know that we would have only remained a great idea.  You are our ambassadors that drive Heshima Kenya’s story and get people to care about the thousands of vulnerable girls and young women in Nairobi who are trying to find their voice.

All the best to you,

Anne
 
Anne Sweeney
Executive Director
Heshima Kenya
heshimakenya.org

Heshima (Swahili): Respect, Honor, Dignity

Jesus on gay marriage

What did Jesus say, if anything, about gay marriage?  A lot, and to the point, says Daniel Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C.

He gives His perspective on this when He addresses the issue in Matthew 19:4-6. There, speaking to the institution of marriage, Jesus is clear when He says, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

That Jesus was committed to heterosexual marriage could not be more evident. A man is to leave his parents and be joined to a woman who becomes his wife. This is heterosexual marriage.

In case you were wondering.  Akin has more on the point, including this:

We must not isolate Jesus from His affirmation of the Old Testament as the Word of God nor divorce Him from His first century Jewish context.

Read him in context to understand what he meant, that is, not to debunk it by making him simply a creature of his time.  Word to the wisdom, this.

Rahm, Jewish, trashing Christian values?

I had thought of Rahm Emanuel as Jewish once that I can remember before he joined unthinkingly in the threat to ostracize Chick-Fil-A for its executive’s public statement of Christian beliefs about marriage. It was when he was inaugurated and mention was made of his being the first Jewish mayor.

Unthinkingly, because not even in Chicago is there political capital in parading disrespect for Christian belief and he has not shown prejudice against Christians that I have ever heard of.

Anyhow, he is (slightly, cautiously) pulling back from his unthinking display of liberal allegiance, thanks no doubt to editorial objections on first-amendment grounds and presumably political advice and his own political instinct.

Chick-fil-A’s values are not Chicago values, Emanuel said Wednesday. They’re not respectful of our residents, our neighbors and our family members. And if you’re gonna be part of the Chicago community, you should reflect Chicago values. [italics mine]

On Thursday, a spokesman for Emanuel softened those remarks.

The mayor simply said that Chick-fil-a’s CEO does not share Chicago’s values, the spokesman said. He did not say that he would block or play any role in the company opening a new restaurant here.

If they meet all the usual requirements, then they can open their restaurant, but he does not believe the CEO’s values are reflective of our city.

He’s telling us what he thinks our values are. In any case, he is or was embracing gay-rights fascism here:

Thou shall not withhold approval of the gay culture. Tolerance is not enough. You will suffer if you do not toe the line, as gays used to suffer in days when the pendulum swung the other way. Forget liberalism, substitute intolerance of another kind.

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Have a look also at the New York Sun, which notes this importantly:

. . . [I]t’s hard to think of a difference between the views expressed in the quotations above by [the offending CEO] Mr. Cathy and those one might hear from the Council of Torah Sages or the Archdiocese of Chicago. Or every president of America who has spoken on the subject until President Obama changed his position and declared himself, personally if not officially, for same sex marriage.

Rahm is out of his league here.

Bishop Bransfield was exonerated unusually

Bishop Michael Bransfield of West Virginia has denied accusation of abuse of a high school boy in Pennsylvania in the 1970s, when he was a young priest teaching at a Catholic high school, saying he was cleared after a “full investigation” by Philadelphia archdiocesan authorities.

But the investigation, in 2008, was short-circuited by the then archbishop, Cardinal Justin Rigali, the Phildelphia Inquirer reports:

In a break from practice, the accusation against Bransfield bypassed the archdiocese’s civilian review board, according to a source briefed on the case but not authorized to publicly discuss it. The board was formed to conduct independent examinations of abuse claims and assesses priests’ suitablility for ministry.

Instead, Rigali acted after reviewing the reports of an investigator who interviewed Bransfield, his accuser and others.

After this four-month process, he pronounced Bransfield not guilty of the accusation.

And though the archdiocese routinely publicly identifies and suspends priests as it reviews allegations against them, four years passed before the complaint against Bransfield came to light, and then only in passing at the landmark clergy-sex abuse trial [just completed in Philadelphia].

The Philadelphia archdiocese has reopened the case, reporting it to local authorities, who will be investigating the matter further, Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman said, adding that it was “unlikely” her office would charge Bransfield over the allegations.

 

Hold your horses on that Pius X Society no

It’s not as simple, apparently.  Also apparently, Pope B-16 has been close to this one, and some Vatican hard-liners, relatively speaking, have been removed from the picture.

Those who think that this is the endpoint, that those in charge of the Fraternity have definitively given up on the idea of putting an end to the injustices that burden them, and of fulling restoring the Tradition of the Church to Rome, risk being disappointed in the days and weeks ahead

via RORATE CÆLI: Op-Ed (English – français) The basis for the future relations of the SSPX with Rome La base des prochaines relations de la FSSPX avec Rome.

Very interesting.

Pius X Society to Vatican: No, thanks

Looks like Pius X Society declines:

(José Manuel Vidal).- There will be no return to Rome. The Superior of the Lefebvrians for Spain and Portugal, [Fr.] Juan María Montagut, will inform the faithful, after the 11 AM Mass, that the hierarchy of the SSPX, assembled in Écône, has decided to say \”no\” to the Vatican.The followers of [Abp.] Marcel Lefebvre do not return to the Roman fold. Mainly because they are not willing to accept the Second Vatican Council in all its farthermost points.

via RORATE CÆLI: For the record: With a grain of salt.

Cat has tongue of monsignor

Bishop Edward Braxton has suspended a priest for not following the missal when saying mass. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch asked for comment, but

A spokesman for the diocese, Monsignor John Myler, did not respond to a request for an interview.

That’s a shame, passing up a teachable moment, as they say in school-ville. He represents the holy church but cat has his tongue when he’s given the chance to explain what’s going on? Lack of apostolic spirit there, I’d say.

From Thames to Tiber for six Episcopals

Ordained Roman by bp of Ft. Worth:

Under a huge dome with images of winged angels, six former Fort Worth-area Episcopal clergymen — including a father and son — lay facedown at a marble altar Saturday and were ordained as priests in the Roman Catholic Church.

In what officials called a historic moment, Fort Worth Catholic Bishop Kevin Vann and other white-robed priests in the diocese laid hands on the priests at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church in Keller to welcome them.

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/06/30/4071150/6-former-episcopal-clergymen-are.html#storylink=cpy

The first of the new ordinariate. Their wives took part in the service. Standing ovation from 1,000 in attendance. “Catholics now with an Anglican heritage,” says one of the newly ordained, whose son was ordained too.

“The six are among 35 Episcopal priests to be ordained this summer,” said a Roman Catholic monsignor, formerly Episcopal. Sixty are to be ordained by year’s end, An ordinariate is like a diocese as to jurisdiction but territorially not: This one “stretches from Newfoundland to Hawaii and from the Rio Grande to the Arctic Circle,” said the monsignor, who heads it.

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Personal note: I dote on the Book of Common Prayer, take mine to mass for reference to the Psalms etc., though frankly the Ronald Knox translation serves best for the New Testament, in my opinion.