Abundantly Blessed in Africa

Abundantly Blessed in Africa

So, just want to start out and say Hi to all my friends, family, and donors on this journey! Thank you for supporting me and making it possible for me to be here! We are successfully in Cote d’Ivoire! I don’t have internet this month in Africa so my blogs will be sparse and only uploaded if our blog leader can get wifi. So, I miss you all but won’t have much contact just so you are aware 🙂

We left America on 1/16 and it was a long journey that started us leaving the hotel at 1 am that morning to wait at the airport for our 5:40 AM flight. Everything takes much longer with a group of 36 people! Then 3 planes later, we arrived in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire. We all stayed the night at a hostel and had a meal together as a squad and then everyone parted ways in the morning on 1/18 to travel in our teams of 6-7 people to our ministry hosts. We traveled on a bus for 5.5 hours to reach Bouake, the nearest city to us. And it was interesting to see everyone get off the bus at one point for a “PP” break, with men urinating less than 20 feet from the bus and women squatting in the bush. Note to self: carry toilet paper and hand sanitizer everywhere you go 🙂 We took a “taxi” in a van to our village of Diabo and then were shown our living quarters, fit with mosquito nets over the mattresses.

We are easing into African life since we have toilets but there is a water shortage so we use buckets of water to flush the toilets and to take baths. Our hosts were so welcoming and many of the church members came throughout the afternoon to greet us and to give us our supper. They even gave us fanta/ coke as a treat in the afternoon 🙂 These people are beyond generous and so hospitable and I think it’s their culture because they just laugh at us when we say thank you for everything. They always want to make sure we are full and satisfied after eating and give us large portions and are always concerned because we don’t eat very much. They do a lot of manual labor with carrying trays of food, buckets of water and working on the farm so they seem to eat more than us. It’s amazing to watch the women balance heavy items on their heads and even the young children do it with smaller items and put us Americans to shame!

I feel very blessed to have such kind hosts that are always worried about our happiness and making sure we have what we need. They really have the heart of Jesus. The journey was long to get here but I can tell the Lord has great things in store and is with us. He’s already proven Himself faithful. We have a lot to learn from these kind brothers and sisters in Christ who have adopted us in as their own for this month. We have two translators and then a pastor from a different city who is helping us for a few days and speaks English. We are in a pretty remote village so there are rarely white people here so we attract a lot of attention and all the village kids were surrounding our place after they realized we had arrived. They get a kick out of us and we stop traffic (literally!) everywhere we go and attract a possy. So goodbye privacy, HELLO Africa!