AIDS Awareness Needed for the Njyem

In February I worked with Collette Nkom on an AIDS brochure that is now available for use in helping the Njyem community resist this terrible danger. You can print the document from Adobe Acrobat on any printer.

Francois MEDJO busy in Lomie

Francois is our partner in the work, based with his family in Lomie. He oversees everthing there: literacy program development, training, capacity-building, ... you name it! His website is http://www.francoismedardmedjo.blogspot.com/.
He says that young and old Nzime are coming to his door at all times to be involved in the acquisition of reading and writing skills. The Njyem are becoming more and more earnest about the use of their language in nontraditional ways.
Visit his site see how you can help him and his team.
Most recently, he created a team of people to read a story in Nzime that recounts a typical AIDS tragedy. This story is called "Kande's Story" in English, and it is being used powerfully in various translated forms throughout Africa. It is his goal to add the sound to the PowerPoint presentation and then project it throughout the Nzime area.
As he said, "Ignorance kills; people die because they don't know what they are supposed to do. The Kande story will help them avoid this outcome."
Francois leads a nongovernmental organization, ASTRADHE, that is a member of a consortium of NGOs. They have asked his organization to take the lead role in AIDS education.

Nzime literacy work well engaged

These pictures shows how younger readers and older alike are catching on to the idea of literateness. Here is one page of a book on the importance of learning to read:

Our coworkers in Lomie have done an good job in this regard, helping the Nzime move more and more in the direction of literateness. This is under the direction of Francois MEDJO, who is a Badwe'e who has moved into the Nzime community as an other-tongue African missionary. He is teaching a group of others to revise AIDS materials, bringing them into a new, simpler writing system.

This Nzime man is proud of his newly-acquired ability to write.

This Nzime coworker, Ghislain Nka'ala, would like to become a pastor to serve his people better. He is looking for a school that has a program suited to his needs, and for people who have finances to share with him in this endeavor.

There is nothing trivial about getting a nation of people, or a people-group, started down the path of literateness, where numeracy and literacy are known about, and where they are expected to play a role in the life of all but the youngest and the blind.