HOTLINE - week of September 25, 2006

"Our intention is to strengthen civil society, and here, as in other regions of Africa, women play a vital role at all levels of civil society and family," says Tammi Mott. CWS’s Mott is Regional Coordinator of the new CWS office in Maputo, Mozambique.

The current two-year plan anticipates reaching more than 143 communities in three countries--Mozambique, Malawi, and Angola--including some 14,150 households, with a special focus on over 15,000 women and children. Plans include expanding programs in literacy, girls' education, HIV and AIDS, and water, and the piloting of new initiatives in civic education, strengthening civil society, food security, and livelihood development.

An event on September 11 in Mozambique's Moamba District sums up the potential to impact people there on a community-wide basis, according to Mott.

"It was an arms collection and destruction ceremony," she says, "part of a program that's been around since the end of the war in Mozambique in 1992--the Transforming Arms Into Plowshares Program of our partner the Christian Council of Mozambique (CCM)." The September 11 ceremony took the program to new levels, says Mott, involving a whole community, not just individuals.

"At the Moamba ceremony, the community chose peace. They collectively turned in their arms and in return received support for school construction. This was a joint effort between the Christian Council of Mozambique and the local government."

Mott says CWS will be working with CCM and the communities, as the arms collection program expands into this broader phase, "no longer just working with individuals to trade arms for tools like sewing machines, hoes, and bikes, but now giving incentives to whole communities as a group," she says.

CWS is now exploring ways with CCM to support "plowshares" communities through projects such as "Water for Life" development programs--to build water resources, skills, and water self-sufficiency on a continent where more than a third of the people lack access to clean, safe water.

"We are staying in the camps to protect ourselves," says Abdul, a community leader in El Neem, a camp for internally displaced people on the outskirts of El Daein town, in southeastern Darfur region.

For some, the trauma of war is such that they do not want to return home from the relative safety of the camps. "I don't want to return," says Malka. "I am afraid. I want to stay here."

Recent attacks on their villages by armed militias forced thousands of civilians to flee their homes and seek refuge in camps around El Daein. Though a peace agreement was signed some four months before, security is yet to be established.

Though security is deteriorating in many areas of the Darfur region of western Sudan, CWS coalition partner Action by Churches Together-Caritas is continuing to provide food, water, shelter materials, education, and other community services for displaced families. Since the start of the program in 2004, ACT-Caritas has helped more than 470,000 displaced people who have sought the relative safety of camps.

Help support relief efforts in Sudan/

Seventeen church and faith-based non-governmental organization leaders in Sierra Leone took part in a CWS Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) training earlier this month. The seminar, sponsored by CWS partner the Council of Churches in Sierra Leone, helped the faith leaders to discuss the causes of the war in Sierra Leone, and to understand the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the human rights issues involved. The leaders are sharing what they've learned with their constituencies. STAR seminars help caregivers and survivors of war and disaster address their post-traumatic stress.

Your prayers and support - and your participation in CROP WALKS and the TOOLS & BLANKETS Program - make possible these and other life sustaining programs. For information on how to get involved, please call your Church World Service/CROP Regional Office toll-free at 1-888-CWS-CROP, that's 1-888-297-2767.

For information about free loan videos, please call 1-800-297-1516, ext. 338, or e-mail us at: videos@churchworldservice.org.

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