Home for the Holidays

The SHONA women need to move. Their home, as pictured below, is about to be torn down. As you see the house has blue, wooden walls, and is built against a lava rock wall on one side.

It is a humble home. But it has been their home for more than a year. And in many ways it is a proud home. 4 young disabled women in Eastern Congo have rented this home through the work of their own hands. It is hard to explain exactly how amazing this is. Young women rarely live independently in Goma, and least of all, those struggling with disabilities. The fact that the SHONA women can rent their own home, and live and work in it, is in fact quite astounding. But not only that, their home has been an open one. They have taken in younger siblings and other relatives, who needed a place to stay.

None the less, their home is being torn down. This happens again and again in Eastern Congo, where small shacks are routinely thrown up on top of piles of stone and dirt, only to be taken down as soon as there is a little more money to build a bigger building. And so poor people are pushed further and further to the outskirts of town.

For the SHONA women, that is a risk they cannot take. The outskirts of town are insecure, prone to armed robberies. The outskirts have virtually no access to running water or electricity. Moving to the edges would put at risk, both their own lives, and their work. So for the past few months the SHONA women have been looking for a new home that is both a safe place to live and a reliable place to work. They are not rich, and they are no longer so extremely poor. But in Goma there is very little in between.

Fortunately the women have found a good option. It is an apartment in the same compound where they live now. For the first time in their lives they will have running water in their own home. They will be able to go to the bathroom at night, without stumbling with their crutches, in the dark, over rocks, to get to a public outhouse. It is not a fancy apartment but it is a solid one. I know it is a good apartment, because in fact, it is the same apartment I lived in while I lived in Goma.

But the women need your help. Renting a home in Goma generally requires at least 5 months rent up front. Although the women can pay the monthly rent, they don't have the money for this kind of deposit up front. It is a lot of money, and comes at a time when many of their families are experiencing very significant struggles of their own.

So would you consider making an extra special purchase this holiday season? We've taken some of our favorite household goods and made them even more. When you purchase one of these special household items, you will not only be purchasing a beautiful handcrafted item for your home, but you will be making a donation to the SHONA women's new home. You will be sharing the gift of a warm and safe home with these amazing young women.

We also have a special section of items that the SHONA women have donated freely in order to raise money for Mapendo's sister's family, a family with 10 children, who recently lost their father, and who are also fighting to keep their home. Even in the midst of struggling themselves to raise money to move, the SHONA women have chosen to donate some of their hard work to a family who deserves a little more help. Thank you for joining hands with us!

Talk to us!

We have a brand new guest book on our website and we hope you will visit!
You can visit our website

or go straight to the guestbook.


We are a small organization and we heavily depend upon encouragement from SHONA friends. Will you come and be the first one to sign our guestbook?

Not only that, but we are offering a cool new way to connect you with our craftspeople directly. If you are a SHONA customer, we invite you to send a message directly to the woman who crafted your purchase. Just include her name, and a brief message to her, and we will translate it and send it on to her through text messaging. You can send words of encouragement, or even a question about her life, and we will post her response back to you on the guestbook, in Swahili with English translation.

How cool is that? How often do we hear about women in Eastern Congo? How often are they described as victims? They are not. They are beautiful, talented young women who have a world of things to say. Send them a message today!

On a cold day

January 29th was one of the coldest days in New York. It was the type of day that makes you want to curl up with a cup of hot chocolate and a good book.

It was most definitely not the type of day when you want to hang out in Central Park. Standing still. Looking pretty.

And yet that is precisely what this young woman was doing.
While wearing a SHONA bag, you see. This young woman is named Vanessa. And that is all I can tell you about her. Because, believe it or not, I have never met her, or even spoken to her. She has never been to Congo, nor meet any of the SHONA craftswomen. And yet there she is doing a favor for women thousands of miles a way. Just because she wanted to.


And the truth is that there is another incredibly generous soul behind that camera. And talented. Have you ever tried taking pictures of people in the freezing cold? And getting them to smile?

