Positive Literacy Stories

A women's group that is doing literacy classes
with their pastor and trying to engage other women

We found two very encouraging points in connection with the Holistic Development of Children consultation that our partner church hosted last week. The first was when we visited with some wives of rural evangelists, I heard my first positive story about literacy classes being done by evangelists. On one visit, we turned off the main road into the smallest and most overgrown bush tracks that I’ve ventured on so far, and after about 30 mins arrived in a small village. We raised quite a stir showing up with a car there and we had about 20 men gathered around the yard of the evangelist while we waited for him to come back home (he didn’t know we were coming because he has no way to charge his cell phone and keep in contact). Later we heard that the people of the village had been hassling him about whether he was a one man church since they hadn’t seen any of his “leaders” come visit him yet. This evangelist’s family had only been in the village a year, but his wife had quickly started a literacy class with the handful of Christian women and a handful of Muslim women. While a few had dropped out because their husbands did not like the idea, she still has had 6 women learning to read and write for the past year, and so the possibilities of further outreach are quiet exciting in this place. This woman was operating without many resources at all, like even a chalkboard, but we did hear another story of a women’s group who was being taught by their pastor with some written resources from a neighboring country.

The second encouragement came during the consultation itself, when an older woman in the room of half men and half women stood up to make a comment. She expressed how grateful she was to learn about these methods for teaching and investing in children through the church, and wished she had known them while she was raising her own children. But she continued that she has great hope for the way this more caring instruction can be used at her church and what effect it can have for encouraging children in the faith. While this is a single comment talking about possible implementation of what was presented, it showed me these ideas weren’t just falling flat as impractical info that was too full of western ideas, but that this consultation can really have a big impact.

--El Padre