God´s blessing for child and parents

At 10 a.m. we came to the Baobab church. The French service was still going on, and we had to wait for half an hour for the Kikongo service to begin. As usual, there were many items on the agenda and today there were also a baby blessing and communion. A visiting preacher held the sermon. In good Congolese style, his preaching was accentuated by using body language and vocal abilities to the fullest. Julienne interpreted sporadically, hence we didn’t understand much. At 1.30 p.m. the church service ended. Afterwards, we were invited to the pastor on soft drinks and biscuits.

One of our entrepreneurs, Dialendua, was also there. We took the opportunity to interview him about his business. He has a clothing store that he doubled in size when he was going through our training and got a loan. He gave us good news about his business, which is especially welcome for us, since positive news are sparse around here. We asked him to give us examples of the benefits of our training. He told us that the financial planning, the budgeting and accounting are very useful. He also told us that he is starting a new business, quite different from the clothing store, namely a pig farm. Dialendua also told us that he has signed up for the FBS course. We are happy for that, because it is his kind of people we want in our courses. He is an exemplary entrepreneur who repaid his loans entirely according to plans.

The second entrepreneur we met was Brigitte. Her family started a shop for sanitary and pharmacy articles when her husband attended our course. Today, we were in search of toilet paper and we just went into the closest store, which turned out to be the store of one of our entrepreneurs. We did not recognize Brigitte at first. Sometimes, it might be quite difficult to recognize a Congolese lady. Many women have a set of wigs and they can look very different from time to time. Brigitte had changed her appearance radically from this simple reason. But she recognized us because we still had the same hairdo, except for Bernt who haven’t got any hair at all. When we had realized who she was, we interviewed her as well. She gave us good news and she seemed happy with their business, and after our conversation, we left the store triple satisfied. Firstly, we had seen results of our courses, secondly, we had benefited her business and thirdly, we had satisfied our need of toilet paper.