Funding the Kirangare Milk Store

A few weeks ago, we celebrated with the women’s group of Kirangare Lutheran Parish in Tanzania. The new freezer for milk had just arrived in Kirangare, purchased thanks to Zion’s Lent offerings. (Missed it? Check it out on Facebook: New Milk Freezer Enables New Business in Kirangare, plus video.)

But before it can launch, the Milk Store needs seed money—for a 6 month rental deposit, to install electricity, and to make an initial purchase of milk from Kirangare farmers. All together, the cost is roughly $400 U.S. dollars (or 870,000 Tanzanian shillings).

To put this in perspective, two years ago Pastor Fue reported that his monthly pay was $50 U.S. dollars. For him, $400 is 8 months’ wages; two-thirds of his annual salary. But for the women of Kirangare Parish’s women’s group—who launched this project because keeping cows is women’s work—$400 is even more of an obstacle.

“We need your prayers for the project,” Pastor Fue said.

In worship on Sunday, June 30, we will pray for this project. We will also hear a section from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. Paul was speaking of a fundraising effort. The Corinthians had previously pledged to give but had not yet given. Paul encouraged them to follow through.

“I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance” (2nd Corinthians 8).

There is currently no Zion fundraiser for Kirangare. We have not pledged any more funds to the Milk Store project. Pastor Fue’s message to me was a prayer request, not a request for funds. But Pastor Fue knows you all, as do I. I imagine, perhaps like he did, that one or more of you will volunteer to make a gift. Zion is a congregation of people who share Paul’s point of view.

The economic inequities between us in the United States and our sisters and brothers in Kirangare are stark. This perspective is one of the great gifts of Zion’s companionship with Kirangare Lutheran Parish, even if it can lead to uncomfortable feelings and conflicting ideas about how to respond.

Our Kirangare kin feel inferior to us—they have said so—and this wealth-gap is surely part of why. Zion travelers and all of you who wrote Christmas cards and other communications are on the frontlines of the effort to level this inequity of dignity. (Zion people who serve in the food pantry do this too, only with our much-more-local neighbors.) No one wants to feel like a burden.

And yet to visit Kirangare is to be humbled. That’s my experience, in Kirangare and in similar visits to Nicaragua and Mexico City. What a tragedy it is to have more wealth and power than hope, faith, or love. But, thanks be to God, their abundance is for our need too.