We recently started doing Church and Community Mobilization Processes training with the leaders of all three churches in the Mwanza district. This will teach them why the local church should care about development, how to identify the resources in their church and community, and how to take action using these resources (the title means, “to enable”). One week we went over several important elements of development with these leaders. They made five groups, with three or four in each group, and we asked them what each element meant to them. I was hoping it would help you connect with them a little bit if you could see their answers, so here they are. (Each bullet point is an answer from a different group. There aren’t five listed for each one because with some answers, I couldn’t make heads or tails of the Swahili.)

Development:

• When someone leaves one lifestyle and enters into another
• Acting for the improvement of the life of the community’s economy, health, environment, and food
• A step forward
• Success in getting a person to take a step in lifestyle, thinking, knowledge, or economy

Community

• A group of people that live together, that interact within a language and culture
• People that go around each other
• A union of different people that live in one place together

Dependency

• Someone who depends on or expects from (the word “tegemea” was used here, it can be used for either “expect” or “depend”) the people
• To work by hand
• Someone or something that expects or depends
• Someone who expects to be given or depends on being given assistance from other people
• Someone who is not able to depend on herself or himself alone, so another must help

Resources

• The things of the people
• The family, together with their plots of land
• The tools for work (people, things, money, time)
• Things that you yourself possess
• Things that a person has, that they can use for for development

Poverty

• Inactivity with regard to knowledge or vision
• Limitations with regard to the needs of the life of man
• It is the lack of important needs, which influence the life you are able to live
• It is a deficiency of knowledge or objects

Here are some pictures of the leaders, along with Eric and I.