I've met this photographer once. He has a full-time job, as a social worker. He has a wife and children and runs his own photography business on the side. And obviously he is a talented artist. But for reasons somewhat inexplicable to me, he read an ad I put on craigslist, asking for volunteers. And threw himself into SHONA.

This was his first SHONA shoot. Since then he has done two more. So stay tuned for more beautiful pictures from Jose Figueroa soon.

In the meantime I wanted to give a shout-out to all our friends out there. Without people like Jose and Vanessa, and many others of you, SHONA would be nowhere.

Many thanks also to Paul Stetzer who continues to help me improve our everyday product photos, the ones I take on a headless, legless mannequin. Trust me, it is quite a task. And he, like Jose, is a talented artist who has donated his own time, his own equipment and his own endless enthusiasm to the project. Many thanks to you all.

Looking for a few good people

As I have mentioned earlier, I recently got a job. This is a good thing since it will allow us to eat. It is also a good thing because I love the job. I get to teach English to a group of adults that really want to learn it. They are mostly women, and many of them have lived in NY for many years, and yet they have never been able to learn more than a couple words of English.

This is not because they do not want to learn. It is because life runs away with us all. They come to the US with full lives, with children and husbands and they work hard, often in jobs that do not expect them to say anything. Politics aside, can you imagine living in a country in which you can not speak the language? I know that sometimes it seems like Spanish has become the second language here in the US, and especially in NY. But the reality is that even here in NY, without English, a person is extremely limited. I have been there. When I moved to Congo I spoke neither French or Swahili. That basically means I could talk to no one. I know what that feels like. And how hard it can be to change that. So I love working with the students that I have, and teaching them English.

But I am also still running SHONA. The craftspeople are doing a fabulous job. They sew constantly, ship regularly, and can't wait to continue expanding.

And here I am with boxes upon boxes. Each new product has to be photographed. And then I have to actually get people to come and see our products in our online store.

This is the trick. There are a million things we can do online to help people find our website. There are a million things I should do. But I am here trying to figure out how to get better photos of our products, and there just isn't anymore time.

Before I took this job, SHONA was doing really well. For 4 months in a row we were 100% self-sufficient. Of course the holidays helped with that, but mostly what helped was that I was going to craft fairs and getting our name out there.

Now our name is...err...very, very small. So I thought I would put a general invitation out there. Is anyone out there with a little extra time on the computer? Is there anyone who likes to surf, twitter, etc. and would like to do it to help a good cause?


And while I am at it, is there anyone in the NY area that would like to be in some photos? We've got a fabulous photographer lined up to take some photos for us, but we need people to model. Don't be shy, I know you're out there.

And I might just as well say this. Is there anyone that is interested in helping SHONA in any way? Everyone has gifts and talents. I'd love to talk with you about ways we could partner with you and use your skills to hep us. We are very small, but our craftspeople are truly incredible people. I'd love your help in better representing them to the world.

Thoughts? Ideas? Please feel free to comment here or send me an email.

Fast-food Giving (and a word on Kiva's behalf)

"I have my standards
And I am eating them for dinner."

That is a slogan I just read on a Whole Foods shopping bag. At least it went something like that. I didn't actually purchase the bag...or my standards...so I can't be quite sure. But you get the idea.

How thoughtful of Whole Foods, don't you think? They have made it so nice and convenient to have our standards. It we start running low, we can just drive across town and pick some up. But I am starting to wonder if they are being a bit too generous with their standards. I mean does everyone really qualify? If I go and buy a bag of apples at the store, then surely I have earned my standards bag. I mean who can deny that an organic apple has standards? But if I buy a carton of mint chocolate chip ice cream, maybe they should just give me a regular brown bag. Or maybe they could just put a smiley face on it...

