Can you imagine getting paid in leaves? Leaves that you then have to feed to your children? That’s the shocking reality for Matunda. After a day of toiling on someone else’s farm, all she gets in return is a handful of cassava leaves and yams. She desperately wants to provide for her family, but all she gets for a hard day’s labour is a tiny handful of yams and cassava leaves. They only eat one small meal a day. 

Something has to be done.    

£240 will give four women like Matunda the skills they need to provide for their families.  For just 5 days of rice and beans, you can change the life of people like Matunda, for whom adverse poverty is a daily reality.   

Matunda and her three children are Mbuti pygmies – a cruelly stigmatised people. They live in a village in the forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Many in the country consider them sub-human, claiming they are 75 per cent animal. 

The villagers sleep in makeshift huts, which leak when it rains. There’s just one cooking pot for the entire village. There’s no safe drinking water, no school and no money for medicine. It’s poverty on a scale that’s difficult to imagine. 

The only way to get something to eat is to make the long journey to the nearest town, where they work in exchange for food on other people’s farms. ‘We don’t have the tools to cultivate our own land,’ Matunda explains. ‘I feel incredibly sad when I don’t have anything to give the children,’ says Matunda. ‘But I don't know a place where I can get more food.’ 

But there is hope, because the church is here. The local church in nearby Madzangina has started to reach out to Matunda and the other pygmy families – helping them understand their true value, loved and created by God. By joining with us in the Mean Bean Challenge, you’ll be helping support this vital work, both in the DRC and around the world.