Clothes

Do you remember what we said about the weather in Congo? It's HOT! What do you wear in hot weather?

If you look at the pictures on this website, it looks like kids in Congo wear a lot of the same things we do. Do you think they go out to the shopping mall and buy them? What shopping mall?!

Most of the clothes you see on kids in Congo are second-hand, sent to Africa by charities in North America and Europe. Congolese mothers buy them very cheaply, by our standards. But if the family doesn't have more than a few dollars a week, at the most, even inexpensive hand-me-downs are hard to buy.

So boys in the Ubangi area usually have just one or two pairs of jeans, maybe a pair of shorts, and one or two T-shirts. Girls have one or two skirts and a couple of T-shirts or blouses. Often the kids will wear one set of clothes every day and the other set for church on Sundays. Sometimes you see pictures of girls wearing a traditional Congolese kind of dress. That means her mother made it for her and it cost a lot of money. The brightly patterned cloth they make it with is too expensive for most families to use very much.