![“Petite flamme”: The Miracle Continues](https://eyut279xk3q.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/20140820-04.jpg?strip=all&lossy=1&resize=283%2C212&ssl=1)
“Petite flamme”: The Miracle Continues
A project which, in the outskirts of Kinshasa – capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo – would like to give teens an adequate education and nutrition, medical treatment and clothing is known as Petite Flamme (Little Flame) and it has been taking care of 1650 children inserted in 9 schools. “It has already been 17 years that I have been accompanying this project,” says Edi, project collaborator for the Focolare Movement, “which for the past 19 years we have taken ahead thanks to the “Support at a Distance” project of the New Families Movement. Aside from the children, the teachers and their families are also benefited, since they have a job even if the salary is a modest one, in a country where the unemployment rate exceeds 80%.”
There are countlesss examples of the concrete support that the project is able to give. “For example,” Edi continues, “a single-mother in difficulty was able to obtain a diploma in sewing, and is now able to provide food for her child and for herself. Or in another instance, an orphaned teenage boy will be the first to graduate in mathematics and computer science at the University of Kinshasa”. At Petite Flamme we also welcome unsighted children who follow a formation course especially made for them. And once they have completed their studies, the teens are not left without any means of livelihood: the teenage girls who have received a diploma in dressmaking, for example, will be given a sewing machine so that they can start their own professional activity. “These children, receive a special formation in music,” Edi explains, “and they receive as a gift a classical guitar. During the graduation celebration a blind boy sang for everyone a song composed by all of them as a gift, and to thank their parents for having taken care of them despite the difficulties that their situation involves, especially in a poor country.”
![](https://eyut279xk3q.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/20140820-04.jpg?strip=all&lossy=1&resize=283%2C212&ssl=1)
Jonathan (left) with his classmates