Women are women's wealth

Working with little of no funding can be frustrating.  It can cause decayed dream and frustrated purposes in the developing world. For those of us who work in a country that have been labelled as fraudulent and corrupt, we always need extra prayers. I live in Festac town but I work with women in riverine communities in Nigeria .

My secret dream was to have a small house that can serve as a space space and shelter us in time of trouble in the community where we work. For a small organisation like ours, it's a long term dream because survival of the organisation was what I was pursuing, not more.

The story changed in July 2017, when Worldpulse invited me for the annual board meeting July last year. At one of the events, a salon meeting, with just a few women in attendance, I was asked to share my story, which I did as usual. It was for a few minutes. At the end of the short speech, one of my sisters in attendance threw a question to me, she asked....Olutosin, what's your next dream.? Actually, I was not not expecting such question but if I were to be woke up in my dream, to answer such question, my dream was glaring at me day and night, it was a house in Ibasa where we work.

I narrated a brief story of how hard it was for us to find a safe space to stay in Ibasa riverside whenever we had issues and needed to sleep over or a woman fleeing abuse needs to find a  safe space, what happened next was like a hard blow on my face and I went straight down on the floor..... my dear sister who asked the question, now asked another question, how much do you need to build that small safe space.? I responded $10,000.00.

I was surprised when she said, I will give you double. This surprise was minute to what happened when I returned to Nigeria. She followed up with me and did not just build a small house, she built the fence with barb wire installed when thieves began to disturb us, built water tower with clean drinking water and the most amazing thing is that the house has toilets, each room has a toilet in a community where we had to build a soakaway with cast iron due to water log!

We named our center after her,  Colleen center, although she initially did not agree but oh my, that is what we love. Less than six months into the project , i could touch my dream, see it and open the gates for others to come and see how one woman's wealth is also her sister's wealth. Our center was declared open to the glory of God and usage of womenkind, at Ibasa in June 2018, by Jensine Larsen,  our Worldpulse founder.

Now, we have many women employed to work at the center, we have clean water for sale and a safe space for us to live. When a woman has enough resources,  she spreads it to other women and more women are able to actualize their dreams through a woman's wealth. 

I am a living example.