In that same Whole Food store I noticed bags of food on display. Each bag had a hand-labeled tag displaying the contents and who had donated them. Presumably they were being shipped off to some needy cause. I enjoyed looking at the carefully selected cereal bars and Thai rice mixes that filled the bags. And as I swiped my debit card (oops.. I admit it...I did actually purchase something....it just was so small I apparently did not qualify me for a standards bag. Perhaps I should have demanded my standards?) But as I was saying...as I swiped my debit card, a picture of Rwanda flashed on the screen, offering yet another way that I could donate money to help feed hungry people...school children I think.

Now don't get me wrong. I have no problem with feeding school children, or donating to food pantries. I just am starting to wonder if it has all gotten a bit too easy.

In this age of convenience have we made our giving just another fast-food convenience? Have we become so consumer-oriented that we have begun to think of giving as a commodity? We want to give, but we want it to fit on our clocks, and in our check-out lines, and don't forget to make sure it is tax deductible.

The problem is that fast-food isn't very good for us. The reality is that the flashiest, easiest to reach, and quickest to consume snack is not usually the most healthy one. And "fast-food giving", probably has much the same problem. If you give a donation to something that looks flashy, is well placed and well advertised, it might be a good thing, but you had better count on a decent percentage of your donation going toward marketing and overhead. It takes money to create that convenient and compelling package.

But that isn't even my real concern. Perhaps we are perfectly happy to consider part of our donation as the cost of making it quick and easy and pretty.

But what happens when we think that we can address the problems of the world, by swiping a card or carrying a bag. Sure we swipe more cards and carry more bags, but do we also begin to believe that this is what social activism should look like?

Charity organizations rely on donations, and spend a significant amount of time and money figuring out the best way to attain them. They cater to our demands as "consumer-givers". We give to help, but we also give for the experience. And they know that. And they want to produce the best "giving experience" for us. The child sponsorship model grew into great popularity in the 90s because it met the consumer demand for personal connection. It provided people with the sense that they could connect to an individual child and make her life better. Likewise the organizations where you can give a goat, or a cow to a family in Africa have similar, personal appeal. But in both cases, the reality is more complicated. Money is not often miraculously delivered to individual families, and goats are not often delivered directly either. Rather donations become part of larger, more complex programs. Both child sponsorship organizations and animal giving organizations have had to go back and explain that the actual money you donate may not go to that individual child, or to buy that individual goat. Often your donation is used as part of a larger program, which may do very good things, but... well, it is not exactly what their slogan said.

The latest organization to struggle with this marketing problem is Kiva, who markets itself as providing direct, person to person connections between small lenders and small borrowers. It is a fascinating idea, but the reality is that your loan is actually processed through local microfinance institutions and does not necessarily go directly to the individual person whose photo you clicked on, as described in this NY Times article and in this blog post. Now this does not make your donation any less effective in the lives of individual people, in fact it means that your donation is being better monitored and better distributed. Ohhh...but we so love clickable photos.

And isn't that the problem? When we support easy, fast and flashy ways of giving, we encourage other organizations to package themselves in this way. We encourage them to simplify the problems for us, and make promises they may not be able to keep. Kiva is an excellent organization with a unique and valuable model. And if we read the information on Kiva's website, the lending process becomes clear, and if you know much about microfinance, the way Kiva is operating makes a lot of sense. In fact it makes a lot more sense than it would if Kiva worked exactly they way people imagined it did. The problems of people around the world are complex, and so must be our part in them.

I recently received a fund-raising appeal from another organization. As far as I know, they are a very good, solid organization that works to treat children with cleft pallets. The back or their envelope featured a big lettered promise that if you made a donation today, they would never ask you for anything again.

Is this really the way humanitarian aid should be packaged and sold? But this is what happens when aid organization find themselves marketing to a consumer market.

And so I worry about the convenience of our society. When I was living in Africa I hated waiting in restaurants. You would sit, and sit and sit. Then they would bring you a soda. And then you would sit and sit and sit. And then they would bring you a platter with a salt and pepper shaker on it. And then you would sit and sit. And about two hours later your meal would come. This never appeared to bother Africans in the least. I guess they were there for the experience. I, on the other hand, was there to eat. And was usually doubled over in hunger by the time the food came.

