Quiet week

It has been a quiet week with Ron being gone in South Africa. He was supposed to blog from there, but has been having internet issues. So I will put in a blurb for him. Our mission wanted us Ron to go for further treatment in Johannesburg, South Africa. Why South Africa? They are on the cutting edge of medicine, even surpassing that of the U.S. So, Monday off he went. He has gone to several doctors, CT scans and all of that will be reported Monday. He will hopefully post all of the details. But he has said it is beautiful and you can buy lots of stuff that they don't have here - so he has been busy shopping in between appointments!

So here I have been busy with language, kids in school and learning my way around town. I have been going to language classes by myself, so that is 2 hours of me and wolof. I have learned a lot and am praying that it sticks in my brain. I find that in class with the teacher I remember what I am to say and then at night with our guard - my mind goes completely blank. It is very frustrating. They have a wolof saying that you need to go slow, slow so you can catch a monkey in the bush - so I am learning that - it makes the wolof laugh when I say it. I am impatient I want to conquer wolof - now! I need to remember I have to take it one step at a time.

All week the guard has been wanting to do attaya (tea) with the boys. I told him that I didn't want them to not be able to sleep during a school night - so they did it last night. Attaya, or gunpowder tea is strong, sweet tea served in tiny glassfuls in a 3 round ritual. Water is boiled on a little gas stove with a small packet of tea leaves and a full cup of sugar, each round with added sugar to symbolize the growing sweetness of friendship. The first bitter round is for life, the second for friendship and the third is the sweetest, for love. The tea is poured impossibly high from cup to cup, up to a two foot arc without spilling a drop. This creates delicious foam. Sometimes they add mint and eucalyptus to the second and third rounds making it even more delicious.

The guard loves our kids and loves teaching them wolof. Last night he invited them to his village to meet his wife and family and share a meal. They are really looking forward to that. He stays here in town during the week and then on Saturday he goes and sees his wife. She is pregnant with their first child. Pray for him, he is a very devout Muslim. Pray that we can get enough language to be able to share Jesus with him.

Here are some pictures of last night:

Thanks for your prayers - continue to pray for wisdom and clarity for the doctors with Ron. We are hoping and praying that he can come home Wednesday.

Fun at Magic Land

This lady was in a full covering riding a roller coaster! Later on our way home, we saw 2 women in full coverings jogging! We told our kids - that's different! This is one of the Lebou fishing villages - this was a view from the Ferris wheel.

At the end of the day we had the most amazing ice cream at a store called Nice Cream!

We had a great day at Magic Land - we went with our supervisors Cal and Patty McIntire and their son Dillon. The kids had a lot of fun - they had to change their schema of what an amusement park looked like, but it was still fun.

Today Ron left for Johannesburg South Africa to get treatment for his kidney issues. I will be doing language study by myself for the next week or so - I know my brain will hurt after 2 hours of intense study. Pray that I will use this time wisely and God will grow me and grant me extra doses of patience. Pray that the kids won't miss Ron too much - Faith had her first meltdown this morning. We will update when we know something more about Ron - he has his first appointment tomorrow. He went off loaded down with a long list of things to buy! You can get pretty much everything in South Africa, so he has much to do besides get his stones busted up! He will probably post from there as well!

Pictures

Our adopted kitty snuggled up in Faith's blanket.

These are the vans that they travel in - they guys ride on the back watching for those that want to ride. They hop on and off! This was travelling down the highway.

Day to Day

Here are some pictures from life around here:

Sorry it has been so long since a post! We are currently having some issues with our Internet, so we have had to borrow a neighbor's signal. We hope to get that resolved this week. They hope so too!

We really like it here in Senegal. It is much more modern than Mali, especially around the school neighborhood. Our days are currently filled with getting our current house set up, and working with our supervisors showing us the lay of the land. We started our language classes yesterday. Wolof is much different than French. There are a lot of fun words to say and since it is a phonetic language – once you learn the letters it is much easier to read. Our language helper is great. Greetings here are very important too! We spent most of our class yesterday learning those.

We mentioned in a post last week the Talibe boys. Talibe means follower – they are learning the Koran from a teacher. We went to their courtyard last week and did a scabies clinic. We basically put cream on their open sores and loved on them. It was very sad. These boys are so torn up with the scabies – I know they must be miserable! The open sores were bad especially around their hands, knees, buttocks and groins. They were a little shy at first to drop their pants, but after we separated them a little bit, it wasn't so bad. Our supervisor works with this one center of boys a lot, so we know that we will get to work with them more! It was neat to see their love for him – we were turning on the street to go to their center (courtyard) and some of the boys saw his car and through the windows we saw them shout his name and then just run with the car. It was great to see!

The pictures above are from our time we went looking at some beaches around - the fuzzy island in the back is called "snake island", not sure why - they have great diving places and neat places to climb and investigate. We hope to go there when it gets a little warmer. The weather is much different here. It is windy every day and right now they are having a cold front - not freezing like the US, but for here very cold. We usually wear coats and sweaters/sweatshirts every day. When you stand in the sun it is bearable, but at night it gets quite chilly.

