Cross posted from Feminist Mormon Housewives, Guest Post by Missy:

Missy takes care of two kids, writes, and is an activist. Utah for Congo is a group that organizes fundraisers and seeks to raise awareness about ongoing conflict and sexual violence in Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Over the past decade, nearly 7 million people have been killed in Democratic Republic of the Congo because of war and conflict. That makes it the most deadly conflict of our generation, the deadliest since World War II. Half of these deaths are children under the age of five.

One of the most horrific elements of the conflict is the habitual use of sexual violence and rape to terrorize people and destroy communities. The sexual violence is characterized by its unspeakable brutality and by the pain and destruction left in its wake. Figures are hard to come by, but a soon-to-be-released study suggests that the number of people raped over the past decade is over 3 million.

What haunts us is the fact that each of us is complicit in the continuation of this conflict. Violent groups are fighting for control of natural resources like gold, tungsten, tin and tantalum: Resources that tech companies use to manufacture the electronics equipment (like computers and cell phones) that Americans use. So every time we use our mobile phones, which are filled with these conflict minerals, we are (if unwittingly) complicit.

This Saturday in Utah we are holding Yoga for Congo Women events to raise awareness of the Congo crisis and raise funds for survivors of the violence. 100% of donations received will go to Women for Women International, an organization that provides women with supportive communities, vocational training, psychosocial support, rights training, and financial support. Yoga for Congo Women will be in Salt Lake in the morning, and in Logan in the evening. We’d love to see some of you there!

In the Barn at Wheeler Farm
6351 South 900 East (Salt Lake)
Registration begins at 9:30 a.m.
Yoga begins at 10:00 a.m.

At the Whitter Community Center
290 North 400 East (Logan)
Registration begins at 6:30 p.m.
Yoga begins at 7:00 p.m.

For more information on this event (and other upcoming events, including our second-annual 5K which will be held on June 11), please visit our blog at utahforcongo.blogspot.com

Groupon is known for doing half-off deals on any number of local services, shops, restaurants and cultural events but did you know that they do half off deals on humanitarian donations?

A couple of months ago, they were offering $25 donations for a $15 purchase price for Kiva. Now they are offering a $30 donation for the organization Build On for the purchase price of $15.

From their site:

Readers are probably aware of the civil unrest in Egypt and the people’s efforts to achieve democracy in their country. Egypt is not the other country making the new for revolution. Tunisia and Ivory Coast are others and there is speculation that demands for democracy will spread across the Middle East and Africa.

The WAVE Women’s Service Mission is organizing a prayer vigil this where WAVE readers join together in prayer for peace and democracy in the Middle East.

Please join us Tuesday evening, February 2nd at  8:00 p.m. in prayer, as families and individuals, for the Lord’s blessing and assistance of these countries in achieving what its citizens hold so dear.

We cannot help but think of the American legacy of revolution that achieved democracy for the United States. Our hearts go out the people of these countries who are in the midst of that struggle and in our prayers we include petitions for their safety and for their needs to be met as well as wisdom to act responsibly.

To learn more and to follow one Mormon who has lived in Egypt formerly, read at By Common Consent.

So again, please join together as fellow WAVErs in support of voice and equality for the people of Egypt, Africa and the Middle East on Tuesday February 2, at 8:00 pm.

It is our hope that our wave of prayers can help God’s will to go forward in these regions of the world.

I love hearing about Mormons who have felt inspired to create non-profit organizations, humanitarian  or advocacy efforts and I’ve been collecting stories where a member of the church sees a problem in the world, decides she or he can do something to fix it and goes about doing it. I find a great deal of inspiration in that. My guess is that these members of the church take seriously the baptismal covenant to “comfort those who stand in need of comfort” as well as the injunction to be “anxiously engaged in a good cause.”

In this post, I’ll be listing a few of the Mormons I know of who are making a difference in the world. I hope you will share me with other stories you are aware of.

Just this week, two bloggernacle blogs posted about such church members:

Mmiles at By Common Consent highlighted Liahona Children’s Foundation founded by Brad Walker.

At Times and Seasons, Adam Greenwood encouraged Mormons to support efforts to block pornography.

Here on WAVE, you have heard about Judith Dushku and THARCE-Gulu, a community center in Uganda to assist women in healing from the ravages of war and enslavement.

At Mormon Women Project, Vicky Dalia was interviewed about her family operated orphanage in Guatemala.

At Tiny Peaces, a group of Mormon women and men traveled to Central Asia to assist women and girls in obtaining education and becoming self- sufficient.

