Annual Ministry Update, 2014

A letter from John and Gwenda Fletcher serving in Congo

February 2015

Apart from two major projects, the main emphasis of 2014 was to maintain the steady movement toward improving the quality of education in the Congolese Presbyterian Church (CPC)’s 787 primary and secondary schools.

One of the two major projects was the construction of a new primary school.  Like last year, the Great Commission Fund of First Presbyterian Church of Evanston, Illinois, matched $40,000 donated by individuals and churches to turn a seriously dilapidated mud-brick, leaky-roofed school into one with fired brick and cement walls and a watertight roof.  The community, Mwene Ditu in East Kasai, is thrilled with the new building, which, I have been told, is so admired it has become something of a local tourist attraction. The government will currently not allow schools to limit enrollment and parents want their children to attend a school that can function, rain or shine. This means that the two primary schools that share this building (one in the morning, the other in the afternoon) are overcrowded in the extreme.  Class sizes range from 103 in the class with the fewest students to 166 in the class with the most students.

Before

Beyond what this school means to the local community, it is a visible symbol of the unity of the Congolese Presbyterian Church, which encompasses the two Kasai provinces, each with a different primary tribe—the Baluba in the East Kasai and the Bena Lulua in the West Kasai.  Historically relations between the two tribes have been contentious, but the membership of the CPC has always been an exception to this.  The church has managed to remain united through any number of ethnic clashes over the years, and the CPC leadership takes seriously the privilege and responsibility of serving its members in both provinces.  The school in Mwene Ditu is a welcome symbol of the church’s unity and a sign that the Baluba students of the CPC’s East Kasai schools are as important as the Bena Lulua students in the CPC’s West Kasai schools.

The other major project was the implementation of a special school designed to meet the needs of children whose education has been severely disrupted.  Using the government’s “catch-up curriculum” that was designed specifically for this purpose, the CPC has opened a small school to educate the children in its Ditekemena (“Hope”) program.  Twenty-three former street children—15 boys and 8 girls—have been taken into the Ditekemena Centre, where they are housed, fed, taught about God’s love and grace, and where they attend school—some of them for the first time in their lives.

After

The children are between the ages of 6 and 15 except for a 2-year-old who came with her 12-year-old sister. The reasons why these children were on the streets vary—death of one or both parents, remarriage of a parent to a spouse who doesn’t want stepchildren, too many mouths to feed, rejection because of a handicap, accusations of witchcraft, etc.  As hard as it is to imagine, some of the children were as young as 4 years old when they were thrust onto the streets.

The focus of the Ditekemena program is to reintegrate the children into their families, but this process takes time. In the interim the children need to be educated. Two of the boys are able to attend public secondary school and the three youngest are able to attend first grade in a nearby primary school.  The other children, however, are not able to attend regular school because of a marked discrepancy between their chronological ages and their academic levels.

Now, thanks to the CPC’s initiative, these 23 children have a safe place to sleep, three meals a day, and 22 brothers and sisters to love, laugh, play and learn with. And thanks to the generosity of U.S. Presbyterians, the children are able to attend a school where they can make up for lost time.

Every classroom is filled to overflowing!

Several weeks after they first came to the Centre, I asked the kids what they liked best about being there.  Every single one said the best thing was being able to eat every day.  And the thing they said was second best? They had been promised they would get to go to school.  The children have been given gifts of clothes, sweets, toys and puzzles—all of which they have happily and gratefully received.  But nothing compared to those kids’ response of ecstasy when they received a gift of school supplies—pens, pencils, notebooks and rulers.  They literally ran around the room shouting with joy. They were glad to get school supplies, but what put them over the moon was this tangible proof that the promise was being fulfilled and they were going to go to school.  If, in looking back on 2014, I had no other experiences to remember, that one would be enough.

Gwenda

The 2015 Presbyterian Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 146, 147