Literacy workshop on the Congo estuary

(This “news” is three months old, but still needs to be shared. - Miriam)

The training had been talked about and always put off. Now, near the end of October, we were on the overnight bus rattling along toward Boma, the first port city to the Atlantic in Bas-Congo Province. In the Saturday evening dusk, porters had trussed all the baggage up on top of the bus and passengers piled in, wedged between narrow seats. Four of us were going: Chantal, Mama Yango, Rose and myself. Chantal and Rose are traveling companions from ‘way back. Sunday morning , in the still coolness of morning, the bus pulled into the parking area, downtown Boma. It was one of the most comfortable trips we’ve made, despite having to travel all night.

Literacy is particularly important to town-dwellers. In rural areas people get by without reading. But when they move into town they find themselves at a disadvantage. They’re handicapped. So much information is written. Deprived of information, people have fewer opportunities to make a better life.

Boma has statues everywhere. Some of Congo’s best sculptors live here. We collected our bags, passed the square’s statue and took a taxi bus through town to where our hostess waited. She shepherded us up her steep hill, past one church being built out of rough lumber near the bottom, turning a corner up a steep narrow pathway past another church on a terrace cut into the hill about half-way, another turn, then up steeply past some houses on more terraces, then finally up past the trees to look out over the Congo River estuary and Boma’s ocean shipping port just before the rise to their gate. The hill continued up just a little more to another church, the mother Christian and Missionary Alliance church for Boma. I later discovered that the national headquarters of the C&MA church which had evangelized this area was on this hill: past missionaries’ houses (I’m sure our host’s was one), offices, a school, their printing house and library, their legal rep’s house and a guesthouse, where we had stayed one night on a trip to the coast when our kids were little.

Besides their international shipping port, statues and the C&MA, special features of Boma are history, hills and rock. Boma is a special town: one of the first ones settled by Europeans. The encyclopedia says that Boma was founded in the 16th century as a slaving station when the respectful relationship of the Portuguese and the Kongo kingdoms deteriorated into a slaving one. When King Leopold II of Belgium was running Congo as his personal colony in the end of the 19th century, Boma was the base of operations. It continued as the capital city of the Belgian Congo to 1926, when the capitol was moved to Leopoldville (now Kinshasa.) Their #1 tourist site is the baobab tree in which Henry Morton Stanley slept (old ones often develop large hollow interiors) when he was in town. On a hill facing us is one of their oldest buildings, a small chapel, built for King Leopold’s men.

The Baptist headquarters in Boma, where we had our training, is on the peak of another formidable hill across town. Strong winds routinely batter their church and school. Surprisingly, this church functions in Lingala, to reach the many Boma residents who come from elsewhere in Congo.

Negotiations for this training had gone on for months. Local leaders had neglected the necessary groundwork. The women’s president, a thoroughly urban woman, had not considered the onset of the rainy season and the planting schedule of women dependent on farming. No churches of other denominations in town had been invited. Even the CBCO churches in the outlying district had been ignored. Many of the women were out of town planting peanuts, and few came to be trained. No one was available to become a French teacher for adults. In a preliminary meeting, the mayor of Boma almost wept at the wasted opportunity for her town. Last minute phone invitations were made.

We had 8 trainees from the church plus 3 others. Most of them were well educated and understood things quickly. All were capable. Most chose to teach in Lingala. A couple of women chose to teach Kikongo for locals. Three lay leaders of one of the village churches arrived for the Kikongo training, excited at the opportunity. The pastor joined, haunted by the memory of all the illiterate people in his village, and their dead-end lives.

The workshop participants were divided into two groups: one for each language, one at each end of the sanctuary. Our “blackboards” were raw plywood sheets propped on benches, there for a church construction project. The dynamic woman leader only had a junior-high education, but is a pusher. She’d done more with her education than many high school graduates. She’s the kind of woman who transforms her village.

