There’s teaching and Chosen Children but since living here we’ve also been able to:
Help build a church...
The church we’re attending is relatively young. It started with less than ten people gathering on a small front patio of the pastor’s house. The number of people grew, but the space stayed the same. Finally, after months of building the congregation now has a church building to gather in. They’re continuing to build so that the many children will also have a place for sunday school. Building a church here is a little different than just writing a check. Tuesdays and Fridays of every week whoever is free comes after work grabs a pick-ax, bucket, or shovel, and helps. It’s hard work, and takes a while but little by little a church is built.
Share a Jesus Film...
I don’t know when, where, or how this international ministry started (it’s funny how much you don’t know when google isn’t at your fingertips). What I do know is that it’s the book of Luke translated into the native languages in a medium they can all comprehend-film. We’ve been able to travel to a nearby village, Rom-Kong, and after dealing with some technical difficulties, show the film at a conference too. We hope to go out with it once more before we leave.
Take a Ride in a Helicopter...
This is something I have not experienced yet, Tammy has. A family that lives “down the road” so to speak are long term missionaries here. We’ve spent lots of time at their house, playing outside with the kids, and walking around town with them. The husband is a pilot and flies a helicopter here. Usually the helicopter is used for transportation of people and goods or medical emergencies. One Sunday a month however, the pastor of the church we’re attending and the pilot fly to a hard to reach village and preach. They’ve been generous enough to include us in this. The helicopter is small so we go one at a time with them. Tammy loved it and I’ll be flying high in a couple of days.
CEF aka 85 kids in a space big enough for 40...
Child Evangelism Fellowship is a children’s ministry that started in the U.S. Although, I didn’t hear of it until coming here. Every Sunday over eighty neighborhood children pour into a small room practically sitting on top of each other until they can squeeze in no more. Then they crowd the door and windows. They sing, talk, laugh, memorize scripture, read through a Bible story and talk about application (with a focus on prayer). This coming Sunday Tammy and I will get a chance to lead.
Guava Picking and Marketing...
Unlike everything else in this list, these aren’t organized activities, but they’re just as common as the rest.
Guava picking here is what apple picking is in New York. Lucky for us there’s a tree right outside our front door (and 5 more close by). You can’t climb the tree-well African children can-but I don’t because it’s covered in ants, and ants bite here. Instead after jumping for the guavas you can reach, you grab a long stick of some sort and hit the ripe ones (which are yellow instead of green) off the branches. It’s really a creative version of t-ball. There’s two kinds-sour and sweet, but they look the same to me. I don’t like just biting into either but they do make a nice sauce, and tomorrow we’ll attempt to make a cake.
Marketing...
I love Wegmans, but I’m afraid the experience may be a bit dull after learning how to grocery shop here. Market is every eight days right in the center of town, about a fifteen minute hike from our house (longer on the way back when carrying bags and going uphill). Like Wegmans, the market has pretty much everything. When you first enter you pass rows of shoes and clothing. you hook a sharp left in the middle of all of this and enter the meat section.
A note on butcher “shops” in Cameroon:
- there is no refrigeration.
- The meat sits out all day
- every part of the animal is for sale
This means that in this alley of the market your poor nose is assaulted, and you gain a new found knowledge of the anatomy of a cow. skin piled on the floor, hooves/legs on one side of the table all the way to the head and brains on the other. After testing how long one can hold there breath through here(never long enough) you come to a wall, make a left, and enter the vegetable section. This section thankfully runs on a grid, and always has lots of delicious food available. After progressing through vegetables you reach an open air area which is the seafood dept. This always confuses me since we are nine hours from the ocean, nonetheless, there are all sorts of fish and crawfish and other unidentifiable things. After walking through you make another left, then right and start working your way to fruits. If you miss the right you end up in the fabric quarter, but that might be all that bad. The best fruit so far has been pineapples and watermelons, but this morning apples were added to that list. Once you’ve purchased all you can carry (a great way to scale back on how much you spend by the way) you weave in and out of venders back the way you came.
