By Rita McInerney

Sister Margaret Good, S.N.D., is using her natural abilities as an athlete while serving God through his people in Zaire, Central Africa.

Growing up and going to school at Christ the King, she enjoyed sports, perhaps challenged by her four brothers. Now this avocation is helping in her mission of molding young girls to become teachers to future generations of Zaireans.

At the girls’ preparatory school at Pelende parish in the Bandundu province, about 600 kilometers southwest of the capital city of Kinshasha, she teaches chemistry, physical education and English. Most afternoons between 5 and 6 p.m., in the last hour of daylight in the tropical country, she coaches basketball, softball and volleyball. She has five basketball teams playing interclass competition.

“That’s something I’ve accomplished,” she told the Georgia Bulletin in an interview. She is home on a biannual two months leave to see her mother, Margaret Nelson Goode, her brothers Joe and Jamie and their families, (brother Tony died last year), and another brother Bernie, in Washington, D.C. She has been at the mission parish, which also includes a busy dispensary and a productive farm from which the sisters and students get most of their food, since 1978. She was a teacher at St. Pius X High School from 1970-78. She also taught swimming at the North DeKalb YWCA.

“I have them playing basketball instead of sitting around outside and talking. It teaches them sportsmanship, helps make them value themselves, makes them aware that these are good years for them. And it gives them a chance to relax. They are so wrapped up in their studies.”

“They are always spectators at men’s sports,” she continued. “Ours is the only school in the region where there are girls’ sports. Most schools don’t have the facilities. They always danced a lot, played circle games, but competitive sports were not part of their life. I try to teach them to accept the decision of the referee.”

Each September the girls arrive at the boarding school, their few clothes in handwoven baskets balanced on their heads, after walking the rutted dirt road, little more than a lane, from their villages. The villages could be a day’s walk from Pelende. The tuition and board cost 1,800 zaire’s (about $90) a year.

If they complete the six-year course (from seventh grade through senior high school) they will be qualified to take the national test to become a primary school teacher. Last year, Sister Margaret said, all of the 18 girls who graduated passed the test, a “first” for the school and pleasing to the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, Belgian, American and Zairean on the faculty.

Becoming a teacher or a practical nurse qualified to run the 60-bed dispensary at the mission are their only choices beyond farming the family plot allotted by the village chief. Most often these farms are a few hours walk from the small grass houses in the village. Walking to the well for drinking water takes 45 minutes.

Teachers are paid by the government. One-third of the schools in the country are run by Catholic priests and religious, one-third by Protestants and the rest by nationals. Along with the girls’ preparatory school with its 225 students there is a primary school with 300 girls enrolled from the five villages on the same plateau with the Pelende complex.

The parish covers 40 villages and is served by Jesuits from Belgian. One priest travels out to the people, visiting each village two or three times a year and officiating at lots of marriages and baptisms. There are 11 primary schools in the parish from which come the students for Pelende. The Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur staff two other parish schools to the south of Pelende.

Polygamy is a “very serious problem” for the church in Zaire, Sister Margaret said. Although there are many parishioners in the Pelende villages married 25 year or more who were recently honored at a liturgy celebrating long marriages, polygamy appears to be coming back.

Sister Margaret said when the priest goes out to the village the catechist is supposed to let him know if the man taking a bride already has a wife or wives. If so, the priest cannot marry him. But sometimes the priest is not told of existing wives. When a polygamous situation becomes know, the man is not permitted to receive communion. His first wife may receive but the second or third wives cannot.

Days are busy at the school. Girls are up by 6 a.m. and study until 7. For the next half-hour some clean the dorm and classrooms, other help prepare the food they will eat, mainly the manioc (cassava) plant. It’s roots will supply luku meal and its leaves kisela, a green vegetable shredded to resemble spinach. Other girls will sweep out the refrectory and bring wood to the two Zairean women who cook for them over wood fires on a cement floor.

The school day runs from 7:40 a.m. until 1:10 p.m. After the mid-day meal the girls take a siesta until 3 p.m. when they study. At 5 p.m. they have their sports period.

Their coach, Sister Margaret, played varsity basketball and tennis at St. Pius X High School, and volleyball and softball at Peachtree Hills Recreation Center. At Georgia Tech she took “drownproofing,” a water survival course originated and taught by Fred Lanoe.

She is a hiker who enjoyed exploring the North Georgia mountains. Now she walks for about an hour into the African bush to pray and meditate on the splendor of the tropical land spread out before her eyes. Occasionally she visits the villages on the plateau with one of the native sisters. The villagers, members of the Yaka tribe, are friendly and hospitable, and usually invite the sisters into their small houses for native refreshments. Snack food offered might include dried mushrooms, dried caterpillar, grasshoppers, or flying termites. The villagers also make and serve palm wine.

Sister Margaret respects the Zaireans. “I guess I don’t want them to become like us in culture. I want them to appreciate their culture, their tribalism, their strong family ties. They could very easily become a consumer economy. The teachers want to buy radios, cassettes, warm-up suits. They see these things in magazines. For our girls, I would hope they are capable of continuing their studies and then come back to serve their people instead of going to the city.” There is a college in Kitwit about 60 kilometers away, also a hospital staffed by two doctors and serving a population of 100,000. Zaire’s only university is in Kinshasha.

Few of the educated young people, she admitted, come back to serve their people. “We have a very bad time finding people for the dispensary. It’s not something that would call out to people,” she said.

Run by the SND sisters, the dispensary is staffed by a native sister, a practical nurse trained by the Belgian sisters. The facility serves about 20,000 people annually. It’s more like a hospital, Sister Margaret said. Babies are delivered, bones set, blood transfused, drugs administered. For surgical emergencies, the patient must be rushed to the hospital it Kitwit. Making the trip over the deeply rutted road can be treacherous, especially in the dark night or during the rainy season from May to August when it becomes a track of mud.

Sister Astrid, one of the Zairean sisters, is a candidate for practical nurses training at the Kitwit hospital, Sister Margaret mentioned. But the SND community is in need of a sponsor or sponsors to pay the $2,000 for the course, which extends one year beyond the high school level.

There is no industry or jobs for the people of the region. Most of the crops, peanuts, corn, beans, manioc, coffee and rice are sold to the sisters or to the occasional truck driver whose vehicle is able to make it over the bad road.

While the women farm, the men hunt game to feed the family – antelopes, monkeys and doves; weave baskets, or make furniture, well-made wooden pieces, according to Sister Margaret, at the workshop run by the priests.

Zaire, at one time the Belgian Congo, has been governed since 1965 by President Mobutu Sese Seko, who exercises almost total control of the nation of three million people, most of whom live in small villages like those in Pelende. Along with transportation, communication in the bush is difficult. There’s a short wave radio at the house of the Jesuits which can send or receive from 7 to 7:30 each morning. Mail from the states takes about two months.

Early in September, the Atlantan will fly back to Kinshasha by way of Brussels. In her suitcases there will be new gym shorts and shirts for her players, and also for the teachers. There will also be light clothing donated by relatives and friends to be sold to the villagers at the store operated by the sisters to help meet expenses.

She will return with mixed feelings, sad over leaving her mother, 87, and all the relatives and friends she has shared good times with since early July. But she has work to do, helping to bring god’s love and truth, and education to an eager people.