Making paper out of elephant dung in Tanzania (Photo: © Harts/CMS) Not rags to riches but elephant dung to designer crafts: the incredible story of NEEMA in Tanzania will headline CMS’s programme at Greenbelt this weekend.
Former fine arts student Susie Hart, 33, from Harrogate has earned the praise of Tanzanian President Kikwete for the project she founded in 2003 that now employs 70 deaf people.
Watch Neema video‘Such is the stigma attached to any form of disability that some of the deaf I teach had to be fetched from under the beds where they were hidden because their families were too ashamed to let anyone know they had a disabled child in the house,’ says Susie, whose own daughter has Downs Syndrome.
‘Looking back at how we began with just three young deaf people and a large sack of elephant dung in one dilapidated room, it’s incredible to see how much God has blessed this work,’ she says.
Products such as paper and lampshades are now sold in safari parks all over East Africa, and exported to the UK and the US.
Susie, with eight of the youngsters from NEEMA, will be running paper-making workshops with elephant dung from Whipsnade Zoo that conforms strictly to Health and Safety guidelines.
Husband Andy, a vet, will also be talking about his pioneering water-purification project – which has recently won $15,000 development funding from Swiss charity
SODIS.
‘All it needs is a recycled plastic bottle and five hours of sunshine at 30 degrees to kill all known germs,’ explains Andy who was recently featured on the BBC World Service.
This ‘incredibly simple and effective’ solution to two of the biggest killers in Africa – diarrhoeia and TB from cooking fires – is being promoted to women’s groups, schools and colleges throughout Tanzania. It could revolutionise more than just the Continent’s litter problem.
The CMS Blah venue this year has a packed programme featuring some of the most innovative names in Emerging Church.
Jenny Macintosh, who has just moved to UK, will be re-launching the hugely successful project
Spirited Exchanges, which she ran with Alan Jamieson in New Zealand for those who quit church, but not their faith.
Says Blah co-ordinator Jonny Baker (07957 639393): "Greenbelt is a re-launch of this, kicking it off into a new orbit. A lot of churches have an adolescent approach and people feel that to move on in faith they must leave the church altogether.
"A million evangelicals don’t go to church on Sunday morning. It’s the kind of thing that evangelical churches feel nervous about supporting because it appears to own up to too much failure."
For more information before or during the Greenbelt weekend, call Jenny Taylor on 07733 407620.