Four Weeks Pay High Dividends

It’s Friday, our last day in a series of four weeks of Old Testament Storybook training with five different language groups. Each group infused the week with their own unique personality, as colorful and distinct as their wax-print outfits: the Ngamh jovial and boisterous, the Sara Kaba Dem and Naa enthusiastic, the Day more serious, the Sara Madjingaye full of questions. Our students are pastors, evangelists, lay leaders, and teachers. They have come to learn to teach others to read and to understand what they have read—not in the national language of French, but in their own language.

Most of the days of training have been spent discussing literacy skills and teaching activities. Over the past two days, Carla introduced three skills: remembering, retelling, and applying what you have read. If you cannot understand and apply the Bible to your life, what good is it to be able to read? With each skill, we teach a sample lesson and activity, modeling how our students should teach others. We read a story, such as “The Birth of Isaac,” following the reading with questions. The students are eager to answer, snapping their fingers at us: Pick me! Pick me! They are eager to volunteer for the activities as well. One day, they play ‘Sight Word Go Fish’ with as much enthusiasm as fifth graders. On another, they cheer and clap when they act out skits on the story of “Abraham and the Three Messengers.”

After the sample lesson in French, we have the students prepare materials or practice the activity in their own language. For many, writing and teaching in their own language is difficult and laborious. For others, the task of summarizing a story or considering what the characters might have thought or felt is completely new. Where possible, we give suggestions or ask leading questions to help them out. They are learning new skills and new ways of thinking—not just new information.

During our daily tea break we ask our students: “Do you have a literacy program in your church? How will you use what we’ve taught you when you go home?” Some answers are encouraging. Adults are eager to read in their own language. Some churches have programs or have had them in the past. But there is great need, too. Need for materials. Need for new teachers. Need to stir up a desire in the children’s hearts as well. Need for encouragement to continue the work once it has begun. There is so much still to do.

But today is Friday, our last day, and they are singing as we enter the red brick, corrugated metal roof building. Like a soloist, one lone voice sings out now and then, introducing each stanza between the steady rhythm of the men and women’s parts. It is Chadian singing, nasal like their languages and based on a scale odd to my Western ear. It is how they have started each day of teaching since we have come. But today, we are not here to teach. Today they teach their own lessons, showing us what they have learned. We observe their teaching and are encouraged; they are applying what we’ve taught them. Their teaching is like their singing, both similar to ours and yet different, too.

If there is one thing we know, it is this: if biblical literacy rates in Chad are to rise, it will be through the efforts of Chadian men and women such as these. Our efforts will be multiplied through theirs. This is our hope and prayer.