Women Doing More provides “opportunities for busy women to help the world in small and simple ways.”

In my ward, I have been impressed and inspired by one sister who coordinated a clothing drive after a natural disaster in the Philippines. Another ward member just moved to Kyrgyzstan as her husband studies Central Asian law.  And a neighbor is the founder of a non-profit organization providing maternal child health services in Kenya.

On the LDS WAVE board, we have Jessica who is on the board of her local hemophilia chapter, myself a co-founder of the international non-profit Solace for Mothers, Tresa and Elisabeth working with THARCE-Gulu.

Will WAVE readers be able to add themselves to this list? I hope so. Courtney is working on her idea to create a crafter’s guild of LDS women that will raise money to send to humanitarian efforts across the globe.

Tell me more. Do you know of other Mormons who are anxiously engaged in advocacy, humanitarian or volunteer work that is working to make the world a better place foe God’s children?

Though Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is best known for his work with civil rights and his “I Have a Dream” speech, he was passionate about two other issues: ending war through nonviolence practice and alleviating the plight of the poor through labor relations. In fact, he was speaking on labor relations the night before his assassination.

This morning, NPR’s Weekday ran a segment that highlighted his work and included many wonderful and inspiring quotations from his speeches on poverty. The last 15-20 minutes are recommended. I’ve quote some of it below.

One of his speeches, in particular, cuts across race lines and even gender lines to highlight a problem that Americans today are all too familiar with. Generally known as the plight of the working poor, Martin Luther King stated in a 1968 speech:

“There is the problem of under-employment and there are thousands and thousand, I would say millions of people in the Negro community who are poverty stricken — not because they are not working but because they receive wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the main stream of the economic life of our nation.”

Most of the poverty stricken people of America are persons who are working every day and they end up getting part-time wages for full-time work.”

This is still the case 45 years later. We are actually much more aware of this now since our economy has been impacted across the board. Just as Dr. King said, we have an awareness and sense of urgency about economic downturn when it affects the white folks too.

All too often when there is mass unemployment in the black community, it’s referred to as a social problem and when there is mass unemployment in the white community, it’s referred to as a depression. But there is no basic difference.

Millions of Americans, across the racial spectrum–White, Asian, Latino, Black–are underemployed or work very hard for wages that cannot sustain them or their families. With women receiving on average 77 cents to the $1.00, women, particularly minority women, are especially affected.

The wage disparity is just one way that women struggle in today’s economy. The book The War on Moms: On Life in a Family Un-friendly Nation describes the many public policies that undermine families and mothers as they work to provide for their children.

It describes how stay at home mothers are not exempt from being affected by these policies as many mothers are finding themselves needing to find work to supplement their husband’s incomes, or in the case of divorce and death, find themselves single mothers which is the single most determinant of children and women transitioning into poverty.

War on Moms is just the book that can give realistic preparation for young women preparing for motherhood in regards to economic and financial impacts of being a woman in the workforce, whether by choice or by necessity. And sadly, we see that many young women do have an awareness of these issues and they may find themselves discouraged from being mothers because of them.

Martin Luther King Jr. may not have called his unfinished work a fight in the War on Families but he could have. When the working poor are unable to make a fair wage, they are unable to provide for their families, regardless of race or gender though still racial disparities compound the problems. When parents cannot provide for their children, children are raised in poverty and the cycle is perpetuated. Dr. King realized in 1968 that fair wages or “full-time pay for full-time work” were needed to break the cycle. Today, it is still needed.

As Mormons, we believe that self-reliance is necessary for spiritual and temporal success. And yet, in the United States, we live in the most family-unfriendly nation in the developed world. There are policies that stand in the way of families working toward self-sufficiency. We can no longer say that people need to work harder and then they’ll be able to pull themselves out of poverty. Some are successful but yet many are causalities and given our covenant to “mourn with those who mourn” it seems inconsistent to expect the many to become the exceptions. Through advocating for family friendly policies, like fair pay laws, we can address, at its root, some of the causes of poverty in our nation.

War on Moms describes some of the ways that these disparities can be addressed. MomsRising.org provides a grassroots platform for women across the spectrum to advocate for policies that would alleviate the strain on the working poor. Their book The Motherhood Manifesto also highlights how policies in business and government can be reformed to address and prevent poverty and grant the dignity of which Dr. Martin Luther King spoke.

It cannot be minimized or ignored that racial disparities continue to exist in the United States. When working for family friendly policies, it cannot be just for the white, middle class families with a working father and a stay at home mother but  the needs of all races residing in our country must be address. The work of Dr. King continues and must continue until each person can “assert [his/her] dignity and worth. We must stand up amidst a system that still oppresses us and develop an unassailable and majestic sense of values.”