As I finish this post that has taken several days due to Internet issues, I promise to upload many more pictures now that we have Internet!

Thanks for your patience (everybody but Amie!).

We hit the ground running!

We have had a busy couple of days since arriving here in Senegal. We came into town on Friday were met at the airport by one of the helpers here and we travelled to our house. We were picked up for dinner by our supervisors and ate some of Senegal's delicious fish. We hung out at their house and played games until late!

Saturday afternoon our supervisors took us to one of the Lebou villages along with a visiting volunteer medical team. While there, we stopped at a courtyard of a Talibe school. This is where 150+ boys who have been given by their families to an Islamic teacher are schooled. They are taught the Koran - basically a rote memory thing, they really don't understand what they are learning, as it is in Arabic. After a morning lesson, the boys go out all day and beg and then bring back the money to the teacher. This provides for their food. The boys come back for some sort of dinner and then they sleep huddled into 2 rooms. We went there because they currently have an outbreak of scabies (skin lice). It was very sad to see these boys suffering and cared for so poorly. The scabies spread easily now (cool season) because they huddle so close together to keep warm and they sleep with their hands down in their pants to keep their hands warm. So the scabies are extremely bad in their genital areas. They are very sore and itchy. There is no running water in the courtyard either. Cal, our supervisor, is going over there to do treatments - which means putting the boys into tubs and bathing them with special soap. The medical team visiting from the States went and dropped off vitamins and creme. Their courtyard is probably smaller than the house we are living in.

After we left the Talibe, we went to the home of one of the fishermen Cal works with. He fed us lunch - a rice, vegetable and fish dish called Tiebou-Dienn (cheeb-oo-jenn) served from a common bowl. We then shared attaya - which is an event more than a drink. It consists of three rounds of tea. Each round is made with the same tea leaves and sugar is added - so the tea is weaker and sweeter. It is delicious. Luke and Faith weren't crazy about it - the tea is a little bitter, especially in the first round. They add so much mint, vanilla sugar and euculyptus drops - it is a sweet, minty concoction. It is truly an art which is learned. It was fun to watch.

Saturday night found us back at our supervisors house watching the Baltimore Ravens win their game on satellite TV until around 1 a.m. It was a great day.

Senegal here we come!

We will be travelling to Senegal on Friday. We are very excited. There will be many changes and exciting things happening. We will be in a large, modern (for Africa) city. People have tried to explain it to us, but we are fairly confident that we have no idea what we are in for! Here are some things people have shared about where we will be in Senegal - there is ocean every where you look - we will be spoiled by living in a big house that was for a missionary family currently on stateside assignment. We are told it even has some grass! One of the big changes we have coming is that the kids will be starting school at Dakar Academy. We are all excited for that! We need some time away from each other! We have pretty much spent 24/7 with each other since October -while they have done great - the kids are ready to be away from each other - we are ready to go out on a date - even if it is breakfast or lunch! Another change is that we will have to break out the winter coats - the high's are in the mid 70's. Brrrrr!

We have enjoyed our time in Bamako - the people we have met, both workers and Nationals. We have been studying French since October - not nearly enough time! When we go to Senegal we will switch to Wolof as well as continue to speak and practice our French. My 41 year old brain is stressed! The kids will continue in French at the school - we are really excited about that! We will post some pictures as soon as we get settled and figure out our Internet.

Please continue to pray for the people of Mali - there are some exciting things happening. Pray for the workers to remain healthy and energized for the tasks ahead! They are great people and it has been our honor to work among them for the last 3 months. We appreciate their hospitality!

The Village

The countdown has begun. We leave Mali in 6 short days. There is much to do. We have gained great respect for Malians during our time here. We have found them to be a welcoming people who enjoy relationship, laughter and a good party! As we prepare to leave, I realize that I still have not posted about one of my most meaningful experiences here – my overnight stay in a village. I started writing about it, but never finished the post. Since I can't sleep tonight – hopefully I will finish and get it published! It will probably be long – it was 36 hours of completely new information for my brain and body. I will try to filter out what was most significant. Here goes:

I offer my up-front apology for the pictures which will so obviously be missing from this post. I didn't take any. There was so much to take in, and I was so appreciative for everyone in the villages I visited allowing me into their lives for a couple of days. I would have felt like I was intruding if I had been snapping away with the camera. I really don't know that they would have felt like I was intruding, but I would have. If you don't like it, either stop reading, or come get me! J (Author's note: Chris gave me a very hard time about this. However, she later went to the village for an afternoon, armed with her camera. She returned with exactly ZERO pictures and told me she understood how I felt. We will work on graciously asking permission and getting you some photos.)

We LIVE in a large capital city. Much is different here from our life in America, but lots of things are quite similar. We don't feel as though we have really gone through much culture shock so far. I am not sure when that will come or what it will look like. However, the village was drastically different from life anywhere I have ever lived – Bamako, Wake Forest, Pikesville, Reisterstown – or any place I have even visited. I question whether my words will do it justice – pictures probably would have helped! I went to the village with a new friend, Daouda, who is doing church planting among the Bambara people here in Mali. He and his wife have been working in the villages around Bamako for several years. There are some relatively new believers in the villages we went to visit. Daouda relates very well to the Malians, and his Bambara is great. Everything I understood was due to him!

