Grandmothers to grandmothers forges caring connections

Next week, staff from L’Arche-Homefires are having their annual Christmas meal, but they aren’t dining in a restaurant like other years.

This year director Ingrid Blais had another notion, one that will benefit grandmothers and their grandkids in Kenya.

A group of grannies in Wolfville will be catering a simple, healthy meal in a church hall and the proceeds will head via Western Union to 20 grandmothers in the village of Kikima. “We are excited,” Blais says, “because the grannies are doing our Christmas lunch. This enables us to celebrate, eat well and have fun while supporting a great cause. I think it fits really well with part of the mission of L'Arche, which is about building relationships.”

Blais says she’d be happy if other organizations copied her idea over the Christmas season. I’m no granny, but I sure do support that suggestion. Ever since I saw Brenda Rooney’s film last spring, The Great Granny Revolution, Kenya has been on my mind.

Rooney’s documentary is about a group of women in Wakefield, Que. who linked themselves in 2004 to grandmothers in a South African township. They wanted to do something to help grieving mothers left to carry the burden of raising their grandchildren after HIV/AIDS took their children.

In less than a year two other groups joined the Wakefield Grannies. In 2006, the Stephen Lewis Foundation announced its Grandmother to Grandmother Campaign. At last count there were 207 groups operating in Canada and the U.S.

In Wolfville, we had word in February from a community development expert named Ruth Kyatha, who had studied at Acadia University in the early ‘90s, about election violence in Kenya impacting families. The film about Wakefield made me think we could help families in Ruth’s community.

When I got in touch, she was thrilled with the Wakefield model of group fundraising and one-on-one letter writing. She volunteered to oversee the project. So we got started. As of October, all 20 grannies are matched up and nine in Kikima had received letters.

Better than that, we’ve been able, largely through sales of recycled jewelry and CDs, to send over $1,000 to Kenya. One granny was assisted with medical expenses and two weeks ago Ruth handed out food supplies to feed the kids.

Saw their human connectedness

In Ruth’s part of Kenya, there has been a long drought and now there is famine. Newspaper reports say local leaders have urged the government to declare the maize crisis a national disaster. Children are starving and two brothers, aged four and five, died after eating poisonous wild roots.

When grandmothers from Africa and Canada were drawn together in Toronto for three days in August 2006, they saw their human connectedness. The African grannies declared, “we grandmothers deserve hope. Our children, like all children, deserve a future. We will not raise children for the grave,” to which the Canadians responded, “we will not rest until they can rest.”

Thus far Canadian grannies have raised close to $4 million. One of our best known grannies, Alexa McDonough, says hope is what people need in the face of the daunting crisis of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and other challenges. That’s what the letters are about, but the catering and jewelry sales serve an important purpose, too.

There are many places in our troubled world where the need is great so we try to take small steps to help others. This Christmas, staving off hunger feels pretty meaningful.