Hopeful Strategies

The mission world has its travelling sales people as well as Kleeneze and sometimes (but not always!) they have some interesting gadgets in their show case. One such walked into my office today. In fact he is based less than a mile from the Faith2Share office but somehow we had not met before. A teacher, turned Oxfam's man in Indonesia and now in Oxford producing resources to help communities deal with HIV/AIDS, Glen Williams, is quite an etrepreneur. You can check out his Stategies for Hope Trust at http://www.stratshope.org/. They have a lot of workbooks, resources for church leaders and community facilitators, etc. in several different languages and quite a lot of it is free to those who will be using them in Africa, Asia or Latin America. A travelling salesman with freebees!

Male-female power imballance fuels HIV/AIDS

The latest rumour from Tear Fund UK, sadly, is that there are more redundancies on the way as they, like lots of us, seek to 'restructure' and survive in a challenging global market. But looking on the bright side, I just discovered a great resource they released this month. Their case study of HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe and Burkina Faso Gender, HIV and the Church, has some provocative things to say about the power equation between African (only African?) men and women and the role of traditional belief structures, even in churches, in fostering the spread of HIV. Not a long read and there's plenty of pictures, so worth downloading.