Not Eudora
By Harry Welty
Published May 14, 2003
One Hundred Spoons
We broke the School Board’s Human Resource Committee
record. I’ve attended meetings before that only lasted five minutes. On Monday
we met for an hour and forty-five minutes. Most of that time we talked about
hockey but, as an afterthought, we discussed the 70 or so teachers that we will
be laying off. Such are our priorities these days.
Claudia and I have been preparing for company for the past
month. Reverend Ntambue Kazadi and his wife Marie, from the
Democratic Republic of the Congo
, will stay with us for one week. They arrived on Monday morning their tropical
systems still in shock from our region’s cold spring weather. I felt some
anxiety at leaving them alone to chair the HR Committee meeting but they are
used to hardship and being alone in a
Minnesota
home for few hours was probably not the worst problem they’ve had to face.
Ntambue is a modest, soft-spoken man whose manor belies the
name he received from his Grandfather. It means “lion” in Chiluba, which is
one of the four native national languages of the
Congo
. There are 400 other languages besides. When I asked how one communicates as
one travels cross country Ntambue told me that most people can speak a bit of
many languages so that there is order to the Babel. Besides, for those families
who have scraped together the ten dollars a year it takes to educate their
children (about 40% of the population can afford this) their children learn the
fifth national language, French.
The
Congo
’s infrastructure is in poor repair. The Belgians left in a hurry in 1960
resentful that the Congolese wanted to rule themselves. The colonials handed
over the keys to the infant nation to a handful of twenty-year-old Congolese who
had been studying in
Belgium
. In effect they told them: if you want to run your own country be our guest.
Not surprisingly, the
Congo
was one of the early hot spots which the young United Nations attempted to calm
down after war broke out. When war
was finally brought to an end by a fellow named Mobutu, under the force of arms,
he continued to rule by force. He also helped coin a new word for his kind of
government - “kleptocracy.” This is a nation in which everything, not
properly nailed down, is stolen. After 32 years of misrule an ailing Mobutu fled
to
France
after hiding tens and perhaps hundreds of millions of Congolese dollars in
Swiss banks.
An entire nation’s infrastructure, left over from
colonial rule, had been allowed to crumble away. The world’s richest source of
raw materials and minerals is mired today in warfare compounded by malnutrition,
mis-education, disease (particularly AIDS), as well as orphans who are dragooned
into local militias, the leaders of which dream of following Mobutu’s example
of becoming President by force of arms.
Twenty-five years ago a young lion, Ntambue, left his home
in central
Congo
in hopes of earning a law degree from the
Congo
’s premier university in the capitol city of
Kinshasa
. After a year, in which he failed to gain admittance, his father, a village
merchant, advised him to heed a dream he’d once had. In the dream God had
commanded him to do the Lord’s work. Ntambue returned home and began attending
the local Presbyterian seminary. After his ordination he went to a larger
metropolis in diamond rich Mbuji-Mayi and served the church for 18 years.
Somehow his talents brought him to the attention of the Presbyterian Church in
the
United States
which awarded him a scholarship to study here. He has now returned to the
US
to defend the thesis for his Doctoral degree. It concerns the tens of thousands
of
Congolese street
children and how the Church can care for them.
He will soon leave
Duluth
to defend his thesis in
San Francisco
. He shrugged off a question about nerves by pointing out that he, not his
teachers, is the expert on the
Congo
. He has also brought a simple proposal with him, one which should appeal to
Americans who believe in “faith based initiatives.”
The Presbyterian University/Seminary of the
Congo
enrolls 150 students. Upon completion of their degree they return to the 800
Presbyterian congregations and 2 million Congolese Presbyterians. They minister
to people who have no work. They run the six best hospitals in the center of the
nation. They oversee 300 elementary and 200 secondary schools while offering
lower tuition than that charged by the state. They, along with the Mennonites,
Disciples of Christ, Baptists, Methodists and Catholics are the hope of a
keptocratic nation.
Ntambue’s school is bereft of the creature comforts. He
seeks 100 spoons at a cost of fifty cents apiece as well as 100 forks and 100
knives and 100 plates and 100 cups. He seeks 100 mattresses at $20 apiece for
the bare rooms the students sleep in. He seeks 100 chairs for the empty dining
hall so that the students no longer have to sit on the floor to eat. These
students, sent to the Seminary by their local churches, are the hope of the
Congo
. Their work may someday allow the wealth of the
Congo
to return to its peoples.
Well, that’s enough uplift for me this morning. Hockey
calls.
Anyone interested in buying a spoon for Rev. Kazadi’s
University could make out a check to: UPRECO (Presbyterian University/Seminary
of the
Congo
) Acct # 31-9004-8884. and mail it to:
Dr. Mulumba M. Mukundi CPC/Kananga
President of the University Seminary
WMD/PCUSA
C/O
Africa
Office, Room 3216|
100 Witherspoon St
.
Louisville
,
KY
40202-1396
Harry Welty is a
small time politician who lets it all hang out at www.snowbizz.com
Pictures
from the Congo
Postscript: Eileen Zeitz Hudelson, who has characterized my
description of the May 1998 NJROTC flag presentation ceremony as a fabrication,
did provide a copy of the video of the meeting. I had suggested that this video
could make clear which of our quite different recollections about the meeting
was more accurate. Unfortunately, the camera does not show Ms. Zeitz until after
the Pledge of Allegiance and the conclusion of the flag ceremony. She was,
however, clearly in her seat immediately after the removal of the flag. Whether
she was out of her seat during the Pledge can not answered by the tape.
