GEORGETOWN -- Over a dozen sewing machines whirred in the church hall of St. Mary Parish in Georgetown on the afternoon of Nov. 8.

Women handling reams of colorful, patterned fabric stared down at the machines through their glasses, making sure every stitch was just right. Ten neatly folded dresses sat on a table, freshly sewn and ready to be sent to girls in need around the world.

Four or five times a year, St. Mary's is a meeting place for volunteers with Little Dresses for Africa, a Christian nonprofit founded in 2008 to provide homespun clothing and menstrual pads for girls who would otherwise have nothing nice to wear to school. Despite the charity's name, the dresses go to girls in Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America as well as Africa.

"We want to support their education," said Annie Rhodes, who founded the dressmaking ministry at her parish three years ago. "We want to support their ability to change their lives. And we believe, I believe, that if you educate girls in communities like this, you're really educating the entire village, because they will educate the next generation."

Abductors and human traffickers are less likely to kidnap girls in nice dresses, Rhodes said, because it signals that they have families looking out for them.

"The girls are actually safer wearing these kinds of handmade dresses than they would be without them," she said.

A single three-hour meeting, which typically involves 15 volunteers, can produce between 10 and 20 dresses.

All of the fabric and supplies are donated. Rhodes cuts the fabric, irons it, and organizes it for the sewing sessions. She began sewing when she was pregnant and couldn't find maternity clothes she liked. When her daughter was born, she began sewing clothes for her, and then discovered Little Dresses for Africa while searching for projects for her Girl Scout troop.

"Any time I had some free time, I would throw together a dress and then at the end of the year, I'd mail them all off," she said.

She sewed the dresses herself for years until rheumatoid arthritis made it too painful. She was taking a theology class at St. Joseph's College of Maine, and her professor challenged her to come up with a practicum -- hands-on ministry work -- she could do. She couldn't sew all the dresses, but she could organize a group of volunteers to work on the machines she had accumulated in her home through her work as a sewing teacher.

"And then we had a couple of hours of sewing, and people were interested in it enough that they kept asking me, 'When are we going to do it again?'" she said. "So I kept running it and, yeah, we're now in our third year."

It was Alison Hardy's first time sewing Little Dresses for Africa. She has been sewing for 60 years, a fact that surprises her when she says it out loud.

"It's such a simple thing to do," she said. "If it can change somebody's life and further education, all for the best."

Ann Mahoney has been sewing Little Dresses for Africa since April 2024.

"I love to sew, and it was for a good cause," she said.

She started sewing over 50 years ago, when she was a little girl herself.

"It gives you a good feeling that you're doing something for people that are disadvantaged," she said.