Since I have been back in the US I have not waited for one meal. I mean I have not once gotten to the point of looking at my watch and wondering where the food is. Sometimes I try and imagine what the trendy New York people sitting at the table next to me would do if their food didn't come for two hours. That always makes me smile.

But has fast and easy food really been so good for us? In his book "Africa Doesn't Matter: How the West Has Failed the Poorest Continent and What We Can Do About It" Giles Bolton
argues that there is a difference between the type of aid that we like to fund, and the type of aid that is most effective. Child sponsorship, and animal giving exist because we, as consumers like them, not because they are the most effective or efficient way of delivering aid. Bolton argues that real change must come from direct budgetary support to poor countries, but you see that got jumbled up in my mouth as I said it. It is hard to make that flashy and compelling, and it isn't readily available in the check-out lane.

How does SHONA fit in this? Did I really just say that we shouldn't think that purchasing a bag will address the problems of the world? I didn't mean a SHONA bag of course!!! I can just see the SHONA craftspeople jumping up and down and gesturing wildly for me to stop my rambling before I scare away our customers. Please don't go away. We desperately need your purchases and they make a very real difference in the lives of 5 incredible people in one of the most difficult regions of the world. And unlike some larger organizations, with us the direct connection is completely real. An individual craftsperson did sew each item and they are receiving 100% of the profit. But stay tuned for my next post, on how these issues do affect SHONA, and in the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts on the topic.

Our shelves are empty! We need your help!

This is it. If there is one critical step for SHONA, it is right now, right here.

We have the chance to become a self-sufficient organization.
And we absolutely have to take it.

We are a completely independent organization with no outside funding. Becoming a self-sufficient organization is the only way we can continue our work.

Now this is quite a proposition, when you consider that our income is built exclusively on the work of of handicapped craftspeople in one of the war-torn regions of the world. Can we really do it? That is what I have spent the last year and a half figuring out.

The answer is a resounding yes. We can and we will. The market is there, and our craftspeople are more than capable.

But we need your help. We need to maintain a much larger stock. In order to do that we need a Working Capital Fund to cover the upfront costs of material, shipping and wages. Those are costs that we must cover long before products arrive in our store. When products do arrive, and they are sold, those costs will be recovered and the fund will be renewed, providing a foundation for our work for years to come.

We know this is a stretch. “Working capital” just doesn’t have emotional appeal. It would be much easier to ask for donations to...

• help put food on the table
• provide medical treatment for handicapped women
• send poor children to school
• rebuild the homes of refugees

But the truth is that this fund literally will do all of the above. Or rather it will allow a small group of handicapped craftspeople the honor of doing these things themselves.

Our craftspeople use the income that they earn from SHONA to do all of the activities listed above, and many more. That photo above is Gloria, one of Roy's six children. With his income from SHONA he has put four of his children in school this year, two of them for the first time. In the past year our craftspeople have worked hard and created incredible change in their own lives, and in the lives of others. Will you help us make that change a lasting reality? We are starting a membership club for SHONA. If we can find fifty members, we can become a self-sufficient organization.
Join us today!

BECOME A MEMBER

Learn more about why this is important

New website and new shipment

I can scarcely believe it myself!

We have a new website, a new logo, and and a brand new shipment!

Come and check out the awesome work that NT Global did on our website. Some of you may remember that a while ago I wrote a despairing entry about technology. In a nutshell I said "ahhhhh...I am never going to be able to do all of this!"

To which I promptly received a number of offers of help. Imagine that!

NT Global does business and technology solutions. Just what we needed. They have donated their services to redesign our website, and they have done a marvelous job. So check us out and check them out.

On our website you will see our new logo. That was designed by another company that has donated its services. Rena at Ali Pro Services has designed our logo, as well as designing all new brochures and labels for us. She has an amazing eye for design, and is fabulous to work with. So check her out as well.

