Have you wondered how your contribution made a difference in the lives of 20 women and their approximately 120 children in faraway Uganda this year? The photos of the two women and one young girl below help me tell you by sharing the story of my most recent trip to evaluate the progress of the Cassava Project.

Agnes, the young mother on the left, has planted two acres of cassava. The crop in the photo is nearing harvest and will be included in the first revenues to be used for her children’s school fees and to help raise her family out of poverty. Her second acre has been cleared, plowed and planted with new cassava stems for the second crop, which will be ready 15 months from now.

Did you know that he/she who wields the plow (and oxen!) often calls the shots? A new study attributes use of plows as one cause for lingering gender inequality. Uganda is named the least gender-equal society in East Africa according to the 2014 Global Gender Gap Index and one of the reasons is this agricultural power play.

I suspect the women farmers of KRMA haven’t read this study. But they have named the purchase of plows and oxen as a top priority upon sale of their first cassava crop.

In 2012 I met the women farmers of Kobulubulu who made up the savings collective called KRMA. Since that time, we had communicated by email and an occasional phone call with an English speaking KRMA member. Now that I had returned to Kobulubulu with Board member Lindsey Holaday, after forming krma-US Partners in the Washington, D.C. area to support these women, we would find out if our cumbersome communications were truly on the same wavelength. Our first task (myself and Lindsey Holaday, who accompanied me on this trip to Uganda) was to meet with their chosen executive committee, a group of women made up of their current chair, Beatrice; their founder and project director, Judith; their treasurer, Monica; their facilitator and last year’s chair, Proscovia; and our liaison Anne, who would also serve as our translator.

I have fallen in love. Not with another man. My husband is still the love of my life. But with a group of courageous women in Kobulubulu, Uganda.

Shall I tell you their story? Not so very long ago, Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army rampaged the village and countryside around Kobulubulu, abducting young girls from their primary school, raping and pillaging and plunging this District into a state of terror. Eight women seeking to keep themselves and their hungry children alive at the nearby Internally Displaced Persons Camp gathered to pray. They were known in the camp as the Widows Prayer Group because their husbands were off fighting Kony and everyone assumed they would be killed.