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| Sarah shows off her beads outside her home in the slums of Kampala, Uganda. |
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BEAD FOR LIFE DOCUMENTARY
Naiga Mary crosses the threshold of the home she built with her own hands. She falls to her knees and wails. Moments later she ululates and dances with joy. Three years ago this mother of four feared she would die from AIDS and starvation, leaving her children with nothing. But through her hard work with BeadforLife, Naiga Mary now has hope for the future. She is one of several hundred women who has been earning an income by making beautiful bead jewelry from recycled magazine paper and selling it to eager buyers in North America. Naiga Mary is among the first to build a home in a one-of-a-kind intertribal village. Before BeadforLife she was begging for work. Now she can feed her family, send her children to school and go to a doctor. She has opened a savings account, something previously unheard of for women living in the slums of Kampala. “When I have a home, I’ll be the richest,” she used to say. Now she has realized that dream.
Naiga Mary’s success story is a testament to a women’s movement that reaches from the slums of Uganda to North America and back again. Life in the slums of Kampala is devastating. Suffering is so endemic that no one goes untouched. War, disease, hunger, homelessness and entrenched poverty have crushed those who live in Kampala’s most destitute areas. Families have been displaced by a 19 year old civil war that has created a million and a half refugees. Many people are HIV positive and suffer from malaria, tuberculosis and starvation. Children die of hunger. They have no running water or electricity and illiteracy and unemployment are rampant. But a chance encounter between women has created a chain of compassion spanning two continents and giving families hope for a better life.
It all started when Torkin Wakefield and Ginny Jordan of Boulder, Colorado were living in Uganda and took a walk through a slum. They were bearing witness daily to the AIDS epidemic and devastating hardships that are crippling Africa. They saw Millie Grace Akena and other women in their mud village making beads from used magazines. The only other option for work was crushing rocks by hand at the nearby quarry for $1 a day. Torkin and Ginny bought some of her necklaces and soon after started the non-profit organization, BeadforLife. Today hundreds of women like Naiga Mary, Achan Grace, Namukasa Rose and Jajja Josephine roll colorful beads into necklaces while women in North America sell the strands at beadware parties in private homes. All the profits go back to the beaders, their families and their communities to help improve survival, health care, education and housing. The program has been so successful that BeadforLife has teamed up with Habitat for Humanity so women can build homes in a village of their own with the money they've saved.
“Bead For Life” is a one hour documentary that shows the economic and heartfelt bridges created between the impoverished people of Uganda and the citizens of North America. The flow of energy is blessing everyone. Through this unique partnership, women of Uganda are learning to create markets and women of North America are learning about courage in the face of staggering personal loss and suffering. The partnership is not only about empowerment, caring and mutual respect between cultures, but also about how socially responsible collaboration can create jobs, maintain families and communities and evolve into a model of sustainable economic development. In a matter of a few years, women like Naiga Mary have gone from death’s door through the doors of their own homes, built with their own hands, through their own resourcefulness and hard work. Women are mobilizing hearts and hands to create a more equitable world and loosen the grip of poverty one bead at a time.
WE ARE RAISING MONEY FOR THIS PROJECT. PLEASE CONTACT
vicky@teletrendstv.com
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