And of course come and see what our craftspeople have been working on. Our new stock is in, but it is going quickly!

And I almost forgot to mention our new blog. Don't worry, I will still keep writing this blog as my personal blog, but our website now has an official SHONA blog. I wrote an inaugural entry there, and am not sure if anyone is going to find it, so please do stop by and leave a comment.

Many thanks to NT Global, Ali Pro Services, and all of you.

To you this looks like a man sewing...

To me this looks like hope.

If only you knew that this man owns his own sewing machine for the first time in his life. And that he has been given the money to rent a small workspace, and table and chair to go with it. If only you knew how many children this man has, the struggles they have been through, and the conditions they live in.


If only you knew how very good at sewing he is, and how much he can do with this small machine.

I recently added a donations page to our website. I posted it with some serious misgivings. SHONA is about what we can accomplish through the work of our own hands, not about asking for donations. But I had received several requests from generous souls who wanted to know how they could give to us, and I realized that we cannot do it all ourselves.

That is a hard realization for me. I am an only child, a bit hard-headed and accustomed to thinking that I could rule the world on my own. I will do something and fail fifty times before I will ask for help. I'm sure my husband will be happy to confirm that for you! I think he considers one of the most telling examples of my personality to be the way I played a video game with him when we were in college. It was a video game that I knew nothing about, not being a video-game fan myself and I can no longer even remember the name of it. But somehow he talked me into playing it. (Obviously this must have been before we were married!) The first step seemed to involve running and leaping at just the right time to avoid being run over by a boulder that is coming right toward you.
I made a sprint for it and got run over,
tried again, got run over,
tried again, got run over...
I think after about the fiftieth time of watching me run head-long into the boulder without once requesting any advice on how to get around it, my future husband concluded that I might be a difficult woman. Fortunately he married me anyway!

But the point is, I like to do it myself. Even if it means getting run over in the process.

Perhaps it is an American thing. I am all about the work of our own hands. Especially in a culture like Congo that has become heavily dependent on foreign aid, I feel it is important to "empower" people to create their own miracles. You know "teach them to fish".

But I have been thinking a lot lately about how nothing we do ever is truly the work of our own hands. It is the work of a thousand hands that have helped us on our way and shaped us into who we are.

Certainly that is true for myself. Sometimes people ask how I can do "this". I am not like my husband, who grew up out here. He is used to moving around and being a stranger in a foreign land. I grew up in a small town in Connecticut, in one house, and in one school. But it is precisely because my family is so rooted that I feel able to be here. It is because they are at home, that I can be away. Home is still there waiting for me, strengthening me. Without their hands, I couldn't do it.

So I posted the donations page, in recognition that we can't do it by ourselves. The Craftspeople of SHONA have done an incredible amount through their own hands, but they have also received your help, in a thousand ways. As soon as I put up our donations page, I was honored and humbled by a donor who gave Roy a sewing machine, a table, chair and workspace. But she didn't want me to tell Roy anything about her, only that this was a gift from God, not from herself or her family.

And so perhaps nothing is truly our own. Not the work we do, nor the gifts that we give. The clothing that Roy is sewing will bear labels with his name as the craftsperson. But if we were to be truthful, the label would need to be much larger, to carry the names of all those who have brought us this far.

Stay tuned for an update to our website soon with pictures of Roy and his family, and the story of their lives. Perhaps you read my earlier posts about Roy's little girl being molested.

At the time I recall being disgusted at what one person can do TO another.

Today I am amazed at what one person can do FOR another.

Perhaps in the end, this is why God chooses to work through human hands. It is a way of redeeming our hands. In a world where we are too often forced to confront the suffering that is caused by human hands, it is a way of reminding us of the good that is possible.



Thank you to all our loyal friends and customers who continue to inspire us.

Islands of achievement

Last week was not good.

Nothing was working. Well, except the SHONA craftspeople, they were working fine.

But that is only half the battle. The other half requires selling what they have made.

