By Jeff and Hillary James

Co-Executive Directors, MLI

I never intended to assume the role of family cook, but that’s just what happened after our youngest daughter, Josephine, was born. For the first half of our marriage, we operated within the classical framework of couples; I went to work, and Hillary stayed home raising our children, managing the home, and keeping us all well-fed. For the past ten years, however, we have worked together from home running a small nonprofit and raising our family, and consequently the traditional gender roles shifted. Surprisingly, I find great fulfillment in being the family chef, as the process of cooking is creative, which appeals to my artistic side. But it is the nurturing aspect, an awareness that what I make with my own hands is giving vitality to my children, that solidified my respect for the gifts that mothers impart. The gifts of health, faith, a solid work ethic, love, and responsibility, to name a few, are the pathways parents pave for their children.

A few years back, while leading a different nonprofit, we were frustrated by staggeringly high HIV rates in the rural fishing village where we worked in western Kenya. After 30 years promoting traditional “safe sex” education, we found that HIV rates were still stubbornly high, particularly among young adults. Polygamy, teen pregnancy, and infidelity were common. Rural cultures practiced customs that may have worked at one time to proliferate their communities, but now struggled under the burdens of disease and poverty. AIDS changed everything in these communities, wiping out a middle generation of adults, and leaving in its wake a plethora of orphans without parents.

*Kenya – Couples stand together to renew their vows.*

For children coming from broken homes, the pathways to prosperity are harder to find, and more difficult to navigate. While great resilience and strength can come from hardship, MLI promotes family dynamics that allow a child to start life with every possible advantage. This is especially vital for children in the developing world where hunger and extreme need are often precariously close by.

As Pope John Paul II said best, “As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.”

In seeking a more effective intervention at our Kenya project we were introduced to Dr. George Mulcaire-Jones and MLI’s flagship program, The Faithful House. The Faithful House encourages fidelity, mutual respect in the marriage, shared decision making, and financial management. With 2 committed and able-bodied parents as partners in a family, financial stability increases, hunger and preventable disease decrease, and opportunities for education expand for children. Tackling extreme poverty by promoting a 2-parent household is a powerful and often-forgotten ingredient to family security and prosperity.

*Missoula, Montana – Jeff, Hillary, and Dr. George*

An MLI team came to our facility and introduced the program to the couples in the community, creating a ripple effect in the village as couples asked for their turn to receive the training. Participating couples marveled that the facilitators asked them to sit together, a very radical shift from the norm of women sitting on one side of the room, men on the other. They also remarked that if they wanted to speak, they were asked to stand up and share together. This too was new. We could see a different mentality emerging about what it means to be coequal partners in building a family and raising healthy children.

We knew then that MLI had a much-needed formula – coupled centered development – for addressing the root causes of extreme poverty at its source, broken families with women struggling to make ends meet and care for their children alone. Most of the families we were supporting with food aid and health care were single mothers.

We are honored and humbled to join Dr. George and the MLI teams in Africa and Haiti to help champion MLI’s revolutionary programming in the developing world.

And we look forward to knowing you, MLI’s supporters, and sharing with you the great successes that are only possible because of your charitable hearts.

Donate to MLI

***To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven. - Ecclesiastes 3:1***

From Dr. George

Strange how these words from Ecclesiastes, written nearly 3000 years ago, resonate with the human heart. I have heard them spoken from the pulpit of a half-finished, mud-walled African church and I have heard them set to music by “The Byrds,” playing “Turn, Turn, Turn,” on a 70’s mellow rock station. I find myself nodding and singing along, “Yes God, there is a time for every purpose under heaven.”

While I nod and sing, I question – the times I have seen the death of women in childbirth, the times I admitted stunted and malnourished children to the hospital, knowing they would die, the stillbirths, the abused child, the mentally ill, the patients – so young and so many - dying of AIDS in Africa, the pitch black nights I was called to the hospital for a mother hemorrhaging, a suicide, a child dying of meningitis.

I turn the radio up. In the context of so much suffering, I ponder further the questions of time and purpose. The world is wounded, deeply so:

“The wounds question, love answers, we are immersed in the dialogue”

At Maternal Life, the dialogue is this: how to build a better world through safe births and secure families. It is a dialogue that has led to programs like the “The Faithful House” and “Safe Passages,” that have such a profound and positive impact on women, families, and communities. It is a dialogue that engages the poor, the least of those, the born and the unborn. . . all beloved within God’s time and purpose.

In that dialogue, I’ll never forget a hug and the words of one of our Faithful House trainers in rural Uganda, “This is the best thing that has ever happened for women here.” Or the letters about “saves” following Safe Passages training – a Nigerian midwife describing her expert management of a post-partum hemorrhage, another describing her success in resuscitating infants with a bag and mask. And thousands of times over, the pictures of African couples standing together and smiling at each other with newfound love and respect.

Moving forward, I am so grateful to welcome Jeff and Hillary James as our executive directors. They bring a bandwidth of faith, passion and experience that will grow our mission ten-fold, twenty-fold, a hundred-fold. Through their time and purpose and your support, the dialogue will continue, will be enriched and will be “under heaven,” blessed by the hand of God.