Therese Kilembo is in her mid-thirties, the mother of three girls and one boy, aged thirteen to nine. At maybe five feet, four inches tall, she's buttery and beautiful, all curves--from her round, dimpled face to her full lips--and all smiles. And like her smiling eyes, which are dark, slanted, and elegant, the woman herself practically twinkles.
Last week, for example, she wore her hair in sleek, tight coils that gleamed, weaving wildly in and out of each other. And she tends to wear bright, happily-colored flowered housedresses with short sleeves or bare shoulders. Sometimes she covers those coils, knotting an equally loud scarf around her head and a
chitenge around her waist, and then--still twinkling--she looks like a proper Congolese woman.
Some Mondays and Thursdays, she walks out of her house to greet me in a grass-green t-shirt. She has covered her hair with a headscarf the color of lemonade, and she's wrapped her waist in a green
chitenge cloth printed with United Methodist symbols and slogans that declare, in French and Swahili--and in red--that God is the Lord of everything. "I've been a United Methodist woman all day," she tells me gleefully, grinning.
Sometimes, though, when it's chilly, or when there's a storm blowing into Fisenge, pushing our group of women into the dim, one-room church building, she pulls a thin, white, knitted sweater over her dress and crosses her arms across her chest.
And I will remember Therese, most often, just like that, perched in a plastic chair next to Patricia at the front of that room, arms crossed against the wind that's slapping sheets of rain against the building, her eyes squinting at a student's work, her mouth smiling at something someone has said. I'll remember her in that white sweater on the first week I attended class, preaching in Bemba, preaching about love--what is love? she'd asked when we began--and twinkling, so animated that I could swear I understand much of what she is communicating in a tribal tongue.
Of course, she's wonderfully gifted, there's no question. The woman speaks at least five different languages, and she nearly finished a seminary degree years ago.
But she raises four children and loves many more, and she loves and holds up the arms of a husband who, most likely, will soon carry the weight of Kafakumba's leadership on his shoulders. And she teaches twenty-seven women--twenty-eight, counting myself--to read and write, sew, crochet, embroider, and to own their time, their lives, their family's and their own futures.
The woman
looks like love, and kindness.
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