More homes in Bobo.......................

During those years we lived in the city, it was important we live in close proximity to Maranathe Institute since I was a professor there; Dad also taught a couple classes, and Dad was involve in constructing many of the Institute buildings. Because we lived in rented houses, we could never keep the same house more than a term, so we ended up living in three houses in the neighborhood of Maranatha.

There was one house right on the campus, and that was so handy for work for both of us - no driving. Of course, we always had an abundance of students in our homes when we lived near the Institute. We also helped to entertain visiting professors and visitors. It was in this home that we had the privilege of entertaining the Ivory Coast Alliance Church president, Joseph Koffi and his wife. They came for a few days and ended up staying longer as Pastor Koffi got very sick with a flu.  We had a number of Ivoirien students at the school in those days, and our house became a Baoulé village, as they paraded in and out with food for their Papa and to pray for him. etc. 

We remember one other event when we lived in that house - Dad especially remembers it.  That was also the year I decided to teach an English class in a private/govenment school in town.  That was an interesting experience. It was also the year of the big red dust storm - we never saw anything else like it in all our years in Africa and neither had the local population. Many people were frightened! It started during the night and I drove through the red dust down to my English class the next morning, only to find no one else was there that day. It was really eerie!  The next day I was scheduled to drive over to Baramba in Mali to help train Malien pastors in TEE.  Neysa Costa used to work with me in TEE and so she went with me. Everything was still red dust - you could only see a few feet ahead of you on the road. We had AC in the car so were able to keep the car closed up. It was really dangerous driving - everyone had their lights on and drove slowly.  It left as quickly as it came, and no one really had any idea what it was except for a sandstorm which blew down from the Sahara. So our return trip - after several days of teaching in Mali - was normal.

But poor Dad was left with the house to cope with. That house on the campus had shutters, no glass windows and so all that fine red dust filtered through the house and settled on the floors and walls and furniture.  Dad and Yusufu decided the only thing to do was to take every stick of furniture our of the house, turn a hose on inside and wash the ceilings and walls, windows, everything. Then wipe each piece of furniture and nicknachs and books, etc, wash curtains and put everything back in the house again.  I came home to a very clean house and an exhausted Dad and Yusufu.  We never ever saw a dust storm like that again!

Another term we lived about two blocks above Maranatha, and that was a roomy home, with a nice walled in yard. That was where we had our family reunion - I think it was at Christmas time that year. And it was Jennie's first visit to Bobo. She was such a sport to participate in everything - meeting all our friends and sometimes eating strange things and travelling crowded in our van.  That was a fun time together and I always associate that time with that particular house. The Peter Colmans lived next door to us.

It was while we lived in that house that I also got hepatitus. I didn't feel well, but kept pushing myself in teaching and translation   until I could not go any longer.  The nurses diagnosed my illness as hepatitis and that is what it was!  I was the most awful greenish yellow color - Steve said I looked like a horror movie!  When Dad took me for blood work and they checked it, the male nurse came out wondering who this lady was, as my counts were so high.  At first they had thought I had some other liver disease and Ruthie A. had packed a suitcase for me so I would be ready to be flown back to the States for treatment - which I certainly did NOT want!  But the diagosis was a very bad case of hepatits and the cure was seven weeks lying down in bed flat, along with some medications.  I obeyed the nurses and doctor and stayed down for seven weeks. I had every student from Maranatha and all our Bobo pastors visiting me and praying for me in several languages and bringing baskets of leaves from trees in the bush which the Africans boiled up and used for curing liver diseases.  And I did get better and was soon back to a full schedule teaching.  Not a fun time. 

The last term on the field, living in Bobo, we lived in a comfortable home just a block from Maranatha, toward town. That house had a deep covered front porch which was great for entertaining people. During the African Cup games we took our TV out on the porch and had a crowd of students there, cheering for the teams as they watched!  It had a couple bathrooms - handy for having company. That was the busiest term of all for me as we were working on the whole Bible in Bobo. Dad had the van for work in the bush and elsewhere and I had a nice little passenger car which I drove to the translation office every day to work with our two Bobo translators. (More about translation later.) Dad also had an orange Yamaha dame which he loved for running around town visiting people.

One Sunday morning he had gone to the bush for the day and I had been at church at Ouézzinville-Sud, and when I came home I found that someone had forced the door of the outbuilding and stolen the Yamaha.  We never did find that bike, which Dad enjoyed so much. Lots of people suspected Daouda - but who knows. We had many thefts of our personal property during our years in Africa, which taught us to hold our property lightly - people are always more important than things! Jetty and Peggy wanted to replace the Yamaha for Dad but he thought it was too much money for such a short time, so they got him a smaller bike which he had to use. Jetty and Peggy were (and are!)  such dear friends and lived not far from us in Bobo.

