The examples from the Python 2 code base do not work and it appears that they don't under Python 2 either. These ought to be replaced or updated with examples from the GPGME documentation.
Currently this appears to be buried in the debian/ directory for some unknown reason, probably pertaining to one of the other developers. Documentation is to be moved to a more appropriate docs/ directory and produced using reST in preparation for inevitable publication by way of Sphinx and the existing infrastructure at readthedocs.org or the projects new home at gnupg.org.