Bridge to Reading

“Sister Connie, it works! A woman who had never had a chance to read or write just read the word, ‘Igitabo – book!’ Then she wrote this word – ‘book’! It works, Sister Connie! Do you understand, this is the answer for the people in the village churches who want to learn to read!”

Pastor Hermann Mutuzi then showed me slips of paper that were the first writing in the life of a young mother in Burundi. She had knelt on the dirt floor of her village church to use the bench she had been sitting on as her desk. She painstakingly copied a word from her first Bridge to Reading story. After three tries her printing was clear as she jubilantly read, “Igitabo.”

We were in Burundi in the Great Lakes region of Sub-Saharan Africa in September, 2010. I was working with 15 Village Church Planters and coordinators who were learning the Bridge to Reading literacy tutoring model. They were becoming tutors and would graduate to being trainers of tutors in 120 village churches in Burundi and The Democratic Republic of the Congo. The good news that morning was, “It works! The people are learning to read and write!”

OMS has begun a two year pilot to track the success of training VCP leaders as literacy trainers. The pastors are using a training model from Literacy Volunteers of New Jersey along with enough beautifully printed materials donated by One Hope, the worldwide child evangelism ministry, to train 1,000 tutors. We’re teaming with the local Literacy and Evangelism, International missionary to provide each tutor with skills to teach reading in meaningful context, along with sight words and phonics. The tutors will also teach writing and simple arithmetic to parents and teens who have no chance of attending school.

How did God put together a plan to teach people to read and write in a church so far off the road that we had to have a guide direct us to the end of a dusty trail? How did He link a literacy trainer and her pastor from New Jersey and a prayer warrrior from Ohio with the Village Church Planters in the DRC and Burundi? A few years ago Theo Burakeye, who was the Great Lakes supervisor for the VCP told my brother Dean (Dean Davis is OMS Director for Every Community for Christ) about having given a Bible to a woman who said, “Thank you for the Bible. I wish I could read it.” Theo knew that in many African villages the literacy rate hovers around 20%. Bibles were gratefully received but, for many adults, it was as each Bible was fitted with a padlock. Parents had no hope of ever learning to read the Word.

As a teenager in Lexington, KY, I had told the Lord that I would do anything for Him but please ‘don’t send me to Africa’ where I was sure I’d be gobbled up by some lion. In 1979, while staying home with our young children and going to graduate school, I asked the Lord for more direction in my life. I was strongly impressed to prepare myself to teach people who wanted to read the Bible. Since that time I’ve continued as a reading specialist and literacy volunteer, tutoring dozens of adults and training tutors and trainers with Literacy Volunteers of America, now ProLiteracy.

After Dean’s conversation with Theo he asked me if I’d consider training tutors and trainers in Africa. I had to laugh since that was the only continent I had ruled out to God! I’d waited all my life to be in a position to focus on teaching people with a Word goal so was quick to say yes. Soon I shared my hopes and plans with our pastor, John Young. John just happened to have been a missionary with One Hope in Russia. Hearing that we’d need to publish training materials for tutors he reached out to One Hope, formerly Book of Hope.

One Hope has distributed nearly 700 million scripture magazines to children all over the world since the late 1980’s. Just recently they have begun to think about the issues around children and youth not being able to read the materials so lovingly created for them.

OMS and One Hope are now working to create a scripture portion magazine to include verses from the 50 lessons of chronological Bible teaching used by the VCP ministry. We want to distrubute 150,000 of these books to families in each of our two target countries. But God seems to have more of Africa in His sights. He might just want you to be involved.

Do you know of people who have been literacy volunteers who might like to teach trainers in Africa? Our Father is putting together an awesome plan to open His Word to any who want to read it. The first step is to practice tutoring in your hometown. If you’re ready for the next step, please contact me for more details at cdschwein@aol.com. We want to prepare twelve teams, each to include two trainers, to commit to go to Africa on a short term mission. We’ll be preparing experienced pastoral trainers to teach tutors who will teach people to read, write and do math in their own churches. You too will be able to hear a pastor cry out, “It’s working! She’s learning to read!”