The other house we lived in in Burkina was a big house up in Ouagadougou, but I will write more on our year of living and ministry there at a later date. Wherever we lived, we moved our belongings with us, so we could have a new house looking like home again in a day.  Now we have lived in one house  for eleven years - the longest we ever lived anywhere with the exception of Santidougou. 

MOVING TO THE CITY....................

We lived two terms in the village of Santidougou, and saw a lot of things started there.  The girls' school, more pastors trained, the primary school and a beautiful dispensary built, the church expanding and maturing, the start of giving God's Word to our people in written form.

Uncle Dave and Aunt Margot joined us in Burkina.  They were first of all assigned to Mali, but at conference that year their stationing was changed to Burkina and the city of Bobo, to do youth work.  They developed a great work among the youth and also worked with US Youth Corps every year.  For many years Uncle Dave was field director, so of course that kept them in Bobo also.

Uncle Jim and Aunt Donna also joined us in West Africa, and they were assigned to Mali and the Bwa people.  We were all close enough together that we saw each other occasionally - at conference time and going to ICA and sometimes for vacations. We were very fortunate in having family near enough to visit each other.  Separation from family is probably one of the hardest things for international workers to live with, and it has always been the case. Internet softens the sadness a bit, but it is still hard.

But at the same time, fellow workers also become like family.  The Royles came to work in Burkina and were assigned to the Bobos, along with us.  Our gifts were different and complimented each other and we worked together happily for years and still keep in touch.  We had one single nurse who came to work with us, but after part of a term she felt that the work was not for her and went back to the States and married.  We have lost contact with her.  Peggy Drake came and what a sweet blessing she was to us and to the Bobo people. She loved to nurse and the people loved her. I taught her the language, and she followed everything I told her to do.  I suggested that when you knew a phrase in Bobo to be sure and use it to make it yours.  And she did this in praying. When asked to pray, she would start out and finish up in Bobo (which she had learned well) and say everything else in English. The local people thought this was great when I explained to them what was going on!

But with a good staff at Santidougou to continue the ministry there, it was not so hard for us to have to move to the big city of Bobo when Dad was elected field director at conference in 1972. Mark, you no doubt remember Bobo better than you do Santidougou as you were a baby when we moved.  Sini could no longer be babysitter as he was for you boys at Santidougou, and so we hired Mamou to take care of you when we lived in Bobo - until you went to school.

Mamou loved you and was so good with you.  It was such a fun reunion a couple years ago when we were all at Council in Louisville and she came to the States with Carolyn and Anne-Berthe.  She was just SO happy to see you again - all grown up and with four children of your own and Katy's.  That was a red letter moment in her life! 

We lived in a lot of houses in the city of Bobo. according to the ministries that we were involved in. The church we were associated with in Bobo was Ouézzinville-Sud, which was a district church of Santidougou and did not belong to the Bobo district. We met first in a little mud building belonging to a Christian family of Bobos. I would teach SS out under a mango tree during the message.  Then of course we graduated to larger  buildings as the years went on.  Attending this church kept us attached to the Bobos, as all services were in the Bobo language and not in Jula. We soon saw many converts and that church grew.  During the last couple years before our retiral - when I was trying to finish up the Bible translation - I was asked to be CE director there and I enjoyed that ministry with people on the weekend, when I was working with the computers and translators all week.

So the first house we lived in was the mission house - there was a living-dining room, an office, a large kitchen, two nice size bedrooms and a long enclosed back porch - and we were a family of seven.  The office became a bedroom and we all were able to comfortably squeeze into that house on the Bobo compound. We seldom had a meal alone as I was also mission hostess, and we enjoyed all the folks that came our way and stayed with us. 

To back up a bit, actually the first house we lived in in Bobo was the small guest house over by the motel, where we were asked to stay between chairmen. Grandpa had been field director and they left for furlough before the Burns could move down from Sangha to assume the directorship in Bobo. So we were asked to fill in for a couple months. We were new missionaries and didn't have good sense about some things. We had gotten a full month's allowance from the bookkeeper (in cash) on Saturday and Dad put it in a manilla envelope on a card table, with other papers,  in our bedroom. We locked the door when we took you two girls out for a Sunday early evening walk. And when we got back, we found the house had been broken into and our entire month's allowance was GONE! We got through somehow, but it sure taught us to be careful about where you keep money in the big city!

