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RSSOf Course, I Will Help
by The Rev. Barbara Cawthorne Crafton
4/29/2007
Easter IV, Year C
Acts 9:36-43
Psalm 23
Revelation 7:9-17
John 10:22-30
All the widows stood beside him, weeping and showing tunics and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was with them. -- Acts 9:39
A gifted woman who truly enjoys helping others -- how many women in your church are like Dorcas? Probably more than one. What would your church be like if they were all suddenly disappeared? Nothing like it is now, that's for sure.
Westerners sometimes assume that women in developing countries are uniformly powerless, and it is true that many kinds of direct political and social power are closed to women in many countries.
But it is never true that women have no power at all. For as long as human society has been here, women have used what they have -- because nobody can use what she does not have -- to make life better for the families that have so defined them. From scratching out a living as a subsistence farmer to selling eggs or vegetables or baskets or home-cooked food, millions of individual women doing small things combine to represent a significant economic force throughout the developing world.
Helping women help their families and one another has proven everywhere to be a good investment. This week, on Africa Malaria Day -- coinciding with the first-ever Malaria Awareness Day in this country -- major newspapers throughout America ran advertisements from governments, charitable societies and foundations, medical societies and corporations and articles to educate us about how this preventable and treatable disease, for so long a scourge of tropical life, is being combated throughout the world. And the most important line of defense against it is also the simplest, and it is squarely in the hands of women: inexpensive, long-lasting mosquito repellent nets, under which their vulnerable children can sleep every night in safety.
To date, Episcopal Relief and Development has trained over 2,000 community malaria agents, almost all of them members of the Mothers' Union, and has distributed more than 210,000 long-lasting insecticide-treated nets in countries including Angola, Zambia, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Many important people have paid a lot of attention to malaria this week -- corporate and world leaders. But it has always been true that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. It is that very hand that will save the lives of those most in danger from this ancient enemy.
