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Mama Kiba Pierrette glows as she receives her literacy diploma.
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A young women receiving a literacy certificate at the International Literacy Day celebration at the 2nd Baptist Church of Bandal. Many young women take literacy classes while they go to regular high school in order to improve their reading mastery.
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For some young women, literacy classes may be the only opportunity to go to "school." Finishing successfully is real cause for celebration - worth getting dressed up in fancy clothes to mark the occasion.
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Literacy classes at the Bandal 2nd Baptist Church opened up new opportunities for this middle-aged man. Success gave him new confidence. He's moving on to English -- what a journey!
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Meningitis forced this young man to drop out of school for a year. He never seemed to make up the ground lost. The church's literacy class offered a way back. At the top of his reading class, he's now trying English.
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What are they thinking? These kids spend weekday afternoons in literacy class instead of hanging out? Honing reading skills is a way to stand out in regular school. They want to finish high school with more than a piece of paper.
The occasion was the Kinshasa Baptist churches’ celebration of International Literacy Day, and Mama Kiba Pierrette’s graduation day. I don’t get to many of these occasions, having been in rural Congo for many years. So I found it interesting to see who was graduating. Besides a number of middle-aged women, there was an elderly lady who looked positively thrilled, a bunch of teenaged and twenty-something girls, a woman who they tell me is preparing to travel in Europe, several young men and a middle-aged man who radiates satisfaction at getting rid of his educational handicaps.
Several of the ladies were like Mama Kiba Pierrette: having gotten well-educated in literacy classes, they took the training to become literacy teachers themselves. They walked to the front twice: once for their diplomas, and once for their teacher’s certificates.
Literacy classes in Kinshasa have evolved. No longer are they just classes for women. Everywhere I have gone, the centers at our churches are full of teenagers, and not just those whose parents never sent them to school. There are lots of kids whose schools are on half day sessions, who sign up for reading classes in their free time.
And it’s surprising to see which of them are in the beginning reading classes. Some, of course, are there to improve their French, taking advantage of the fact that school French classes and our French classes take different approaches. Some are like the graduating boy, who suffered some brain damage from a severe attack of meningitis and had to drop out of school for a year or so. He is, I’m happy to say, back in form and at the top of his English class.
We estimate that in the 15 years we’ve had this literacy program 16,000 people have found new lives through our classes. Now that’s worth celebrating!