Literacy classes in the Sungu church

You could be pardoned for wondering about all those literacy teacher training seminars, whether they actually result in anything. We wondered that after we did the seminar in Bulungu, a town 19-20 miles upriver from us, in 2006 (it’s on your map of Congo). The silence from Bulungu and the other villages that participated was deafening. Once I ran across a hospital patient at Vanga who said, “Oh, yes. We have reading classes at Bulungu First. They’re great.” But that was all.

Then in January I bumped into the teachers we had trained for Sungu at the hospital in Vanga. They said, “Oh yes. We started classes in Sungu and have been teaching right along. We stopped just recently because of Clotilde’s (one of the teachers) health.” But why have I never heard about your classes? I wondered. “We’ve been sending in reports all along to our district women’s president to send to you,” they said.

In March, on my way back home from Masi-Manimba, I had had to spend the night in Bulungu and got to talk to some of the women there. I told them about the new opportunities in the country for adult literacy, and their advantage to be had in being registered with the state with us, so they promised to send me the reports and money for book orders.

Then the Sungu ladies again came to the hospital, after which they came to visit me. Their major concern this time was glasses for themselves and their students. We arranged that an optometrist and I should visit them the first weekend in May, right after I got back from Sona Bata.

So, where in the world IS Sungu? Well, it’s not on my map. But it’s close to Bulungu. They claim to be the market basket of Bulungu, producing manioc, vegetables and rice for the town. There were 3 ways to get there. The way through Bulungu is short but the narrow foot trails winding up and down hills are not good for a bicycle. A shortcut across country requires a river crossing. There used to be a bridge. Now a canoe man ferries people across for a fee. The well-travelled truck road wanders the long way around, through the “county seat” of Nko. Extra miles mean extra work.

As it turned out, the optometrist was just back from another trip and too tired to go with me. (He plans to go another time on his own.) So I set off on my own by bicycle. I had mislaid my directions. Eager villagers mis-directed me a couple of times along the way. Instead of following the cross-country shortcut, I wound up in Bulungu. There they advised me to leave my bicycle with an acquaintance and ask for Sungu people in the market who were ready to go home. It’s about a 2½ hour walk from Bulungu to Sungu, down to the rice paddies, up one ridge, down, up, down and up once more to Sungu. Quite a haul to market, and a barrier to carrying very much.

We had a very good visit. The village chief is a church member, and claimed me as his guest. He even loaned me a foam mattress – probably his and his wife’s. I visited the literacy classes, held in the local primary school, and corrected the teachers’ techniques. They had forgotten some of the techniques we had taught them, so were taking way too long with their lessons. As a result, whereas the first class should have been finished with the first book and into the second, it was still just a little over halfway through the first book. I hope they will now buzz through rather quickly, as the students’ reading and writing skills are pretty well developed by now.

As always, I talked with lots of people about their agriculture, their plans for economic development of their village, health in the village, their schools and their church. The Sungu Baptist church was awaiting a new pastor. In the meantime, the old laypastor and our literacy French teacher were holding things together. But the old laypastor needed new glasses badly to do his job well. Generally he would ask the younger man to read the Bible, then either he or Kawita would preach.

The village was suffering from a reputation for a lack of good roads. They produced lots of peanuts (every house had sacks and sacks stored in it), but needed to persuade truckers to come to the village to get them. The chief was a relatively young man, hardworking, dynamic, with good ideas, determined to rule for the good of the village and be respected as a Christian. One drawback though: neither he nor his wife knew how to read and write. My visit brought respect to the literacy classes as a legitimate development activity for the good of the village, and to the teachers. The chief and his wife hadn’t been sure about these classes and had not joined, but will now.

A young man from the class, Timothée, walked me back to Bulungu to pick up my bicycle. He had had to drop out of school at 6th grade, when his father died. Not only was there was no one to pay his school fees any more, but he had to help his mother support his younger siblings. He’s extremely poor (on our way, he had no shoe on his right foot, and only a broken one on his left), but this is his chance to catch up and make something more of his life. This is one motivated guy.

Please pray for Timothée, the chief and his wife, and for our teachers, who are doing a good job in serving their village, and deserve payment and recognition. Also pray that that optometrist will get to the village, and that I will be able to help them buy their glasses.

