Three weeks ago a lady called Jabulile came in – she’s probably in her mid-to-late 40s and she works for the council as a street cleaner near the Good News Centre. When she came in, we asked her to write her name down, but she just shrugged her shoulders – she didn’t know how to. So I sat with her and we started from scratch, learning the alphabet letter by letter. She doesn’t find it easy, but each week she goes home and practices the letters we have learnt in the lesson and comes back with pages and pages of them written out! When she sees us pull up in the car, she just abandons her work to come into the Good News Centre to learn to read, write and speak English - she’s clearly very motivated to change her life and to work hard to give herself better opportunities in life. Working with this one lady is now one of the things I look forward to most each week.
It’s just so awesome to see the smile and the expression of pride on her face as she makes progress – and all we’re doing is learning letters of the alphabet! It’s a God-given skill we have all learnt when we are very young and we probably now can’t remember a time when we couldn’t read or write, it’s completely normal for us. But for this woman, this is life-changing, and I always leave Clermont after the class feeling so uplifted and thinking : “How awesome! For me, that’s what this is all about!” It’s not teaching her the Bible or preaching in a conventional sense, but it’s using our time and skills that God has given us to help other people and hopefully make a difference in their lives.
Esther Abson
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