Jane Edwards
June 2024
Taking justice to the people
Dear all
Hope you're all enjoying the summer weather. Here it's been surprisingly rainy, normally this time of year is our dry season (winter) but it's been pretty wet recently.
It's made navigating the less familiar roads around my new house slightly trickier, since you can never tell whether the water on the road is just an innocent, shallow puddle - or hiding a deep pothole.
Assisting with specific cases
Most of our legal aid clients make the first contact by calling/coming into our office. I'd like to share with you a couple of recent projects where we have gone offer legal aid to people where they are.
One of these has been in the pipeline for a little while, and we're really excited to have been able to start it up. It's going into prisons, and taking on the cases of specific inmates. Previously, we have had cases before where family members of someone who has been imprisoned come to us, but by actually going into the prisons themselves, we can assist so many more people. Many of the new cases we have taken on have already served their sentence (but not yet been released), others are still waiting for a trial (and we may be able to get some of these released on bail while they wait). We are doing this in conjunction with a local church in Maputo, and in Beira with EquipMoz (the partner organisation that we work with on the app – see below), who are teaching inmates a business skill so they can support themselves financially.
The Beira office recently held a mobile justice clinic near a busy market on the outskirts of the city. This is a really great way to reach out to people who otherwise would not have heard of us, in their own community. Some people come for just advice on the day, others turn into longer term clients who we represent in court. This time, we received cases on a range of topics, from employment to family to land rights.
Taking our services in this way to people who wouldn't normally have heard about us also opens up new opportunities to talk about our faith and how this motivates us to help those who need justice.
General legal trainings
Over the past month, AMAC has given legal rights trainings to local community leaders, community activist organisations (including ones working with disabled people), churches and communities.
With these trainings, we have reached over 500 people face-to-face. Many of these though will be able to take information they have learnt and either disseminate it within their communities or use it themselves to benefit the communities that they serve.
In addition to the face-to-face trainings, we have continued with our regular radio sessions and are working on updating certain parts of the mobile app Juris, which gives simplified information on legal rights. Enabling others to access information on legal rights from their homes.
Please pray:
For the new cases AMAC has taken on, that we would be able to process these quickly and obtain justice for those involved.
For opportunities to share our faith with these new clients.
That the information we teach in the legal educations would benefit those in the communities who need it most.
For God's guidance for AMAC in the near future.
Thank you for all your prayers and support for Mozambique and our work here.
Love Jane