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Ask the Ari women of Ethiopia how marriage is supposed to work. Is it just a social formality in which anything goes as long as one partner – usually the man – is satisfied?

     Cultural norms certainly differ from place to place, the women likely will say, but that doesn’t mean the mothers and their children will thrive in the southwestern corner of this African nation however much the family structure is contorted. The national Project Hannah team traveled to a remote village and met with speakers of Ari, one of three languages used by the ministry in Ethiopia, and the team received firsthand feedback about the worst problems facing women.

     “Many women cried because of polygamy, and we cried with them,” the team’s report stated. “… They openly discussed the harmful traditions of their culture.”

     Polygamy undermines the family in numerous ways, according to the local women elders and young people who were consulted. Men spend lots of money on their new brides, and limited financial resources have to be stretched thinner. Intimate relationships become impossible because a husband can’t love two wives or 14 wives the same way he would love one, the team was told.

     And the problems get worse. Men often resort to beating their wives, and some wives retaliate, killing their husbands and ending up in prison. Having multiple sexual partners increases the likelihood of HIV and other diseases being spread. Finally, when mothers can no longer feed their little ones properly and families are forced out of their homes, the children may be scattered or sold off as laborers.

     Project Hannah seeks to learn all it can about issues such as these facing women around the world so that it can reach out to them with physical and spiritual answers through radio broadcasts and local prayer groups. In fact, the interaction with Ari communities is centered on the distribution of audio handheld devices that play programs aimed at curbing the incidence of fistulas, a debilitating condition that often results from early pregnancy or poor maternity care. While in one village, the team members visited two fistula patients, one of whom had been married at the age of 8.

     Along with the steps toward aiding fistula sufferers, the team reported encouraging news regarding the enlistment of men to help raise women’s status. After presenting Project Hannah’s goals to classes of male theology students, who then asked biblically based questions about the ministry, team members were pleased to hear many of the men vow to support the equality of women.

     Results like these led the Ethiopian team to decide that it will devote one-fourth of the time in future workshops to meeting with men in hopes of increasing the impact on the church and the community.

     “To restore women’s hope, we have to work hard so that a man should humble himself and lift up women so that they will live in harmony,” the Ethiopian Project Hannah ministry team reported.