My heart and mind were still reeling from meeting with Children of Liberty members, but I had to move on with the day and keep working. I then met with members of the Comfort Congo SKR (Street Kids Rescue).
Hearing how difficult life has been for these kids is tough – it’s hard not to imagine how my own two boys would cope in their situations. As I listened to them share their testimony, wave after wave of God’s compassion and love for them kept hitting me. I spent a lot of time thanking God for the work he has done in their lives. I couldn’t help thinking about all the other kids out there on the street of Goma, the rest of DRC and further afield that need that same move of God in their life …
After spending some time with the SKR kids, I met with two of the Mums from the Comfort Babies Congo project. Many young women find themselves pregnant due to various unfortunate circumstances. Often their families and communities will disown them. This can lead to rejection, trauma and a life of destitution.
Comfort Babies is a project that cares for women and their children by providing for their physical, emotional and spiritual needs in a supporting environment. Our partners, Comfort Rwanda and Comfort Congo do a brilliant job in creating an environment where these young women can rebuild their lives and become happy and self-sufficient.
Naomi and Judith shared with me their heart-breaking, yet uplifting testimonies. They both had difficult childhoods, either losing parents to death or injury due to the conflict in North Kivu, or experiencing forced domestic servitude through family breakdown. They both talked about how Comfort Babies has made them feel accepted and valued. They said that the program has been a lifeline in helping their children grow up healthy and allowing them a better opportunity to provide for them.
By this point I wasn’t sure how much more I would be able to keep in my head, but I knew we had a few more people we had arranged to meet that day and I had no intention of letting them down. So we headed from the Village of Hope to Kambize Primary School and Kisima Primary School.
Education in DRC is a huge challenge. There are not enough schools. There are not enough teachers. There are too many families who cannot afford the fees. “The process of learning and education plays a critical role in terms of skill and cognitive development on both a personal and social level. That’s why education is considered vital and arguably the silver bullet in the battle to reduce inequality. After all, access to education should be a fundamental right.” (Future Learn).
Dieudonne, the head of Comfort Congo, has a passion for education and making sure kids have access to it. We at Comfort International share this passion. We support the education programme in DRC through the support of teachers, classes and through helping to raise capital funds for building the schools.
We run both teachers’ sponsorship and Adopt a Class sponsorship programs, both at £30 a month. The two sponsorship programmes achieve similar goals but approach things from two perspectives, with the teachers sponsorship aiming to pay the teacher a salary to enable him/her to teach the class, whereas the Adopt a Class provides funding for the class to function which includes the teacher’s salary but may also help provide chalk and notebooks etc. Those are not big sponsorship programmes with small numbers being supported and we would love to support more teachers and classes.
Even with support, life is very difficult for the teachers. Without it, life is a struggle to survive. Many teachers cannot afford to feed their children more than once a day. At some point we would like to have two sponsors for each of the teachers but the present need is to have one sponsor for each teacher from the schools where we support teacher salaries. In the midst of those struggles though, there is also joy and reward.
Theophile (above) has been a science teacher at Kisima Secondary School for 7 years, since the school first opened. Theophile’s family are all teachers and so he wanted to be one as well. He studied biology at university before becoming a teacher but has returned to university whilst teaching to study French so that he can teach that as well. Because of the volume of Internally Displaced People from Matura and Masisi, Theophile has 135 children in his class – 75 of them are from the Displaced Community.
Theophile loves teaching; he loves having time to help the children develop their skills and learn. There are many challenges that he faces as a teacher though. The classrooms are too small, even before the influx of displaced children they were too small. Often, students are unable to sit in class and so cannot fully participate. He often does not have the materials to teach properly – lacking chalk, notebooks and pens. Theophile’s classroom does not yet have a floor – it is just bare rock. Often, because many children cannot afford shoes, they cut their feet on the floor and the school takes them to be treated for this, which further eats into the school’s limited budget.
Before Theophile was a part of the Sponsor a Teacher program, he felt a lot of shame in front of his class. This was because he could not afford shoes himself, or soap to wash his clothes. He felt embarrassed being in front of the class, and lost his confidence in front of them because he could not come to teach and look well kept. He was going through a difficult period before he was sponsored and had to stay with his brother. Now that he is a part of the Sponsor a Teacher program though, he has been able to afford his own home to rent and now his brother stays with him.
Theophile said that before he was sponsored he had no peace in his heart because everything was difficult. Sponsorship has restored this peace because, although life still has challenges, he is better able to face the material challenges. Theophile hopes and prays that more of his colleagues will be adopted into the sponsorship program as many of them currently face the same challenges that he used to. With sponsorship he knows that their lives can be better. He hopes for better conditions for the children at the school – enough space, enough materials and enough teachers.
There are so many programs that Comfort International supports in need of more support; Congo Teachers and Adopt a Class sponsorship programs are two of the programs with a huge need. I would love to see more supporters here in Scotland invested in these programs – if you feel called to this, please get in touch so that we can have a chat with you about this.