WAVE readers, what organizations or efforts are you familiar with that offers innovative and effective strategies for bringing people out of poverty in the United States? Particularly, are you familiar with efforts that address racial disparities separate or in addition to women’s issues?

It is the goal of the Women’s Service Mission to learn together on to effectively serve and assist others in their hardships. If you have knowledge of these areas, please share your experiences here. As always, if you are familiar with or care particularly about an issue that affects women around the world, please write and submit a guest post to: service@ldswave.org.

Submitted by WAVE reader Heather Farley. You can find her blogging at Its All About the Hat.

Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States. In 1994, Congress declared Martin Luter King Jr. Day to be a Day of Service.. Because it is a federal holiday, many people have the day off and can dedicate some time to serving others. Serving my community has been one of my top resolutions this year: I feel like I’m at a place in my life that I can really think outside of myself. I also want to set an example for my children. Unfortunately, I’m having a hard time trying to complete that resolution. It’s hard to find organizations that will allow children to come serve alongside adults or have service opportunities during hours that I can find babysitters. I really want to be able to bring my children with me so they can be involved in the community at an early age. While putting together humanitarian aid kits is nice for FHE (and we have done that), I really want my children to meet new people and start feeling a sense of the greater community we live in.

So my question for you all is two-fold. First, do you have plans to join in the Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service tomorrow? And have you found ways to include children in serving? Please let me know!

Heather

On the anniversary of the terrible earthquake in Haiti that took so many lives, I want to highlight a non-profit organization dedicated to improving maternal and child health in Haiti. Mother Health International was founded a year ago today to “respond and provide relief to pregnant women and children in areas of disaster and extreme poverty.” It is run by a volunteer medical advisory board of CNMs, CPMs, OBs, and NDs.

Mother and baby at MHI

From the MHI mission statement:

We are committed to reducing the maternal and infant mortality rates by creating healthy, sustainable holistic birth clinics using the midwifery model of care with culturally appropriate, education for the health and empowerment of women. With every healthy birth there is a positive benefit for the communities that we serve and the world as a whole. Our ultimate mission is to empower and educate the local clinic staff, with gender equality, to become the health care providers for their community.

I wrote to Heather L. Maurer, Co-Founder and Executive Director, for more information about her organization. Here is a brief history of MHI:

Located in the country’s southern coast, Jacmel suffered extensive causalities as well as was left littered with crumbled buildings and destruction after the January 12, 7.0 earth quake. MHI founding members were part of a first responder team of seven medics, midwives and support staff, originally affiliated with Bumi Sehat International Foundation, who traveled to Jacmel, Haiti on January 28, 2010 via Santa Domingo, DR to offer disaster relief to women and children. With the help from private donations, NGO’s, nonprofit organizations and government organizations, the team was able to provide emergency medical aid, water and food to the women and children who survived the earthquake.

Shortly after arriving in Jacmel, the founders of MHI recognized the greater need beyond disaster and emergency aid and began the process to build a holistic birth clinic in the heart of one of the most under served areas in Jacmel, St. Helen Parish. On March 10, MHI officially opened our doors to pregnant women and started prenatal evaluations. A few weeks after the opening of the birth clinic, the first baby boy was born into the hands of a volunteer midwife, peacefully and healthy. Today over 400 babies have been born at our birth center and thousands of women have received prenatal visits. Midwives and OB/GYN’s come from around the world volunteer their time in the birth clinic. Our birth attendants are skilled at gentle birthing techniques intended to offer women a place of dignity in which to give birth, reduce pain, decrease interventions and cesarean sections. Our model of care incorporates traditional holistic midwifery care while respecting and embracing Haitian culture and customs.

Our plans are to build permanent structures to serve as our birth clinic and we are searching for a sponsor/donor. We are in immediate need for this as the demands are growing.

Mother Health International’s birth clinic in Jacmel has seen over 425 births since its opening in March 2010. It is housed in a 44-foot diameter (1,500 square feet) dome from Pacific Domes. The birth center has 9 beds.

Interior of dome

Dome at night

I love reading the employees’ and volunteers’ stories of their time at MHI. To keep this post from running too long, I won’t repost them all here. Please take the time to visit these links–I think you’ll find them as inspiring as I have:

• A reflection from volunteer Melinda
• Meet Marie Antoinette Helen Jeune, Assistant Midwife at MHI
• Meet Ninotte Lubin-Assistant Midwife, Administrator
• Judith Baptist-HIV Counselor
• Sheline Agella
• Clare Loprinzi: Haitian women move with strength and grace
• Tata’s Story
• Meet Nadege Medee-Another MHI team member
• Meet Shela Barthelemy-Student Midwife

For a feel of what it’s like to give birth at the MHI clinic, read Imaccula’s birth story or the story of MHI’s first set of twins. You can learn more about MHI at their website, blog, and Facebook page.

