Our Next Women's Literary Center

Yesterday, six women appeared at the gate with gifts of bananas and avocados. Traditionally, people travel long distances just to welcome us to Congo and extend well wishes on us. These came from about five miles away. The sun was baking us, so we made our way to a large shade tree in front of our house. Just then, the professors from the women’s lit. school joined us to meet together and discuss and plan for the rest of the school year at Mbila. Our visitors said that they had been watching what a blessing the school had been to the women of Mbila and asked, with great interest, if we would start one at their village.

I quickly gave them four prerequisites before we could hold classes there:

There must be order. The children had to be confined to another part of the village as we cannot teach with hundreds of kids running around.

There must be a building in which to teach.

It had to be the will of God.

There must be great hunger on the women’s part to learn to read.

We, of course, cannot have two literary centers at once, so we will have to wait until 2013 when we graduate the women of Mbila. Looks like our work is cut out for us for the next five years.