Style Substance Soul | An online gathering of women who strive to look good, feel good, do good.

Amy met Laura Luxemburg at a local street fair, and was immediately smitten with both her products and her mission. Laura founded Ssubi to help the Bishop Asili Health Center in central Uganda. On the Ssubi website — which you should check out right now — you can buy beautiful bags and beads created by the patients themselves, who are all HIV positive. Through Ssubi, Laura has shown these women and men that they can take control and transform their community. She has not only helped them raise money, but has empowered them to create a sustainable economy. We can all take a lesson from her.

Where you are born or where you live should not determine whether you live or die.

I have always been a supporter of non-profits and through my travels to many developing countries I saw firsthand how little it takes to make a difference.  That’s when I began questioning, how much money actually gets to the people who need it?  I found, in most cases, it was shockingly less than 25%. I felt there must be a better way.

In 2007, I was introduced to the Bishop Asili Health Center in central Uganda.  This 48-bed health center, run by seven nuns, services three districts, which is over 660,000 people.  My original involvement included private self-funding of medical equipment, donating to the building of a surgical suite, funding orphans to local schools, building and stocking a piggery and the purchase of 218 acres in a remote bush community that has no clean water source, health or education facilities.

Two years later, in 2009, my children, ages 17 and 9 asked, “Why do you care so much?  You could spend the money on yourself or us. “  I told my son, “Come with me, and if you do not see the merit then I will quit.  Even if I do nothing else, I have done more than most.”  So when school got out for the summer, we traveled together and Baron saw firsthand how the programs and funding had transformed this community.  On that trip, the chicken house was converted to a sewing school and a recycled paper bead program was started with the most needy HIV positive patients at Bishop Asili.  If you ask Baron today, he will tell you this experience changed his life.  He will tell you of the woman who was so grateful that she kissed his hand and another that named her son after him.

I founded Ssubi to represent what the patients, the nuns, the community, all of us near and far share — hope.  We believe it is possible to empower both women and men by encouraging economically sustainable and creative endeavors.  These ideas are not unique, but we recognize that there are areas of immediate need that often fall through the cracks. Ssubi supports projects that are less likely to be funded by large international organizations, filling those gaps that are often left behind.   We are currently doing this through the following projects: Ssubi Beads, Ssubi Bags, Mercy Scholarship Project, Holy Hams Piggery (designated model piggery for Uganda by the Minister of Agriculture), and Sister’s Blue Ribbon Poultry.

In an increasingly interconnected world, what happens around the globe affects us all.  In the developing countries of the world, the challenges of poverty and disease can only be met if each of us recognizes our individual responsibility as a global citizen.  We must then take bold steps forward to truly make a difference.  It is with this belief in our hearts and our minds that Ssubi was founded.  Together we can make a difference, but we must take the first step.  Ssubi truly is HOPE!

 

tags: african art, ssubi

This entry was posted Friday, June 17th, 2011 at 2:30 am and is filed under guest contributors, soul. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Feel free to leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.