Sona Bata literacy workshop

Kinshasa - May 11, 2008

Sona Bata is one of those old mission stations in Bas-Congo province, an hour and a half west of Kinshasa by good paved road (Hurray!). It is mostly known for medical work and its excellent nursing school. Early on, it was the base for evangelism efforts in a vast area, and they had a great spiritual awakening and turning to Christ in the early 1920s. Many among the Ntandu, Nlemvo and Ndibu peoples (all sub-tribes of the Kongo, each with their own dialect of Kikongo) came to know Christ.

But Sona Bata and its churches have been neglected over a long period of time, and ravaged by conflicts and scandal in the church. Church members and their children are turning away in droves to other churches, sects and, particularly, politico-mystical nativistic movements. With some 60 local congregations, only 5 pastors in the whole district, including the two supervising pastors, have had any pastoral training. The rest of the churches are led by glorified deacons, given the title of pastor by default.

The Sona Bata women asked the literacy team to do a literacy teacher-training seminar at Sona Bata 2 years ago. After postponing several times for various reasons, we finally pulled it off two weeks ago, through the energies of the assistant district pastor, Pastor Luzolo. We were warmly welcomed at Sona Bata.

The training went extremely well. Participants were more capable than typical participants in other workshops. People in the Sona Bata area these days may use Lingala about as much as they do Kikongo, depending on their age. But they still have a strong cultural preference for Kikongo. So the team used Kikongo, which I don’t speak. I could follow it, though, and helped in several places despite the fact that I could only speak in Lingala. (Frustrating in the seminar when I couldn't demonstrate anything! It's just the grammatical organization of the language that I need to learn, to be able to speak.)

I'm not used to having people pick up techniques so quickly. In our Bandundu workshops we build in a lot of extra time. But at Sona Bata all the participants could read and write rapidly. They were able to digest the general principles of teaching adults in two days rather than three. This gave us all kinds of extra time to assure a training we could be proud of.

Attendance was rather disappointing: we had 9 participants in Kikongo and 9 participants (5 students training to be schoolteachers audited for their requirements) in French. However, there were 7 villages represented, which is all to the good. Not quite the 60 parishes Pastor Luzolo hoped for, but perhaps all that could be realistically hoped for in view of the fact that many pastors have been recently moved and Pastor Luzolo himself has only been in Sona Bata for a year. Those people appear to be quite motivated, so we can hope for something solid to happen, particularly since they are so close to Kinshasa, and can be visited easily and can come visit Rose and Mama Yango, the Kikongo-speaking trainer.


As usual, we spent some time with the women. (I learned how to make kwanga!) They appreciated that Rose is involved with the denominational women's structure and Mama Yango is a district president, so both could deal authoritatively with their problems.

Apart from the district pastor, who is old and tired and does not want to do anything, the leadership we met in Sona Bata particularly interested us. We had very stimulating conversations. Pastor Luzolo’s a local boy (his grandfather is the chief of the area, and we also met his mother, sister, nieces and a grandmother) who went to Kinshasa for pastoral training and stayed to serve Kinshasa churches, like so many others. But he really loves the Lord, and when called, came back, responsible for evangelism in the district, though with no money to work with. Others I’ve talked to consider Pastor Luzolo a gifted evangelist. His mother is also a dynamic women's leader. He is very concerned about development, particularly agricultural development, and particularly from a Christian stewardship point of view and has gathered a cadre of like-minded Christian ag people around him. He is trying very hard to turn the church around. He has just started an in-service training school for his district pastors who are without pastoral training, and wanted my advice on what it should contain. Happily I had brought my copies of the Kikongo language Mobile School laypastor training curriculum, which he had not seen, and could give him ideas from the Kikongo Pastoral Institute. His lack of a budget to do all these things is one reason for his interest in agriculture: they want to grow and sell crops to support all these other projects. So they really wanted to talk to Ed, and did so today.

Please pray for Pastor Luzolo and his team and the Sona Bata churches, their pastors and the people we trained for adult literacy, that together God will use them to bring new life, new capacities and new solutions for this area.

She did it ! !