We recently opened our own online store, which was exciting, and ever since then I have been wading through information trying to figure out how to attract traffic to our website and to our store. This seems to involve completing a million tasks which may or may not ever bear fruit. I spent days registering with search engines, writing metatags, joining forums, and trying to figure out how to get people to link to our website. And I may never know if it made any difference. You just have to throw it out there and hope for the best.

Meanwhile, the electricity kept disappearing. And when the electricity was on, my internet connection kept disappearing. And I kept asking myself who in their right mind tries to run an online business in a place with unreliable electricity and internet speeds that the US hasn't seen for at least ten years.

So I felt a bit isolated.

But today I received an email from a woman who wrote to inform me of her research on "islands of achievement"...and that phrase really resonated with me. Perhaps not the achievement part, but the island part. While working on her Master's Degree, she researched “islands of achievement within failed or fragile states” and she realized that there were a lot of local people around the world rebuilding their lives and their communities in the midst of larger chaos and conflict. After she finished her masters degree she was struck by the fact that many people haven't had the chance to hear these stories, and she started a website to bring people together and tell these stories. She was writing me to inform me that she had just written an article about the SHONA women and it is posted on their website, along with over 400 other stories.

We are an island of achievement! Visit her website, not because we are there (although that is good also) but because it is a fascinating place to see what regular people are doing throughout the world.

Their article on SHONA

The main page of the website: http://hopebuilding.pbwiki.com

And then she informed me that she had compiled her article from an article about us on
ITnews africa.com. We are on the front page of their website right now!. And we didn’t even know it! I guess something I did last week worked after all. Check it out!

www.itnewsafrica.com

I deeply appreciate the willingness of both these website to seek us out and share our story. I appreciate the chance for SHONA to be “seen” by others. I would like to believe that I am humble, but I have to admit that it is really hard to work on something day after day and feel invisible. And I do start to feel like an island.

But what I found most inspiring was the opportunity to visit the beautiful "hopebuilding" website and read the stories of so many others. Because if we are all doing it, then we aren’t really isolated after all. And that is the gift of this website…check it out!

Technology and all that

Many thanks to all the loyal SHONA customers and friends who have visited our new store and updated website. www.shonacongo.com

And many thanks for the technology which has brought us here.

The SHONA women were taken advantage of in the past. Before they joined us, they were part of a sewing group where the manager ate first, and then the men and only at the end were these young women given a cut. But where else could they go? They had no resources to open up their own shops. They had no strong legs to circulate through the market, looking for work. And to be honest, they would have found it hard to convince many customers of their abilities. People see first that they are handicapped, not that they can sew.

But through the miracles of this age, the SHONA women have been able to land themselves in the middle of one the most promising markets of all. the internet. Without having to pay off ten people in the process. The reality that we are able to set up shop online, that we have customers that somehow find us, that we have people across the world who read our stories and care...it is a reality that I wouldn't have dreamed of ten years ago.

Think of all the things you buy everyday. What percentage of the profit from those sales goes to the person who made that item? What percentage of the things you buy are made by a person at all? With the warped speed of technology, in many ways we have lost the personal. Too often our food is cultivated by machines, our clothes are made in assembly lines and when we answer our phones we find machines on the other end. But in another way, the internet has made the world infinitely more personal. I can read status updates on facebook and discover that my friend went to bed at 11:00. I can read status updates on all my former high school students and be scandalized...again and again! I can see pictures of people I went to grammer school with. And you. You can come and visit us, here in Congo.

So please do. Keep reading our blog. Visit our website. www.shonacongo.com

As I exhault in all of this technology, I must admit that I have spent this past week banging my head on the keyboard. As we open our new store online and move away from ebay, I have to figure out how to get traffic to our site. Don't worry there are plenty of resources online. An infinite number of resources with infinite lists of all the things I should do to publicize our website. There are inlinks, outlinks, metatags, search engine submissions, trackbacks, blogrolls...and that is only the beginning.

