A Day with Ruhtt Mbumwae

We have been trying to give visitors Roger and Mary Beth McCown as many experiences as possible during their stay with us. With that in mind, Roger, Mary Beth, and I tagged along with Ruhtt Mbumwae on Wednesday as she visited four of the Christian community schools that she oversees.

Our first stop was Simikkakata, the blind community just outside Kalomo. In 1998 Ruhtt and her husband Shepherd found a group of families huddled together by the side of the road. They were blind people who had been gathered from the streets of Livingstone and abandoned with no shelter, food, or assistance to begin a new life on the land provided them. Ruhtt and Shepherd mobilized the George Benson Christian College students to build housing and get a local church congregation started in the new community. More recently a school serving over 400 area children was established in a nearby abandoned building. A new church facility also houses a preschool.

Next we visited Katungu where a brand new classroom block is almost finished. An older structure built by the community is already too small for the needs of a growing school population. As in all of the construction projects Ruhtt manages, the community must provide the labor. The parents of the students mold all the bricks, gather the sand and rocks needed, and assist with the building of the structure under supervision of a contractor. We found a group of women gathered under a tree ready to prepare lunch for all the students. Care International provides food for the school lunch program and mothers take turns coming to cook.

We bumped over rocky roads and narrow paths to Siabalumbi. The new classroom building here was funded by donations from a Christian school in Canada. Now community members at Siabalumbi are constructing additional houses for teachers.

Our last stop was at the community of Mutala. Here the first graders sang for us.

At every school we found students busily working. When we entered their classrooms, the students stood up and greeted us in unison. The teachers were glad to have their students show us the work they were doing. At Katungu, two second grade boys came to the front and proudly read to us. At every school we found parents working on construction projects and preparing lunches. Every classroom had books and teaching resources in use.

These are community schools, which means that the communities rather than the government’s ministry of education initiated the schools. Each began with an active, strong church whose members wanted to reach out to the community. The community members and outside donations provide material and financial support to operate the schools. Each school serves an area that has no other school within 15-20 kilometers of the community. Ruhtt and those who support her are making a difference in the lives of children and families all over this region. We were blessed to spend a day seeing how God is at work in this ministry.