The villagers were fun! Their dialect of Kikongo, KiYombe, drawls and sings. Each word in the lesson became extraordinary. There isn’t a KiYombe dialect Bible. But since the curriculum includes daily Bible lessons, we had come with two modern Kikongo version Bibles (thanks to you), recently off the press. Even the pastor hadn’t seen them yet. We gave one to the pastor, one to the village leaders. Such a treasure! They trembled with joy.

The second part of each day’s session was learning to make beaded mobile phone pouches. They are all the rage in Kinshasa and sell for $10: a good cottage industry, where you can get the beads to work with. The Boma women really loved this part, and some ladies came just for these sessions. Our trainees were learning to make the pouches in order to teach their future students.

Why? International literacy circles say that simply getting through a reader or two does not make most adult learners functionally literate. The real goal is to navigate easily in the literate world. People should be able to find their way around a Bible, read and understand charts and diagrams, work with written instructions, understand and fill in voting ballots and other forms, etc. Part of the vision of my colleagues, and the Boma women participating, is to lift themselves and their reading students out of poverty. So we now include in our teacher training events some written instructions to give to their classes to practice reading and trying out: sewing instructions, handicraft instruction like that of these pouches, cooking recipes, or recipes for other saleable products. I suppose that if our classes were all male, we would give building instruction or include some pages from a mechanic’s manual to work with.

A week later, Chantal, Mama Yango, Rose and I were on another night bus, rattling our way back toward Kinshasa. We left behind 11 intelligent and motivated people equipped with the tools to teach adults to read. Sometimes it’s not the number of people we train, but their quality and sense of purpose. The Lord brought us together for a purpose. Now we wait for news that they’ve started classes, with the beginning of this new year.

10 Years of Literacy Work!

Rose and I launched the CBCO women’s literacy ministry in 1998. The training team has put a lot of effort into this work. The ministry is considered by many to be the leading literacy group in all of Congo. In Kinshasa we have some 70 class sites, and have graduated nearly 1500 people. And we are the only group that tries to work on any scale in rural areas.

In Kinshasa anniversaries are a big deal. All occasions are opportunities to raise public awareness about the importance of literacy in modern life. But when the program already operates on lots of volunteer effort and a starvation ration for a budget, how do you celebrate. Badges? T shirts? Matching outfits for everyone? Influential people to speak? TV exposure? Sometimes it seems like a couple of hundred dollars doesn’t buy anything anymore.

But Rose was adamant. She took out a loan to get T shirts printed up: “Learn to read for your family’s well-being - 10 YEARS!”, with the Baptist literacy logo. The supervisors and teachers pooled resources for refreshments, and flaunted a kind of uniform at our gathering. Graduating students got their diplomas. We had a cautionary play about how reading and following directions can save your life when sick. The assistant director of the government adult education department spoke. That begins to sound like a celebration.

At the ceremony I noticed a group of young people off to the right. Who were they? They are school kids who are enrolled in adult classes in order to improve their reading, writing and French. They represent increasing numbers. Several people told about how literacy classes had helped them. One young man was an orphan. His extended family had taken him in, fed him and clothed him. But they didn’t pay for school. Learning to read and mastering simple arithmetic, he now has the means to work his way into a decent job.

Women testified about getting positions of leadership since learning to read and write and learning to use the Bible. Other women spoke of gaining new respect now that they could speak, read and write French. Several women had passed the state exam to get the equivalent of a GED.

On a side table, a pile of class projects caught my eye: clothes for sale by budding seamstresses, handmade mobile phone holders ($10 on the local market), doilies and hats represented new income-generating activities learned by our literacy students in class.

Another group of teenagers and young women turned out to be daughters of soldiers. Their families moved around so much from post to post that they never got any schooling. At Lemba-Matete, the biggest Baptist church in Kinshasa, these girls make up ¾ of the classes.

All of us in this ministry truly celebrated what the Lord has done in people’s lives through dedicated teachers in local churches. This was a day off to give thanks. But no one is more aware than we how much remains to be done if Congo truly wants to reduce adult illiteracy by 50%. Fifteen hundred people have new opportunities. Imagine if the Church throughout Congo could open the same doors for the 10 to 15 million people, most in rural areas, who still can’t read. Now that would be cause for celebration.

