Kari Miller

The biggest change for me is how I live. I’m going to give like I have all the money in the world. If I went home with nothing in my wallet, I didn’t care. I realized I’m part of a worldwide community. You always have a capacity to give to another person. That act of giving between two friends creates love and gives hope.

Kari Miller

I was born October 12, 1971. I teach in St Louis Park. In 2000, I started sponsoring a girl named Maria who lived in Uganda. She was in 2nd or 3rd grade. Her parents died of AIDS. She was living with her grandmother and struggling to go to school. If you don’t have any money you can’t go to school. I decided I wanted to help. I went to Uganda and visited her and her grandmother and it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. I also learned about HIV and the disease of AIDS. There are millions infected with that disease.

Over the years, I thought more and more about what I can do to be more compassionate. I left my job and home and family and got on airplane and went to Uganda. I met a lady named Joyce. Joyce is a widow and has five children. As we became friends Joyce invited me to come and meet other friends of hers, a group of widows. I felt honored to be asked to be part of that group.

“Do you understand the life of a widow?” one woman asked. “My name is Rosemary. I was living in northern Uganda at the same time the Lord’s Resistance Army, a political movement, was kidnapping children and making them become child soldiers.” Two of her children were abducted and she never saw them again. She talked about her kids going to sleep hungry. She tried to feed them tea to fill their stomachs. I was overwhelmed.

As we were walking out of the meeting, Rosemary began shouting “Widows. Widows. Widows.” She was saying, “one of us is in trouble.” When I looked, there was a woman standing outside the building. She looked like she only weighed eighty pounds. She was sobbing. These women, who had a hard time feeding their own kids, started reaching out with the small bits of money they had. I knew some women would go home and say to their children they wouldn’t eat tonight. They don’t have food to feed them in order to feed another.

“What can we do to make money?” They got this idea of collecting paper to make jewelry. They would cut it into strips and varnish it. The widows started supporting themselves.