Eloufeine traveled 2 hours to birth at the MHI clinic.

If you like what MHI is doing, please consider donating to help keep the clinic operating. All money donated to MHI goes directly to maintain and sustain the birth clinic in Haiti; board members and directors work on a volunteer basis.

Lisa is the founder of the blog www.feministmormonhousewives.org. She recently blogged about how as a Mormon, she found herself embracing the term feminist and pro-life. She outlines her reasons for why.

When I was in my early teens I found out my neighbors had a dark secret.

They were Democrats.  Obviously, my first question to their daughter (who is a few years older than me, and whom I greatly admired because she is both kind and beautiful) was . . . “So you believe in abortions?  Don’t you care about the babies!”

She responded “it isn’t that simple”, gave me a look that made me feel shame deep in my bones, and went to talk to someone less ignorant and self-righteous.  Go figure.

(And as Karma would have it, I get this response [though often worded more delicately] on a pretty regular basis.  And really it isn’t something I feel I can respond to in a sound bite. )

Shortly after this dark discovery, when I asked my mother about the Jones’ being (whisper) “Democrats”, and how could they! She told me this story:

When she was pregnant with her third child she really felt that she could feel the spirits of her children, each of them somehow felt distinctly different.  She could sense them as people far before they entered the world.

And she was agonizing over the issue of abortion (though she didn’t tell me why, more on that later), wondering what would happen to all those spirits whose lives were cut short,  wondering about the women who took that step, could they ever be forgiven?  She said it was just eating away at her peace of mind, and so she prayed and prayed.  And she received a very strong answer, “Be still and know that I am God”.

She didn’t feel like she knew any more, but she was filled with peace that God was a God of Justice, and a God of Mercy, and that the babies would be okay, it wasn’t her place to judge the mothers.

And from that story I think I built a kind of rough gist of a (personal) Mormon doctrine of abortion, basically, that pre-mortal souls would get another chance to come to Earth.  Now my mom still labels herself as strongly Pro-Life, and so did I back then, in fact, it was abortion that was one of my big sticking points as I made my awkward transition from a conservative orthodox to a liberal heterodox kinda gal.  As I was deciding if I should label myself a feminist or not . . . abortion really was the issue that weighed on me more than any other.

I was starting to understand how important it is for women to have control over our own bodies.  I felt great pain and sympathy for women who found themselves in impossible situations and chose abortion. I’d read about the horrible pre-Roe days when hospitals had whole wards for botched abortions where women died in droves.  I knew all that, but I just couldn’t get over the babies!  The poor innocent babies.

I never could convince myself that I could just switch sides, call it a fetus,  forget about the moral ambiguity of the whole situation.  I never could find again the comfortable moral certainty of willful ignorance.  It took me a really long time to realize that I didn’t have to.

One of my first steps along that path was rooted in the Church’s own public stance on abortion, namely where it states in the handbook that in the case of rape and incest, abortion is considered a viable alternative.  Surely abortion could not be “murder” if there are instances when the Church itself says it is a viable (if probably regrettable) alternative.  Because the church would never (I hope) say that a mother could murder her two-year-old child, not even if the child had been conceived during rape or incest.   It seemed clear to me that there was, there had to be, a material difference between abortion and killing a living child.

And then there was the huge nine-month gray area of pregnancy itself.  I had had a hard time believing (in the black and white mindset) that every time a sperm and an egg meet up, that fertilized egg is morally equivalent to a fully formed infant.  Just for starters, six cells in a petri dish doesn’t look like a baby.  If I ran into a burning building and had to pick between saving six-cells-in-a-petri-dish or a baby, I’d pick the baby, every time.  And even if given the ideal environment to grow into a baby, over half  of fertilized eggs simply never could become a baby, too many mistakes in the chromosomes.

But neither can I say I think a fertilized egg, or a zygote, or a fetus, is a meaningless glob of cells. At the very least it is potential life, and something deep in my bones says that is sacred and special and not to be dealt with lightly. Plus there are all those cute little ultrasound pictures with tiny toes and itty bitty penises and precious thumb sucking.

