When I visited the school in Mabala, near Nioki in the DR Congo, the oldest students had just finished taking their exams that day. Unfortunately, they have to pay for their schooling and the exams. One of the girls had recently been expelled from the school as she had gotten pregnant and by law cannot stay in school under this condition. I asked our manager Jean, what the oldest students will do after their final exams. He replied: “Nothing!” It’s a heartbreaking situation!
There are very few jobs available in the area; about three quarters of the people are jobless. The people also need help in doing agriculture the right way. Ing. Jean, an experienced agronomist said that the leaves of the manioc plants (main staple in Congo) in the fields there are sick. The locals need training and Jean also wants to introduce better seeds without sicknesses which bear more fruit.
For this reason, we want to build a Secondary School for agricultural and veterinarian training as there is no school with this emphasis in the whole Kutu region. Hopefully our school will be able to give students the training they need to start their own jobs as farmers so they can feed themselves and earn some income.
After visiting the school, Jean and I went to our guesthouse and met a boy called Patrick who was selling bananas. We talked with him and asked him why he wasn’t in school. He said he goes to school in the afternoon; in the morning he has to sell bananas to be able to pay his school fees – 5 $ per trimester, 15 $ per year. There are many children in Congo who cannot go to school, because their parents don’t have the money for it.
Talking to this boy I had to hold back my tears as I don’t think children should have to sell bananas so their parents can send them to school and after their final exams do “nothing”!
Whenever I go to the bush and see those precious and potential children and young people with little hope for a decent life, it breaks my heart and renews my vision to find people who want to help the poor receive a better chance in their life. It encourages me also to keep working on the book I’m writing to give more people a vision of what can be done to change the world with love.
On this visit to Congo I asked friends from different walks of life what they thought could be a solution to the above described problems. I liked Jean’s simple reply: “First, we need more of God’s love. Instead of being so concerned about ourseves, we should also think about the needs of others. The second thing we need to do is work. For the majority of the people in Congo, that means doing agriculture as there is so much land available. Congo has 80 million hectares of land just for agriculture, besides woods etc.
Our goal is to help the rural population, so they will have a better life and stay in their villages instead of wandering off into the cities which are already overcrowded, where they don’t find work and might eventually end up in Europe as refugees.
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