The young man on the right recovered from meningitis, but the illness left him struggling to remember things. Learning is a slow process.  In this church literacy class, he gets both sympathetic teachers and extra help, that may help him to recover more than his health.

Since the beginning of the year, I've been circulating among the churches in the west end of Kinshasa with our new supervisor, Esaie (Isaiah.)  We've struck up conversations with literacy teachers, pastors, church school principals and women's leaders, probing to find out more about their needs and hopes for their churches and communities.  In the process we have opportunities to share a new vision for literacy in Kinshasa.
 

Our conversational journey has taken us to Baptist churches in the neighborhoods of Lukunga, the WWII Veterans' Camp, Djelo-Binza, Malweka and Pumbu Cité so far.  Today I bent the ear of the pastor of Livulu Baptist Church.  In the next few weeks we will repeat the exercise with Sanga Mamba, Bwadi, and the two churches in Kintambo, close to where I live..  Only 70-odd churches to go in order to cover every CBCO congregation in Kinshasa.  And that doesn't begin to think about sharing the vision in rural areas.

The message we're bringing the churches this time is "Look for the opportunities in your communities that God gives you."  Invest seriously in those opportunities.  Think about building dedicated classrooms for literacy outreach.  Forget that old idea that literacy is pastime for a few old ladies from the village meeting in a back room of the church.  Literacy classes are an incredible resource for your church and neighborhood:

• not only for teaching women what they have missed, and helping them to a richer life,
• not only as a way to get more people reading the Bible and equipping them for ministry,
• not only for bringing new people into the church. 

Literacy classes are an incredible resource for your families' kids.  Many of our own kids aren't doing well in school because they don't have a solid reading foundation.  How about our nieces and nephews newly arrived from the village unprepared to live in a literate world.  And what about those kids recovering from a long catastrophic illness that robbed them of school time and compromised their ability to pick up new knowledge quickly.  Schools here are crowded and don't have tutoring.  Teachers have little time to give struggling kids the help they need.   

These young women have finished Lingala reading and writing classes and moved on to French.  This not only widens the scope of sources of information but gives them a key to open new doors of opportunity.

Literacy classes are different.  We can give struggling youth the individual attention they need to really learn.  While they may start by learning to read and write in a local language, this builds skills and confidence that often leads them to learn good French too.  For a church with a vision, literacy classes can be buzzing with teenagers morning and afternoon, just like those at the Lemba-Matete Baptist Church or the Second Baptist Church of Bandal's.  A church with a vision might even start thinking about where to put vocational classes for its post-literacy students.  What trades might they teach them?

I tell schoolteachers and principals that they can recommend literacy classes to the parents of the students they notice are not doing well.  It is no honor to a school's reputation to have bad students and low percentages of graduating seniors, and principals are happy to hear of an alternative.

It's a dazzling set of new ideas for most of the people we're talking to.  From our perspective as literacy teachers, this vision gives us the scope to touch many more people.  But it also means that our classes begin to do a better job meeting some deeply felt needs in our communities.  And that gains respect: from our host churches, from our communities and from the people we teach.   

Teachers in this kind of a center work harder.  But sharing a valuable skill and doing it well makes it much more likely to be able to make a living from it.  Serious teachers, with serious investment in space and materials by host churches, creates a dynamic that attracts more students, serious students, students willing to pay the voluntary monthly fee for classes they agreed to pay.  That makes for happier, more dedicated literacy teachers.

Trusting in God's vision,

Miriam