Empowered by Opportunity: Rhoda's Journey Back to Her Craft

Rhoda is 30 years old. She is married, a mother of two a son now in top class and a daughter in middle class and a woman who has spent her adult life doing everything "right."

She holds a Diploma in Business Administration (Accounting) from Kampala University, Uganda. On paper, her career looked promising. She worked as an accountant for two years, moved on to Air Aviation for two and a half years more, and later took up a position as school bursar.

“I had a diploma, I had jobs, but I did not have progress. I was tired of working hard and still standing in the same place,” reflects Rhoda. 

The positions paid little and promised even less. She was responsible for eight dependents, including her two children, and no matter how hard she worked, the growth she hoped for never came. Frustration became familiar. Complaints piled up faster than progress.

When the Empowered Worldview (EWV) training came to Maridi, Rhoda was mobilized along with 74 others. She was placed in the first group, one of the earliest to sit through the three-day training.

She did not know it yet, but those three days would undo years of quiet self-doubt.

The sessions moved through identity, vision, relationships, the roots of poverty, and mindset change grounded in biblical reflection. Two stories struck something in her: Moses and the staff in his hand (Exodus 4:1–5), and the widow whose jars of oil never ran dry (2 Kings 4:1–7).

“When they spoke about Moses and the stick in his hand, I thought about my own hands. I had a skill I was ashamed of shoe making. I had been holding it the whole time and calling it nothing,” she shares.

For Rhoda, the answer arrived almost immediately, and it embarrassed her a little. Shoe making. A skill she had picked up during her student years in Uganda, one that had quietly supported her through school. She had filed it away as beneath her, a leftover from a harder time, irrelevant next to a diploma and a title.

The training asked her to look again.

Rhoda did not leave the training with a certificate on the wall. She left with a decision.

She revived the shoe-making skill she had dismissed for years and launched her own business: Dadiri – Empower Craft Center, Maridi.

It began small modestly, even. With just USD 100, she traveled to Uganda to bring back the materials and tools she needed to start. No loan. No donor grant. Just a stick she had been holding all along, like Moses, and the courage to finally use it.

Rhoda happily shares, “I did not wait for another job to save me. I took what I already knew, and I built something with it. That is how Dadiri began with USD 100 and the courage to try again.”

Rhoda's story is not really about shoes. It's about what happens when a mindset shifts when someone stops waiting for the next job to save them and starts building with what's already in their hands.

She moved from dependence to self-reliance. From chasing employment to creating it. From a skill she was ashamed of to a business that now carries her name and her future and, increasingly, the future of her family and community.

By Pr. Lam Duop Lam, Faith and Development Coordinator