And it seems to me that most logical people, regardless of their specific beliefs about the sacredness of human life, or the point at which “potential human life” becomes “a person” with legal and moral rights of her own, that while there is no magic line that everyone can agree upon when that transition occurs, most of us will still agree that there is a huge moral difference between three weeks and thirty weeks.

And there just is no easy answer, not anywhere, to these dilemmas. So since the ambiguous morality of the whole situation didn’t seem to help me at all, how does one label such jumble of contradictory feelings?  I guess I’ve taken a more pragmatic approach.

In the end, I knew I had to label myself as a feminist, because I just cared too much about women’s issues to be all wishy-washy with the title.  I know that some people have bought into the backlash of the 80s and 90s with all the negative man-hating/wanna-be-a-man connotations of the word, but I have some of the same problem with labeling myself  Mormon, lots of baggage with that label as well.

And in the end, I decided to accept the label Pro-choice as well.  Not because I love abortions, I find them deeply disturbing in fact, but only because I can’t think of any practical advantages to making abortion illegal. I don’t want to return to the bad-ol’-days of hospital wards filled with dying girls.  And in strictly practical terms, making abortions illegal does very little to reduce the number of abortions, all it does is make them more dangerous to procure.  So it seems to me more logical to focus on things that actually do reduce abortions . . . sex education, easy access to birth control,  and financial/physical security for mothers.  All, issues deeply important to the feminist cause.

It was not long ago that I found out the reason my mother was agonizing over the issue of abortion when she was pregnant with her third child, after all, it was the 1950s, and my mother was a financially secure, happily married Mormon woman, it wasn’t like she was in a situation where it made a huge difference in her own life.

But . . . it turns out it was personal, deeply personal.  My mother’s mother had found herself in rather desperate straights, a young mother with two small children, divorced from jerk, and pregnant, far away from family in the middle of the Great Depression.   She was a deeply devout Mormon woman, but she had an abortion. An illegal abortion. She went on to remarry, and have two more children (my mother and my dear aunt) and live a happy but tragically short life.

My mother was only 13 years old when her mother died.  Mom never had a chance to talk to her about that choice, or to know her own mother as an adult. And when my mother faced having her own third child in radically different circumstances, she was heart sick that she would not see her mother again in the next life, that a sin so great would keep them apart. And when she went to the Lord, desperate to be reassured that she would still have that connection to the mother she lost so young, the answer was crystal clear, “Be still and know that I am God.”

What has been your experience in thinking about the morality/legality of abortion? What are ways that you can or are in involved in efforts to prevent abortions from taking place and serving women in need?

I have been looking forward to spotlighting THARCE-Gulu on the Women’s Service Mission since I first heard about it. It was founded by Boston Stake Relief Society President, Judith Dushku, who is a university professor of political science. She took her students to Uganda after learning about the political upheaval in the region and met survivors of the conflicts there–women who had been child soldiers and sex slaves. In her work in Gulu, Uganda, Judith has already helped to coordinate the building of a house to the women there. Her current effort is to create a Trauma, Healing and Reflection Center to support the women there as they overcome and process their traumatic experiences.

Along with her daughter Eliza Dushku (former cast member from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer), Judith is trying to raise $30,000 to build the land for the center at THARCE-Gulu. They are about a quarter of the way to their goal and hope to achieve it by Dec. 30, in time for Eliza’s 30th birthday.

Two of our WAVE board members also serve on the board of THARCE-Gulu and will traveling to Uganda in 2011 to continue the work on the center there. To learn more about Judith and their work, read the article “Mormon feminism meets global challenge” from the Salt Lake Tribune.

Feminist Mormon Housewives is hosting an online raffle to support this worthy effort.  You are encouraged to donate via Paypal but you can also send a check (see fMh post for details).  To be entered in the raffle click “special instructions to seller and mention fMh, Exponent II, By Common Consent, WAVE or any bloggernacle blog).

A large donation is not needed, so please do what you can. Its wonderful to see these humanitarian efforts inspired by feminist consciousness and by the faith and love of Relief Society sisters a world apart.

Our prayer this Christmas season is echoed in the lyrics of the song, “O Holy Night:”

Truly He taught us to love one another,
His law is love and His gospel is peace.

Chains he shall break, for the slave is our brother.
And in his name all oppression shall cease.

Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
With all our hearts we praise His holy name.
Christ is the Lord!

Then ever, ever praise we,
His power and glory ever more proclaim!

May we join together in the coming year to relieve the suffering of women around the world and join together as sisters in this work.

Merry Christmas from WAVE. We wish you a happy and safe holiday and that the spirit of Christmas will be with you and that your season will be bright.