Raymond Mafuta, literacy teacher surrounded by the daughters of soldiers who are learning to read. The Lemba-Matete Baptist Church runs 6 literacy classes all the time.
These young women dominate the literacy classes at the big Lemba-Matete Congo Baptist church in Kinshasa. They are daughters of military families. We all know what the military is like: they move a lot. And when military orders come to go, you go that day, no matter if it is in the middle of a semester. The children’s schooling is the last concern of the commanders.
The other fact of military life in Congo is that ordinary soldiers don’t have much of a salary, and are often paid months late. So their children either have a very interrupted education, an unfinished education, or, none at all, especially the girls of the family. If a family doesn’t have enough money to send all their children to school, girls are the first to get left out.
So these young women didn’t get an education, or much of one, when they were children. But now they are grown, and most of them make a little money buying wholesale and selling retail in a market or in front of their houses – enough to pay their own tuition in an adult education course. They are determined to push open the doors of opportunity with their own hands and the Lemba-Matete Baptist Church is right there beside them.
They are learning all that they can, so that they can participate fully in life, and go further than their parents. Some are learning trades. And their teachers are determined to teach them about true life, that life Jesus spoke of in John 10:10: I have come that they might have life, life in all its fullness.
