Regional Minister Penny Ross-Corona recently participated in a Global Ministries pilgrimage to Ghana and South Africa. She was one of six Regional Ministers and two GM staff members to visit some of our ecumenical mission partners in these two countries.

One such partner was the Christian Council of Ghana, which has established a wonderful ministry in a fishing village on the Atlantic coast outside the capital city of Accra.

In this village, fishing is the only way of producing food and income, and the culture is such that only men can fish. If there is no man in the household (or if he is sick or disabled), there is no income to provide for the simplest survival needs of the women and children.

So Global Ministries and the Christian Council of Ghana worked to economically empower these women and assisted them in starting up their own business. The women now have a system in place for buying fresh fish from the fishermen and then preserving the fish (through a drying and smoking process) in order to sell them at market for a small profit.

The fish are dried on huge racks on the ground. Then a wood burning oven is used to smoke the fish. The women tend the fire on the ground under the oven, while the fish are smoked in racks on top. Then the preserved fish are packaged and sold. Profits are small during the fishing season, but much greater when the season is over.

The group asked the women (through an interpreter) what it is that makes them want to get up in the mornings. The reply was, “I want to get out of bed, because I now have my own business…I can now support myself and my children.”

Thank you to Rev. Dr. Penny Ross-Corona for sharing this story of our connectedness through Global Ministries. Please remember in prayer former Transitional Regional Minister Larry Colvin and his wife Debbie, who will be starting their work in Ghana in just a few weeks.