The Perpetual Education Fund office work

Mark here:

We are called as Perpetual Education Fund Self-Reliance missionaries. The Fund is a wonderful thing that gets many of our young people into school to prepare for a better future. We have 300 recipients here in Kinshasa, and are growing here, and starting in Lubumbashi, 1,200 miles to the east. Next year, we are told we will begin helping church members who have no other livelihood to start small businesses of their own.

One of our duties is to contact all of our loan recipients by phone once a month. We can’t mail them a statement, because there is no mail service here. We encourage them in their studies and assess problems. For them to make a loan payment at the bank is challenging, because the bank system itself is pretty young in the country. Nonetheless, they learn responsibility and self-reliance when they keep their commitments faithfully.

The students are required to make a small loan payment ($5) every month while they are in school, more after graduation. Very often, a student who is behind in his payments will commit to come see us or to make a payment at the bank. What we found is that those commitments are usually forgotten, so I began to make a record of them and watch for the completion of the student’s intentions. Occasionally we send a text message reminder. The result is fewer students are behind on their loans.

Part of the process of getting a P.E.F. student loan is an extensive online application. The students approach this after the "Planning for Success" workshop, and interviews with church leaders. Because of power outages, slow connections, server slowdowns, etc., they sometimes take a full day on the computers in our office to apply.

This week, Elaine took her beautiful African fabric (actually imported from Holland), and made a simple bedspread for our bed.

Rainy season is upon us, so we experienced the drive home in the rain this week. The video is from inside our Toyota pickup truck. Along the way an oncoming car flashes the headlights at us, indicating that he wants to turn in front of us. We've learned to do this in hopelessly congested traffic. On rainy days, all the street vendors disappear except for umbrella salespeople. This is a pretty mellow drive home, enjoyable to see the rain for dry-country people from Utah. Our rainy season lasts 9 months, we are told.

We pass the gas station where we buy fuel. Gas is about $6 a gallon, not bad. After the gas station we see one of the innumerable buildings under construction in Kinshasa. Elaine has started a photo collection of them. People start buildings here and run out of money, but might come back later and pick up where they left off.

Just this morning, we learned that the wall on the left in this video is that of the U.S. Embassy in Kinshasa. We pass it every day, but it doesn't advertise itself prominently. Just yesterday one of our P.E.F. workers, Boris, had a background check there for his new employment at the U.S. Aid Agency. As we pass the embassy, you can barely see the U.S. flag through the tree on the left.