In the village of Muluma Musulu, in the DR Congo, poverty and wrong beliefs about gender have had devastating consequences. Like in many other places, people believe that women belong at home, so women and girls rarely have opportunities for education or employment. As a result, wives were completely dependent on their husbands to provide for them. When their husbands did not have work, the families went hungry. In desperation, too many families sold their daughters into prostitution just to obtain basic needs like soap. 

This problem really bothered the church, but what could they do? Their role was to care for spiritual matters. Then, through TCT training, the women of the church learned that, with God’s help, they could show God’s love and fight poverty and prostitution in their community. Some of them knew how to make cleaning products. With the church contributing the supplies, they held a training to teach other women how to make their own household cleaners to sell. At the end of the training, each attendee was given supplies to start their own business.

The women got to work and began earning money and providing for their families. When their husbands, who had been looking for work elsewhere, returned to the village, they found that there was something to eat at home! These families have started sending their children to school. And their daughters no longer need to sell their bodies for basic needs.