Underneath an enormous tent pavillion protected from a May sun with obvious ambitions to be an August sun, Claremont-McKenna College celebrated the graduation of the class of 2008. Two hundred and thirty or so different people making the rite of passage from experimenting students to practicing adults -- our Rebecca among them.

Two grandmothers, a great-aunt, two great-uncles, a brother and two proud parents, gathered from the Pacific Northwest, southern California and Africa, joined the festivities. Friday afternoon we met some of Reba's close friends and their parents. Brittany Ruiz, another accounting major and Reba's dorm mate, was there with her parents. (Reba and Brittany will be looking for an apartment together in the Pasadena area in August.)

Meeting Professor Mark Massoud, Reba's advisor on both academic and spiritual matters, again was a particular blessing. For four years we have laid Reba in the Lord's hands when our own hands were too far away to be any practical use. Dr. Massoud is just one instrument of God -- guiding and encouraging Reba, giving her a picture of a committed Christian life, and charging her to follow the Lord herself.

For years, a valiant prayer warrior we know, Doris Templeton, has included Reba and Mark on her prayer list. She prays they would know the Lord in a deep way, meet other young people with wholesome and Christ-filled lives, and grow to be the people God wants them to be. We saw the fruit of those prayers this weekend -- Christian friends and mentors, Reba's achievements marked by a diploma and prospects for the future. Thank you, Lord.

Reba starts an internship in June with the Los Angeles Urban Project, a Christian outreach to marginalized people in the Pasadena area. In August she and Brittany start house hunting. And in September Reba plunges into the real world of auditing with the Pasadena office of the McGladrey and Pullen auditing firm. Way to go, Reba!!!

Palm manual ready for printing

Successful farmers around the world have wonderfully detailed knowledge of farming and the environment that should be the envy of any agricultural scientist. But the view that every semi-subsistence farmer is a peasant agricultural expert is too romantic. Most farmers in the Vanga area would give up farming in the blink of an eye if they could find another job that would feed their family. Most farmers are good enough to survive, but very few have the necessary expert knowledge needed to excel. And not many have a grandmother or aunt or father who is a reliable repository of all the accumulated expertise of the ancestors.

Apply this to family farmers that are interested in starting a small family plantation of oil palms. Most people that harvest palm nuts these days have experience only with wild palms or the old palms of the abandoned Unilever plantations. As far as they are concerned, God planted the palms and takes care of them. Most have given little thought to the conditions that make for a top-producing oil palm tree. They are content with whatever can be collected, unaware that oil palms have so much more potential. Expert knowledge is so scarce as to be non-existent. ACDI organizes a couple of grower’s seminars every year and farmers in the oil palm program benefit from 3 or 4 extension visits a year. But the small-scale grower has no simple reference at hand to guide him or her in the day-to-day management of nursery and plantation.

To rectify that handicap, I have been working on a manual for small-scale oil palm growers. It is 90 pages of basic advice written in relatively simple French with lots of illustrations. It is adapted from an English version developed for oil palm growers in highland areas of east and central Africa. But the extension staff here at Lusekele and I have tried to apply general principles to the more specific conditions of central Congo and highlight the specific experience of small-scale growers in the Vanga area. The manual aims to help farms adopt best sustainable palm growing practices and expand their vision of how productivity of palm oil production in the Kwilu can be improved.

Why French and not Kituba? Choosing a language for extension materials always poses a dilemma. Information in French can be used all across central Africa. ACDI is part of a development partnership that includes Presbyterians in the Kasai (Tshiluba speakers) and Mennonites in southeastern Bandundu (Pende speakers.) The manual could be useful in Lingala- and Kikongo-speaking areas too. By putting it in French right now, we make it possible for people in other regions of Congo to translate and adapt the information to their own conditions. True, Kituba would be a better choice for small-scale growers in the Vanga area. Translating the information into Kituba will be the next step.

ACDI advises and supports over 100 small farmer’s groups who have planted oil palms. Each group represents 5-25 families. Since 2003 we have helped over 700 farm families get started on planting over 825 acres of plantations, most less than an acre. By applying simple growing principles, a farm family can boost annual oil yield from 500 liters per hectare to over 2000 liters per hectare – a 300% increase.

Ed Noyes