Appearances can deceive, Thank God!

How often have Rose Mayala and I asked the question, “Have we accomplished anything worthwhile in our literacy efforts?”

When we started training literacy teachers in rural areas, we imagined an effective network growing relatively quickly the way it had happened in Kinshasa. We would create a mobile team of highly motivated and capable teachers in each area. These teams would train volunteer literacy teachers in local churches, expanding the number of villages involved until we had each area more or less covered. Proud new readers would finish classes each year. Motivated students would pool their contributions to give the teacher a “thank you” gift and buy chalk, notebooks, pens and reading primers. They would start by sharing books. By pooling resources, each student eventually would be able to buy her own book, if she wanted one.

The dream hasn’t translated well into practice. The first literacy classes here in the Kwilu River area around Vanga began in 2001. Since then only one student has received a reading certificate.

People want literacy classes. Women flock to them. But they will not buy teaching supplies and readers, however enthusiastic they are about learning. Village people cannot articulate the reasons, but they very often feel that teachers owe them free classes . . . and all the supplies. Nearly all teachers sacrifice time otherwise spent providing basics for their families in order to teach classes. But most teachers say they get no help from students. Many that we train become discouraged and stop teaching.

Why do many village classes progress so slowly, when Kinshasa literacy classes have people reading pretty well in several months? It’s hard to know without visiting classes myself. But one can speculate. Supervision is much harder for several reasons: villages are far apart; transportation is scarce or non-existent; and fluid schedules and poor communication make it hard to coordinate so that the supervisor arrives when classes are being taught. This makes it more difficult to correct deficiencies and encourage teachers. Subsistence farming imposes an irregular schedule and often leaves women little free time for classes. The benefits of literacy are often not immediately as evident as they are in the urban setting. And sometimes even trained literacy teachers may not be confident readers themselves, especially in French.

The apparent results of 2008 seemed especially discouraging. Only two local groups reported on literacy classes. “Sidewalk radio” buzzed about other classes, but where and how many was hard to guess. One of our two supervisors spent the year taking care of family members at the hospital or being treated herself. The other has a heart for literacy but struggles to put together informative reports. Without a clear picture of what was going on in individual churches, it was hard not to assume the worst.

This year UNESCO finally geared up for a 10-year campaign to halve the number of illiterate adults in Congo. They wanted to register all literacy classes and teachers in return for promises to channel support their way. This was something to get excited about! Bureaucracy grinds slowly. The forms arrived only at the end of November and all registrations needed to be filed before the end of the year. How to do it?

December is not a good time for a general meeting. Many of our teachers are primary or secondary school teachers as well. Schools have finals in December and insist (quite rightly) that their teachers be present. And gathering teachers (who must walk or bicycle 40-50 miles) is not easy. We had no idea how many literacy teachers would show up. Imagine our surprise (and delight) when 57 teachers showed up with reports in hand to prove that they’d been teaching most of the year. A year’s worth of reports all at one time! I still can’t say how many villages that represents -- perhaps 70.


First, local literacy volunteers are accomplishing something, despite the obstacles. CBCO literacy efforts in Bandundu in 2008 were not the disappointment they seemed to be. We will be “reaping our first harvest.” Many students are close to finishing. Local classes will be graduating students all over this area. Graduations encourage teachers. They make the village sit up and take notice. They encourage other students to redouble their efforts and bring more people to join classes.

Second, most of our CBCO literacy classes in the Vanga area are registered. There is at least a glimmer of hope that the government and UNESCO will strengthen our literacy initiatives.

Of course the global economic downturn could turn Congolese government finances completely upside down, pitching adult literacy toward the bottom of the pile of priorities. And local corruption constantly threatens to divert resources intended to develop human capital. Those are good subjects for intercessory prayer. For the time being Rose and the team do what they can with the modest resources that God has provided – yearning to see opportunities created and lives truly changed as people learn to read.