Those Ladies
Wednesday, November 18, 2009 by Jen Lemen 
Odette tells the story of selling chickens and eggs as a child in order to care for the needs of herself and her friends in the refugee camps of Uganda. By the time we finished, she likes to say. We felt like those ladies from the big organizations who lend people money.
I always loved that part of the story--little girls feeling as powerful as grownups who were committed to making a change--but I didn't really know what she meant. Until Tanzania.
In Tanzania, I met those ladies and immediately fell under their spell. They are quiet, they are wise. They are measured in their energy and fierce in their focus. They are staring down poverty--its ravages, its sources, its brutal effects--and they know what to do. They are executing their own particular brand of justice--passing over the one they are supposed to favor for that girl in the back with fire in her eyes. They are placing their bets on that live wire, even as they readjust their enormous handbags and stamp the dust out of their fashionable shoes.
They are believing the girls they choose can show the rest how to escape the bowels of hell.
Meet Juliet, the program trainer for BEST (Business and Entrepreneurship Support Tanzania). It is her job to teach the entrepreneurial skills the poorest of the poor need to enter the market. I watched as she checked in on the women she serves, questioning them like your favorite aunt--the one who believes in you and at the same time won't mince words if you need to hear the truth. She is tending them like a garden of possibility, one promising seedling at a time.
I don't always take a good picture, she told me. But I doubted it could possibly be true. How could the camera not love this radiance? How could the lens turn away from this bedrock determination that everything is going to be just fine?
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