by Ruthie Claydon, Experience Team Assistant (summer 2021 intern) During my internship with HOPE International, I experienced spiritual growth in completely new and unexpected ways. Throughout the summer, I felt fully welcomed and integrated into the vibrant staff culture. Overall, here are four of the biggest ways I was impacted by HOPE’s employee-directed spiritual practices. […]
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HOPE Intl
HOPE Intl
News Spiritual Integration Staff / TravelsKristine Frey
Kristine Frey
Staff / Travels Stories we loveKristine Frey
Kristine Frey
Staff / TravelsWhen I left to do a grocery store run back in March of this year, I was actually thinking the errand would be a refreshing break. I was shopping sans children for the first time in two years—in my mind, the equivalent of a tropical vacation. Yes, I’d heard about COVID-19 and how people were stocking up on certain staples, but I was prepared to respond calmly. I’d shop my list for the week, like I always did, and not give in to the panic.
But as I encountered the bare aisles—only a couple bags of edamame left in the frozen veggie aisle, bread and cereal gone, spaghetti sauce picked over—I found myself breathing a little harder. Continue Reading…
Jill Heisey
Jill Heisey
Staff / TravelsWhen I heard that a whole generation of economic progress could be lost because of COVID-19, what might have been an abstract concept felt personal.
Like kids across the country, my first grader, Addi, spent this spring learning from home. One assignment had her interviewing a family member, and she chose her grandpa: my dad. She carefully printed questions in her notebook—using her best phonetic spelling—and as FaceTime connected, I settled in to hear the stories I remember hearing as a child: my dad and his brothers chasing each other across farm fields, dad knocking an aggressive farm goose senseless in self-defense, his exasperated mother shooing six boys out of her kitchen with a rolling pin—or whatever else was handy.
Addi and I giggled over several of these same stories, but hearing them as an adult, many were tinged with a sadness and struggle I hadn’t remembered. Like when my dad told Addi about his family’s two-seater outhouse, how the brothers competed to be first in line for a weekly bath so the tub water would still be clean, how glasses of water turned to ice on bedside tables in the wintertime, how his parents saved every bit of extra money to buy each boy a second-hand bicycle one Christmas, how they rarely visited a doctor, and how his parents buried their only daughter and a son before their fifth birthdays.
It dawned on me: Not in a faraway country or too long ago, my dad grew up in poverty. Continue Reading…
HOPE Intl
HOPE Intl
Staff / Travels Stories we loveHOPE Intl
HOPE Intl
Staff / Travelsby Robert Gonza, Quality Assurance Officer (HOPE Rwanda)
When I started working with HOPE Rwanda, I didn’t know if I believed in savings groups.
My job in quality assurance includes interacting with our field partner staff, training them about quality assurance processes like reporting documents, attending monthly mentoring meetings, and visiting and encouraging saving groups. I enjoyed my job and my team, but I was not always very sure how savings groups were transforming people’s lives.
Almost anyone you ask at HOPE Rwanda will be quick to share the statistics of how the saving groups are transforming lives—how many families we serve, how much they’ve saved, the number of cows, goats, and pigs they’ve purchased with their savings. Three years later, I now myself could share all these things. And I thought that the numbers were the most important things about these savings groups.
But I was wrong. They are about way more than just the savings, the number of loans, or those who attended the meeting—or pigs or cows. Continue Reading…