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| Achan Grace works on the porch of her new home in BeadforLife's Friendship Village. |
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BEAD FOR LIFE DOCUMENTARY
Achan Grace 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 five feared she would die from sickness and starvation, leaving her children with nothing. But through her hard work with BeadforLife, Achan Grace now has hope for the future. She is one of several hundred women who have been earning an income by making beautiful bead jewelry from recycled magazine paper and selling it to eager buyers in North America. Achan Grace is among the first to build a home in a one-of-a-kind intertribal village that is a model in the fight against global poverty. Before BeadforLife she was begging for work. Now she can feed her family and send her children to school. She saved 1.2 million shillings for a down payment on a home, something previously unheard of for women living in the slums of Kampala. Achan Grace has a house with sturdy walls now rather than one with mud and sticks.
Achan Grace'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, Ginny Jordan and Devin Hibbard 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 were crippling Africa. They saw Millie Grace Akena and other women in the Acholi slum 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 Achan Grace, Namukasa Rose and Sarah Ndagire 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, vocational education and housing. The program has been so successful that 100 women now have homes of their own in BeadforLife's Friendship Village outside of Mukono, Uganda.
“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 create markets and women in North America learn 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 Achan Grace 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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| Cinematographer Paul Hillman videotapes a beader during a trip to Kampala, Uganda to do production work for BeadforLife. |
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BeadforLife : Party Video http://www.beadforlife.orgBeadforLife eradicates extreme poverty by creating bridges of understanding between impoverished Africans and concerned world citizens. Ugandan women turn colorful recycled paper into beautiful bead jewelry and people open their hearts, homes and communities to buy and sell the beads. The beads become income, food, medicine, school fees and hope. All net profits are invested in community development projects.
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HDNet World Report : Friendship Village http://www.beadforlife.orghttp://www.hd.net
BeadforLife's Friendship village houses 180 impoverished Ugandan families outside Kampala, Uganda. Shovelful by shovelful, brick by brick, beaders are enthusiastically build their own homes. Through their hard work and savings with BeadforLife they acheive a dream. As one beader says: “If you own a home, you are never really poor.”
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