By Elizabeth Jones

Winding up a steep ½-mile path was a wiry older woman wearing a banana leaf circlet that cushioned her head from the hefty mud brico-block balanced there. The hand-made brick was the size and weight of a cinder block, easily 15-20 pounds, but she tripped up the path as readily as a mountain goat. Every so often, Ann Marie would look back, stopping from time to time to check on the progress of the young white woman laboring up the hill behind her.

Down the hill a few miles and along another artery of that same path, just the day before the staff of Food for the Hungry and a group of Americans had crowded into her current home – sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on benches in the main room. Through the only other doorway, a smaller room with blackened walls showed a kitchen. She couldn’t know it, but her entire mud hut intact, could have fit snugly inside the living area of an American home with room to spare.

 

Ann Marie and her children had sat on the floor in the dim light, sunlight filtering through gaps in the branches that served for a roof, while she patiently shared about her family, her widowhood, and her life circumstances to a room full of strangers – strangers who had come thousands of miles to hear her story and to carry bricks and mortar for her new 4-room home with clay roof tiles.

But today was a workday. Ann Marie was carrying bricks one-at-a-time from an old tumbled-down house to the new home site. A few of the Americans had joined her friends and neighbors in carrying bricks up the hill - to their intense interest and amusement. One was following her up the steep dirt track, a young woman named Sara. Ann Marie crested the hill, crossed the road to the work site of her new home and handed the brick up to the builder with the ease of long practice, turning to look for the young woman. With a nod of satisfaction, she saw the brick arrive over the hill, then the intense and determined face and finally the careful feet of the American woman.

She came over the rise with a trembling neck and back, fatigue in every feature, but she had made it. She had brought her first brick to the construction site - to the applause and delighted laughter of the watching community members, her teammates and Ann Marie.

Applause was a familiar sound for the young woman, but in a much different context and for a much different purpose. American audiences know her mainly as a singer-songwriter – Ann Marie simply knows her as Sara. Sara Groves.

In the fall of 2008, Sara and her husband-manager Troy had birthed the Art Music Justice (AMJ) Tour out of a shared dream to create an evening of worship that encompassed more than simply music. Their vision was to paint a picture for their audience of what the integrated Christian life could look like. The goal of the evening was to create the artistic context within which Sara, Troy, Charlie Peacock, Brandon Heath, Sandra McCracken and Derek Webb could have an evening of conversation with their friends in the audience about family, faith and justice work. But it was also an effort to directly respond to specific needs around the world and in one community in particular: Gisanga, Rwanda in Africa and the unmet-as-yet Ann Marie. Wanting to engage their listeners in the conversation, Sara and Troy invited the AMJ audience to become involved through sponsoring children Gisanga as well as joining them on future trips.

The 20-city tour and its message struck a chord, and the AMJ audiences responded with overwhelming generosity, giving over $50,000 in donations for International Justice Mission and sponsoring over 550 children from Gisanga, Rwanda through Food for the Hungry. It also spawned the first AMJ short-term team - a hybrid assortment that included Sara’s husband, friends, a journalist from Christianity Today, three of Sara’s audience members from the Art Music Justice fall tour, and her eight-year old son Kirby.

 

Ann Marie doesn’t know a single Sara Groves song. She isn’t aware of the AMJ tour. She hasn’t seen or met the thousands of people who sponsored children in Gisanga. She hasn’t even met the person who sponsors her own children. But, she has seen the faces of the men and women who helped to build her new home - making bricks, heaving round balls of mortar up to the builders, climbing into cisterns to refill water containers, and playing with the children at the worksite. And she now knows the face and name of the woman carrying the brick up the hill to put in the wall of her home.

The exterior walls to the home were almost to the roofline on the team’s third and final day on site. Most of Ann Marie’s neighbors had dispersed to their own work, gardens and households. The vehicles were waiting to take Sara and the team members back to Kigali where they would soon board planes for their own respective homes. Behind them, Ann Marie worked steadily, quietly putting brick after brick into the hands of the men balancing on the scaffolding of rickety poles.

Ann Marie and her children have moved into their new home. Sara and Troy plan to take Kirby and his brother, their 6-year old son, Toby, on their next visit to see Ann Marie. For more information on future Art Music Justice tours and mission trips to Rwanda, go to www.myspace.com/artmusicjustice