When Filda’s husband was murdered, she felt joy quietly pack up its bags, nod to her from the door and then step out into Uganda’s shimmering heat.
“I’ve seen how widows are forced into poverty,” wrote Elisabeth Braw for Foreign Policy, “evicted from their homes, denied their rights, and often rendered invisible and voiceless.”
Esther was abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army in 1994. Three years before, Joseph Kony had launched his brutal campaign supposedly to defend Acholi tribal rights in Northern Uganda, leaving a wake of thousands murdered or mutilated.
“My husband abandoned me and our two children,” one woman in Burundi shared with a World Challenge partner. “He’s a ‘pastor’ and now on his third wife.”
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is wrestling with freedom from the Russian Orthodox Church—which has often been an accessory to Russian political leaders—and trying to transfer its authority to a new archbishop.
Rosa feels along the brick wall of her kitchen. Only the size of a living room in many Americans’ houses, her home is simple and clean. At least, she hopes it’s clean. She’s swept like always, bumping the broom between the table and chairs’ legs.
Something clatters cross the floor, and she pauses, trying to squint through grainy gloom at whatever’s fallen.
As the sun rises on the eastern part of Kenya’s capital, it brings to light one of the world largest slums: Mathare.
The third largest in Africa, this slum is home to some 500,000 people scraping together a living in grinding poverty.
This spring, Director of Mercy Ministries Mark Buzzetta traveled to Cusco, Peru to connect with a local church doing great work caring for widows.
The trip was eye-opening to Peru’s great natural beauty and local struggles, coming almost as often from floods of global tourists to their region as well as stifling animist traditions.