In 2018, I started pursuing a vision of helping Tanzanian young adults to become servant leaders who will make Tanzania a better place. Originally, I thought that my primary task would be to show them that a life of love and service could really be better than a life of being served, taking bribes, and embezzling church funds.

Well, don’t get me wrong, that has been a major part of our transformative work here. But I learned very quickly that many Tanzanian young adults don’t serve because they just don’t think that they have anything to offer. Selfishness is an obstacle, but so is self-hatred.

Maybe you remember something that happened to you that suddenly made your life a lot worse. For Rebekah Willis (not her real name), it was when her father died, when she was 14. Her father had had a good job as a military officer. Her father’s brothers had never liked Rebekah’s mother, and they immediately took all of her father’s property, and they told Rebekah and her mother (and Rebekah’s 3 younger siblings) that they had 24 hours to leave the house.

A soft, spoiled life suddenly became a life of doing their best to sell potatoes. Rebekah wanted to distract herself from her new reality, so she would steal from the already tiny amount of money that her mom had and go watch movies on the tiny screen at the thatch-roof-and-wooden-benches cinema.

Her mother wasn’t used to disciplining her, so she didn’t. She just told her to stop, Rebekah didn’t listen, and the conflict built up, day by day. One day her mother had had enough. She had never beaten Rebekah before, but that day, she grabbed a stick, grabbed Rebekah by her hair, and beat her mercilessly. She screamed at her about how she was a dog, how she wished that she could have any other child, how the oldest child was supposed to be helping her, but how Rebekah had turned out to be a worthless firstborn. The wounds were so severe that she had to take Rebekah to the hospital, once she realized what she had done. After Rebekah was treated and discharged from the hospital, Rebekah’s mother called her own mother and sent Rebekah away to go live with her.

Rebekah grew up with her grandmother, but she never did recover from the idea that she was a terrible firstborn child who had really let her mother down. I first met her in February 2021 when she joined QuadW Tarime. She was anxious to please, while also having no confidence in her own abilities, or even her own thoughts. I could sense that she was deeply sad, and yet she laughed at almost everything. I remember one day we cooked plantains together, and then I asked if she could go ahead and serve everyone’s plates. She immediately became downcast and fidgety. I was confused, and I said,

“I’m sorry sister, is there a problem?”

“Brother Davis, I don’t know how…”

“You don’t know how? You don’t know how to serve the food onto the plates?”

“Well, it is… I don’t know, I don’t know how to balance.”

“To balance?”

“It is, it is… I don’t know how to balance the food evenly between five plates.”

I involuntarily laughed, a confused chuckle, and Rebekah burst out laughing with me.

Still chuckling, I said, “But sister Rebekah… you can do it. It’s just a few plates. And if you get it wrong, I’m sure it won’t be a big deal”.

She laughed, looked at the ground, and said, “Me, I’m used to just serving for me and my grandma. Five plates is so many, and what if I give someone too much, and others not enough? Can we please just wait for sister Veronica to get back? Veronica can do it; me, I can’t.”

What do you say to someone who doesn’t have enough confidence to serve food onto five plates? I didn’t know. I just hoped that a loving community would be a good place for her to rebuild her self-concept.

We put her on a ministry team with two fellow community members, so that she wouldn’t have to do anything all alone, and then we started to give her tiny little opportunities to succeed. At the same time, we continued to show her that we loved her unconditionally and that she no longer had to fear criticism.

Sister Rebekah, do you think that you could ask to borrow a knife from our next-door neighbor?

Sister Rebekah, do you think that you could go to the market today, to buy the food items that we need?

Sister Rebekah, you did a great job going to the market last time. When you go this time, do you think you could ask the neighbors if they need anything from the market? That would be a good way to build our friendship with them.

Sister Rebekah, our neighbor, Mama Esther, lost her child, and she is grieving. Could you go cook dinner with her? I think that would really comfort her.

Sister Rebekah, do you think that you could go introduce us to our neighbor, who lives near the banana trees? She’s a bit older. People say that she is a witch. I doubt it, but one way to find out.

With each successful step, Rebekah seemed to be rebuilding a fragile, glass-like frame of self-confidence, slowly growing more sturdy as the days went by. One day we were having a community meeting; Rebekah was always as silent as a stone during community meetings, believing that she had nothing to contribute. And this was a particularly important community meeting; we were about to start our first neighborhood group, and we were discussing what the group’s focus should be. Myself and 3 other community members went back and forth between an economic empowerment group, or a group about loving and valuing children, or a women’s empowerment group, and suddenly,

“I’ve seen that we need to do something for comfort and healing. A healing group”, Rebekah said.

If the coffee table had spoken, we would have been less surprised.

I tried to hide my shock and just said, “Yeah, yeah, good idea. I’d love to hear a little more about what you are thinking.”

“Well, many women in this neighborhood are hurting. Mama Esther and Mama Vero lost children last month, Mama Baraka has been beaten by her husband, and Bibi Nchagwa… people keep saying that she is a witch, but she’s actually just a lonely old woman. We could teach them to comfort each other and help each other heal.”

As we overcame our shock, we slowly realized what a perfect idea this was. Faraja Group was a huge success, and it continues to this day. As the days went on, Rebekah’s growing confidence built on itself, snowballing as she found her voice, and as she recognized the many gifts that she had always had.

These days, Rebekah is a servant leader who is actively making Tanzania a better place. She was one of the key leaders who protected 95 girls from the FGM rituals last December, and she used her new-found confidence to stand up to relatives who wanted their daughters to be cut, fighting for the girls to be sent to our safe location instead. When a neighbor’s daughter was dangerously sick, she escorted the neighbor to the largest hospital in the region and stood up to the doctors, nurses, and hospital officials until the child was given the attention care that she needed. When a dear friend’s husband sent their daughter far away to be treated by a team of witches, she took her shy friend’s side. Rebekah stood up to the husband, then stood up to the mother-in-law, and then Rebekah even enlisted the help of the child’s school principal and some government officials who handle truancy cases, on the grounds that the girl wasn’t attending school. After about 3 months, the husband saw that this was becoming more trouble than it was worth and brought the child back home, re-enrolled her in school, and ended the witchcraft treatments.

Rebekah hasn’t forgotten her days as a frightened, ashamed young woman and now leads a house church for teenage girls and 4 house churches for young mothers. She teaches them that to slowly, gradually develop their confidence, in a community of love. The title means “courage to love”.