There was much that was good about my time in the village. The best part was simply being with the people. They welcomed me (us) wholeheartedly. I was treated as an honored guest at all times. This meant that I had the best chair, I was given a chicken (alive at first, later cooked as part of our dinner), and that I was generally the center of attention. My inability to speak their language made their job more difficult, but they were extremely gracious nonetheless. Don't get me wrong, I brought a lot to them as well – tremendous laughter! Men and women, boys and girls all enjoyed my attempts to parrot back their greetings. I wasn't even trying to give the proper response – I never knew what it should have been. I simply offered the same greeting that was given to me. Lack of language was definitely a challenge. Although I knew it was futile, I think my brain kept trying to understand what my ears were hearing.

No doubt the biggest challenge for me was the food. I have never claimed a strong stomach. I can vividly remember my first (and last) raw oyster. It went down, but didn't stay there for more than a second or two. So Daouda prepared me on the ride out for what to expect. He told me people usually struggle with the food or the latrine, or both. The latrine was fine – I didn't have to use it much while I was out there anyway. Food was a different story. The graciousness of the people meant that they were quick to offer me something to eat – an offer I could not refuse, culturally. We took a gift of rice to the village where we slept, so dinner was rice and sauce. But two times before that and once the following day, I had tow. I don't like tow. Not in a box, not with a fox, not in the rain, nor on a train. I have tried it, and I do not like it, Sam I am! Tow is similar to cream of wheat (once it has thickened enough to hold in your hand), but is made from either millet or corn that has been freshly pounded. It has no sugar. If you are like me before this experience, you aren't sure what millet is. Two words – bird seed. Malians eat tow from a large common bowl, using their right hand to reach in and scoop some out from directly in front of them. Before eating it, they dip the tow in the sauce in another bowl – usually green and somewhat slimy. I had green sauce with a bonus – brown fish sauce mixed in! I suppose this is the place to tell you that this stomach struggles with fish in America on a good day. Not all fish, just fish that tastes, well, fishy. I prayed much during every meal, and even prayed the second day that I would not be offered lunch. God chose to answer that one otherwise, but he definitely helped me with each meal. I did not enjoy any of it, but I ate enough to be gracious and everything stayed down. (My friend Daouda told me that he has eaten some crazy stuff in his years of service and that his prayer is "God, I will get it down if you keep it down.") Daouda also told me the next day on the ride home that he was worried about me during our first meal – that he has never seen anyone turn so red while eating!

The food being a challenge for me caused me another challenge – I was forced to face the fact that I was so ungrateful for the food that was available. I even had the choice to eat little. Let's face it – I could have missed all meals for two days and this body would have found some excess energy stored up! Sure, it was new to me and quite different from what I know, but I could not shake the feeling that my ingratitude meant that I believed I deserved better food than this. Yet these people eat tow day in and day out, and they are grateful for it. They know that if they aren't eating tow, they probably won't be eating at all. This still is not all resolved internally, even weeks after the experience. I have heard good things and am therefore excited about the food in Senegal, but that just perpetuates my lack of gratitude for the tow. Not sure what to do with that.

Sleeping out under the stars was great. I was on a thin mattress on a cot, in a light blanket/sleeping bag, with sheets on the mattress and another thin throw blanket on top. I slept in my jeans and sweatshirt, and was still a little chilly! (I was offered the opportunity to sleep inside – they would have preferred it, but the air inside the mud brick building did not move at all, and I probably would have been so hot that I would not have been able to sleep.) I covered my head a little bit – to protect me from the chill, the mosquitoes (that really were not there since rainy season had passed), and the brilliant light of the stars and moon. The sky was really beautiful without any lights to compete. I was woken numerous times throughout the night by the noise of animals – some tied up, some roaming around my bed – but each time fell back asleep and felt adequately rested come morning.

Day two offered more of the same: laughter at (and with) me, sitting under a tree drinking tea, more preferential treatment for me, and more tow for lunch. It took a long time for us to leave – much longer than we had planned. In much (if not all) of Africa, the guest must ask for and be granted "the road" prior to leaving. It took a while for us to be given the road at our last village, and Daouda knows many people in surrounding villages, so we had to stop and greet quite a few who were out when we were passing – to not do so would have been rude – quite a cultural shift from life in the states! We had several more offers for tow, but evening was approaching so we did have to get on the road to be home before dark. And the four dollar can of Pringles in the car was calling us!

I realize this is a long post with little detail of the ministry that took place on our trip. While Daouda did tell a story from God's Word to the men of the village who were interested, most of it was relationship building so that there would be a trusted foundation on which to build in the future. The work is very slow, but it needs to be for it to be genuine. More about that in the future, if you are interested. There were many more experiences, all different, most positive. If it had not happened before, the village made me realize – WOW, I live in Africa. With that, we have great peace we are exactly where he wants us to be at this point in time.