The former Archbishop Fidele, Father Craft, and Mary Dailey Brown at the Chapel of the Holy Comforter for ECM’s free student lunch.
On Wednesday, October 24th students had the opportunity to meet the former Archbishop of the Republic of Congo, Rev. Fidele, and hear a presentation from Mary Dailey Brown, CEO of the non-profit Sow Hope. Sow Hope focuses on helping women of the developing world.
The Archbishop joined Sow Hope’s efforts after his retirement to continue his late wife’s work of helping women who had been raped in the Congo. Over 200,000 women have been raped in the Congo, and there have been zero prosecutions. It is a terrible reality, and a glaring symptom to a deeply rooted problem facing women in developing countries around the world.
During her presentation, Brown gave some background to how she ended up starting the non-profit, and then shared the vision she had for Sow Hope. I thought it was fantastic that she shared her personal journey, because her story connected the audience to the beating heart of Sow Hope.
Brown shared her experience traveling the world in search of mission partners as the director of missions for a church. As she traveled, she began to notice a common theme. Everywhere she went, women were carrying an unbearable load. She saw that men were doing light work and hanging out in the village centers drinking tea while the women were left to till the fields, walk miles to and from a water source to collect water for her family, chop and gather wood to cook the food she grew, and watch after her children at the same time. The women had the responsibility to feed the family, and that burden was solely on their shoulders. This realization floored Brown. She wanted get to the bottom of this and find out if she was the only person seeing this, because no one else seemed to mind.
The disparity and general attitude towards women that Brown noticed during her travels lead her to ask a nurse during a trip to Ethiopia why things were like this. She asked why there was such an unequal burden placed on the women. The nurse paused and thought about it for a bit and responded that she had lived there for 32 years and had never noticed it.
She said she didn’t know why, but that was just the way things were, and she didn’t see that changing any time soon.
This was a pivotal moment for Brown. She returned home and decided that many people could do her job as a mission director of a church, but that she didn’t see a lot of people helping women specifically.
She wanted to dedicate her life’s energy to that group because she felt that women were the largest most oppressed group in the world.
She decided she wanted to work for a large scale international organization like World Vision, but one that focussed on helping women in a holistic way through health and wellness, education, and economic opportunites. With the intent of quitting her job as a mission director for a church, she decided to search for that type of organization. She searched for 3 months and found no such organization.
She was sickened by this void in the non-profit world. How could there not be an organization that focussed on women in the third world? She prayed to God that he would call someone to start this type of organization, because the world really needed it.
She felt at that moment a tug on her heart, that she was the one he was calling to start such an organization. She wrestled with the idea, because she didn’t feel like she was qualified enough to be the founder of an organization.
This reminds of a familiar saying, “God doesn’t call the equipped, he equips the called.”
So after wrestling with God a bit, Brown decided to start Sow Hope.
The strategy of Sow Hope is to find local leaders in developing countries with a history of serving women, and ask them ask what their passion and dream for their village is, and then ask them what they’d do with more resources. Sow Hope cultivates this type of local leadership, and then empowers these leaders with resources to help them achieve their dreams.
Personally, one of the best take aways from this presentation were her closing questions to the audience. She asked,
What is that thing that keeps you up at night?
What is the thing you do that makes time fly by?
What are you passionate about?
She said that once you figure the answer to those questions out, you should pour your life’s energy into that passion. She quoted the Theologian Frederick Buechner, saying, “Vocation is where our greatest passion meets the world’s greatest need”.
Brown figured that out and started Sow Hope, and as a result, is changing thousands of lives.
For more information, and to find out how to support the work of Sow Hope, visit sowhope.org.
My prayer is that we all find what keeps us up at night, what makes time fly by, and what we are passionate about, and that we pursue that passion with all that we are.
Peace to you,
Lauren Wright | Episcopal Campus Ministry Coordinator
UNO Episcopal Campus Ministry 