After a while my eyes start to glaze over. And I go and get a cup of coffee and sit on my balcony for a while to listen to the sounds of Africa and remember where I am. And when I drag myself bag to the computer I remind myself of why I do this. It is so I can introduce you to some incredible women, who deserve this one break.

And I know that if the internet can do anything, it is because it brings us together. SO that I am not really alone staring at this computer wondering how to write a metatag.

So won't you join us? Please share the link to our website! www.shonacongo.com Post it on boards, put it in emails, blogs, websites...As I have come to realize, anything that shows you are reading our website will lead more people to us. And that is all we need.

And we wait...

We have now been in Rwanda almost a week. We would like to go home. The town of Goma continues to be relatively quiet. A strong police commander was brought into Goma and they started shooting people who were out looting. So, now, we only here shots occassionally, and it might be the government shooting to stop bandits, rather than the other way around.

And we wait...
Nkunda remains on the outskirts of town, apparently waiting for news of negotiations between Rwanda and Congo. Or maybe waiting for something else entirely...who knows.
The people of Goma wait for markets to open, schools to open and work to begin again.
The refugees wait for food, water, and medical help
the aid agencies wait for the refugees (where have they all gone? They have apparently been forced out of camps and disappeared in all directions...)
And we wait for news that it is ok to return to Congo...

We have gotten some good news.

Our house and the Shona house were not looted! For all the reports of wide-spread looting we appear to be incredibly lucky. The sewing equipment for Shona as well as all our merchandise remained untouched.

Also, thank you to the people who donated so generously to Shona. We now have enough money to sustain the women for several more weeks in Congo, which should be plenty. Sometimes the world seems so big and we seem so far away. And when we realize that people so far away are thinking of us and concerned for us, it means a lot. Thank you.

What can we do?

A number of people have written and asked "what can I do?"
That is a good question. All of us who are sitting in relative safety (whether it is the safety of a hotel just across the border or a house thousands of miles away) struggle with this question.

For the past two days Goma has been strangely silent. Nkunda is continuing to hold his rebel troops outside the city of Goma. Behind rebel lines refugees camps are being forcibly emptied and refugees are being told to go home (many of whom have not been home for months or even years), sending hundreds of thousands of refugees into the streets with no water, no food and no shelter. Aid agencies are unable to reach the vast majority of these refugees because of the continued fighting and insecurity in these areas. The relative calm in Goma is largely due to the fact that heavy negotiations are taking place between Congo and Rwanda, and the international community has sent a number of high level diplomats to support these negotiations. But many fear that this is the calm before the storm. Unless a heroic accomplishment leads to a real agreement between all parties involved (and how many times has this been tried and failed before?) the war could ignite to catastrophic proportions.

So we are all left asking what we can do.

As soon as we are able to return to Congo, I hope to have a better idea of how to meet some of the needs of the many people who are suffering there.

In the meantime, the four Shona ladies are fortunate to be here in relative safety. They are staying in one room of a guest house and eating one meal a day, plus bread to tide them over. We are paying $25 a day to be able to do this. ($15 a day for the room, $10 a day for food) We hope to be able to return to Congo soon, but there is no certainty on that level. They have left behind all their sewing equipment, plus about $500 worth of merchandise that was ready to be shipped out. We are hoping that the house was not looted but have yet to receive any confirmation on that. In the meantime, we are unable to continue sewing and expenses continue to rise.

We have a stock of items in the US that continue to sell on ebay. Your purchases are always appreciated, and especially now.

www.shonacongo.com

If you are intersted in making a small donation to help fund the Shona women as they stay out of harms way, that is also much appreciated. All donations will be used to cover the cost of the room and food for the women.

I know that the people of Eastern Congo would also greatly appreciate you keeping them in your thoughts and prayers. They would also appreciate you spreading the news about the situation in Congo. Being in the midst of a tragedy is terrible, and feeling that the tragedy has become invisible in the eyes of the world, is devastating. Please follow the news, talk to people, and help keep the eyes of the world on this disaster.

www.monuc.org

BBC