We also lived in the big beautiful house with a nice yard - but right across the street from a bar, where they played music and caroused half the night, especially on weekends. That was a beautiful layout and very elegant, it was large. Mark you had your own bathroom along with your bedroom there. The roof was flat and when you were on vacation you teenagers loved to go up on the roof and make tea and sit and chat. Peter Nanfelt was then president of the Alliance and he was at our house for dinner one evening. We were sitting out in the yard enjoying the moonlight, and he was amazed to see your friends and you, Mark, go up on the roof where yoiu liked to make Arab tea and hang out.  Peter was shocked when he asked what you did on the roof and we told him you made and drank tea.  You boys especially loved that ritual with your friends.

We were gone on a trip (probably to Bouaké) and someone came and stole all of the considerable amount of porch furniture we had sitting out on the open verandah! Steve came to town and found out about the theft, and went to the police. And sure enough, there sat all of our furniture in front of the police station. So he had them bring it all back and put it back on our porch!  We never knew if the police had taken it or if they had found it at some thief's compound.  But at least, thanks to Steve, we got it back!

We lived in a beautiful house up near Marantha during the year we were finishing the NT translation. The yard had an abundance of beautiful flowers and bushes and the house itself was very nice. I remember, Elin, you loved having your own bathroom there. We had the house trailor pulled into that yard and used it as a trnslation office where Etienne could sit and translate all day.  Dad was working on new building at Maranatha all day and at night he would come home and type up the work that Etienne and I had done that day, in as many carbon copies as he could make for readers.  His comment was, "This is like heaven - no day and no night - we just work all the time!"  And that WAS a busy year.

You loved going out with your gun, John, before dawn to shoot birds and small animals. This was during your vacation.  Mark woke up and begged to go with you one morning and it was before we were awake. You could not find Mark's shoes, so you put a pair of yours on him and stuffed the toes with enough rolled up socks so they would fit and he could walk - barely!  That must have been a painful hunting trip for pre-school Mark! 

After you had all left the field, we lived in Tim and Ruth's house one year, and Dad took care of the CAMA work while I was teaching at Marantha Institute and writing PEDIM courses.  That was a nice house too with a shady porch and we enjoyed the work there also.  I don't think any of you were living at home by that time.

Enough of our various home in Bobo for now - to be continued.....................

MORE VACATIONS............................................

Besides the Burkina missionaries, people came fram far and wide for the Spring vacation time at the Guinguette.  The name for this vacation spot was given by the French military when they were stationed in the city of Bobo.  The French military were stationed in Bobo when we arrived on the field in 1959, but left the country shortly thereafter, when Upper Volta (named for the Volta River) became independant, and the new government changed our country's name to BURKINA FASO. (This name was a combination of two of the major languages in our country of more than seventy people group languages, meaning "fatherland of upright people". The people were called Burkinabe, after a Fula expression, another major language.)  And thus those names has remained.

Guinguette meant something like "little drinking place" in French and the soldiers named this little haven in the forest near Bobo for the bar they built there. There was a round cement dance floor, very small, and beside it was a thatched open building for the bar. French families would go there on weekends and drink and dance. There was even a string of colored lights strung up in the trees, which they operated by battery.  When the French military left Burkina Faso, the bar fell into ruins but the round cement dance floor remained.

In the midst of a very dry country, this little oasis was a natural phenomenon.  A stream ran down through a forested  area half an hour outside the city of Bobo-Dioulasso. The river was chin deep in places, the water was clear and flowed gently; there were huge trees making an arc over the swimming pool we called the Guinguette.  A gentle slope went from the flat camping land where we pitched our tents, and ended in the stream - there was no beach. Along about March - when the boarding school had a short vacation and you kids came home - the missionary community of Burkina, Mali and sometimes Côte d'Ivoire gathered at the river for vacation. 

The woods were alive with the noise of light generators and a whole tent city - tents of all colors.  Many of us took along our house help as the living was very primitive, water had to be hauled from a distance - and the workers had fun gathering around the campfire at night. You kids often joined them and enjoyed all the comments made! The man who worked for Uncle Dave and Aunt Margot was not happy because his patron's tent was an ugly khaki color, and so many other people had beautiful colored tents. Since his patron was the field director, he thought he should have the nicest tent!  Each year we also dug an outside toilet hole, with a wooden box and seat inside and straw mats to form a wall around the outside.  All the comforts of home!


Guinguette season fell during the time of year when Maranatha Bible Institute was in session, and I always had morning classes. So most mornings I would drive into the city, teach my classes and then return at noon in time for lunch and a fun afternoon. I did not have time to shop, so usually someone from camp would also drive in and take bread and fresh vegtable orders for people.  So we had a pretty modern setup.  Filtered water had to be set up also. 

