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The answer lies in an African proverb:

When you pray, move your feet.

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As a young man in the 1960s, American Tom Logan spent a year traveling in Africa. He returned to the U.S. and dedicated himself to the civil rights movement, working to register voters in Greene County, Alabama. He protested actively throughout his years at seminary in Chicago and went on to build and manage housing for low-income families in southern Illinois.​

 

When Ethiopia was devastated by famine in 1985, Tom and his wife, Jocelyn, were dismayed to find that 40 percent of the contribution they’d made to a large charity had gone to overhead for the organization. Feeling that there had to be a better way to get aid directly to people in need, Tom went back to Africa himself.

 

Nearly forty years later, Marion Medical Mission, the organization the Logans founded, has built more than 53,000 wells in rural African villages, providing more than five million people with a sustainable source of safe drinking water. MMM builds wells where it seems impossible: where there is no electrical power, where many times there are no roads or bridges, where there is cholera, where there is no medical care. MMM builds wells for people in need, regardless of their faith. The MMM well program is run and administered in Africa by Africans. The people who use the wells know how to maintain them, and they can afford to maintain them.

The story of MMM is a remarkable illustration of what can be done when we love our neighbors as ourselves. It shows what we can achieve when while we pray, we move our feet.

 

ALL PROCEEDS GO TO MARION MEDICAL MISSION

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