07392
June 29, 2007

Inequality, lack of education way of life for Congo’s women, yet hope prevails

PC(USA)-supported partners offer training, encouragement

by Toya Richards Hill
Presbyterian News Service

KINSHASA — Kalanga Odette was no more than 16 when she became a wife.

The expectation for her, like most married women in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), was to bear lots of children. Odette, the mother of nine, complied.

She also remained faithful to her husband, and even lived without him for two years when he left their home in Congo’s rural Kasai region to find work in the capital city of Kinshasa.

So when the 42-year-old learned she had HIV/AIDS, she knew it couldn’t be true. In fact, she took the test three times just to be sure.

“I can’t have AIDS,” Odette said she thought to herself after learning the news. And if found with it, “what will happen?”

Angry and feeling helpless, Odette felt that killing her husband — who knew he had the disease but didn’t tell his wife — and then herself was the only answer.

Then she talked with Monique Misenga, director of the department of women and families for the Presbyterian Community of Kinshasa (CPK).

“I asked her if she was a Christian and she told me yes,” Misenga said of Odette. Misenga followed with the questions: “Then why can’t you follow what Jesus said? Can you forgive your husband?”

Odette told Misenga “no” at first, but eventually with Misenga’s guidance she changed her mind. Odette and her husband have both now undergone counseling, and Odette also participates in an income-generation program that Misenga’s department operates.

A deep brown-skinned woman with a somber look, Odette embodies the collective pain of women in Congo, the second largest country in Sub-Saharan African.

Hers is trauma, hurt and sadness specifically centered on life with HIV/AIDS, but on a much broader scale she is an example of the powerlessness and disenfranchisement of Congolese women living in an overtly male-dominated society.

Married off young, at the mercy of their husbands, uneducated and often unable to even communicate in Congo’s official language of French, women in the DRC have little to reach for.

War, too, has further victimized Congo’s women, and rape has commonly been used to enact terror and control.

The gender issue is deep, and women have often been left behind on many things, said Misenga.

“Women all over the country have very, very low education,” she said. “We have to train them, to equip them.”

Misenga’s department, supported by various agencies of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A), including Presbyterian Women, covers a range of empowerment and training projects for women and their families.

Sewing programs and other income-generation projects are active ways women in Congo are providing for themselves and their families.

Photo by Toya Richards Hill

Visit the offices in Kinshasa and you are sure to find women leaning over sewing machines making elegant outfits out of colorful fabrics as part of the sewing program. Or, you might see youngsters who are being supported through an orphan care program, or HIV/AIDS education taking place.

It was women in Misenga’s programs who helped make the tote bags used at the PC(U.S.A.)’s 217th General Assembly last year in Birmingham, AL.

Women need to be taught, “They are human beings created in God’s image,” she said. They can manage their own lives, Misenga added.

That’s a big lesson for women like those in the remote village of Bulape, located south of the equator and some 236 miles east of Kinshasa. It’s also home to a mission station created by Presbyterians in 1915 that includes Bulape Presbyterian Medical Center, operated under the auspices of the Presbyterian Community of Congo (CPC).

Life in Bulape, without question, is difficult. The women, as in most Congolese villages, are responsible for virtually everything, including the backbreaking work of tending the agricultural fields for hours on end.

“Most of them are laborers,” said the Rev. Kubibu Munanga, a local schoolteacher and one of the only female pastors around. “They have many problems.”

Ask the women of Bulape what makes them sad, and repeatedly you’ll hear talk about their children, especially the girls.

If there are five or six children to raise, “you can’t bear the school fees for all of them,” Munanga said. Boys, culturally more valuable in Congo society, take precedence.

Girls start school at age five or six, but “most of them don’t finish,” and by secondary school a class of 20 or 30 students might have only two or three girls in it, Munanga said. Instead of school, the girls “go to marriage,” sometimes as young as 12 years old.

The smaller ones can be found in the villages, packing younger siblings on their backs while their mothers tend the fields. 

Munanga, who hails from Bulape, was lucky. She finished high school, and her parents supported her call to ministry and theological training.

Yet even with her advanced education and respected positions, she has trouble rising above the traditional role of women in Congo.

Most men have trouble seeing a woman as what they want for the church, said Munanga, whose challengers sometimes cite scriptures that say women shouldn’t speak out.

“Pray for us, the life is very difficult for women here,” she said.

Given the opportunity to talk about concrete things that could improve their lives, Bulape’s women point to things like a literacy project, a sewing shop, a building dedicated for widows and orphans, and enhanced maternity and reproductive health care.

The price tag of everything on their wish list comes to about $24,000.

Yet not everything in the women’s lives there is bleak and gray, and when asked what makes them happy they also aren’t short of answers.

Many young girls in Congo aren’t fully educated, and often they must care for younger siblings while the mother tends the fields. Photo by Toya Richards Hill

One woman says happiness comes when she wakes up and is healthy. Another says it’s when she has visitors at her home.

Still another Bulape woman finds joy when her children are studying, and one says it’s when difficult times come and God answers her prayers.

“We are in a deep crisis in our country,” the CPK’s Misenga said. “Life is being destroyed every day.”

Yet there is still hope, she proclaims. Through a strategy of training and teaching, women can make a way for themselves.

“We can solve our problems,” said Misenga.