The river and its banks rang with the laughter and American voices, and I am sure many local people who took that particular path on their way home from town, wondered what all these tubabus were celebrating out there in their forest!  The water was clear, and we did occasionally see a long croc swim through our swimming area at night. No one was allowed in the water after dark.  But you kids liked to watch the night life in the water with your bright flashlights.

(A parenthesis here:  we would go to the Guinguette occasionally for a day off during the year and apart from vacation time. One day when you girls were small, Martin from Santidougou was with us and we were all in the central pool swimming there in the river. Suddenlym Martin shouted, "Duro! Duro! (Hippo! Hippo!)  and sure enough we all got out and pulled you girls out just in time for a big Mama hippo to go swiming upstream fast - right through the area where we had just been swimming!  That was the only time we were chased out of the river!)

Occasionally we would have a potluck supper together, with everyone contributing something and all eating together.  Do you girls remember the day you decided to make raised doughnuts for the crowd?  You had this huge bowl full of dough and were kneading it first in the bowl and then with your hands in the air - and the dough fell down on the ground among the leaves and dust!   No problem, you just brushed off or cut off the dirty spots, rekneaded the dough and everyone enjoyed the delicious raised doughnuts! 

So going to the Guinguette was a lot of work - but also a lot of fun! And we all looked forward to it every year for a few years there.  The one sad memory for me was that it was at the Guinguette that I saw my sister, Aunt Donna, as a well adult for the last time. It was not long after that vacation that she came down with the disease that eventually killed her.  More about that later....

We also went to San Pedro a couple of times during those years, after the Ivory Coast Alliance Mission had established a guest house there. It was a beautiful spot up on a high hill above the ocean, with housekeeping apartments available.  One year Jason Foster went there with us to be company for you, Mark. It was too far to go home for him. And we have great memories of that time together.  Never realizing at the time that in the future we would be stationed there at San Pedro  after we retired from Burkina Faso, to work with the church and run the Mission guest quarters. 

Vacation time...................................

Now on to something not quite so somber!  Every year, as missionaries, we were allowed one month of vacation, this was to include travel.  We hoarded those days carefully and planned ahead.  Once you kids started boarding school, we had to plan days to be with you at ICA.  Dad and I went as far away as Paris, France, and as close as the Guinguette, which was in Bobo country. Some of those vacations were memorable for us and you but we always had fun together when Dad and I were not giving our time to preaching and teaching and helping the sick and translating the Bible. Each year there was a time to put aside our work and concentrate on family. And we had some fun and funny times.

When we knew you were going away to Mamou to school, Cheryl, we decided to take vacation down at Dalaba, in Guinea. We did not want you to go on such a long trip (three days!) without having any idea of where you were going when you attended Mamou later that year..  You three girls were all pre-school.  Because my folks had owned a very small cottage on the top terrace of the Dalaba Alliance Hillside, we were assigned there.  There was no running water, but a spring with clean water near our house. Dad called it running water - you filled your bucket and ran with it to the house! There was one large bedroom, a sitting-dining room and a little front porch. No refrigeration - a garde-manger where we kept food away from the flies. There was no inside toilet, but an outhouse for daytime and a "chamber pot" for nighttime!  All the comforts of home!! 

Fruit and vegetables were abundant at that time of year in Guinea. That was before they learned to grow strawberries in Burkina, and we ate berries frequently at Dalaba.  There was a nice picnic grove down at the foot of the mountain where we were staying, and the whole vacation crowd would go down there for at least one day for an all day picnic. With three children to cook and clean for, we took along Yusufu to help out with the cleaning and cooking and he enjoyed travelling with us and seeing the sights so far from his little village.  He didn't mind just eating what we ate.

We went in to Mamou one day so you girls could see the school, and we tried to be as positive as possible as we talked to you about going there.  About the second week, you girls developed the measles - one after the other, and all very sick with the disease. Which did not make vacation much fun for any of us.  There was one particularly low point - it was during the night. We always kept a low kerosene light on at night in case we had to get up with you girls.  (Did I mention there was no electricity, no gas stove - strictly camping!)  Debbi and Elin, you were so sick that night and kept getting up to use the covered chamber potty in the bedroom - we were all five in one room.  It had been raining for days, and continued on through the night. Dad got a flashlight to see better to get you girls up for the potty, and made a wrong move and the half full potty turned upside down on the floor!  We were grabbing rags to mop up and you girls were crying and the rain was pouring down.  Was this vaacation, I wondered, as I longed for my dry Santidougou house with an indoor bathroom!  But we did see Dalaba - and Mamou. And we did have some good days there as well.  Before taking the three day trek back to Santidougou in Burkina............

I wrote about our unfortunate pressure cooker incident in Monrovia, Liberia, during one vacation. We did go there again one time and that vacation was fun and uneventul.  When you kids were little, we also went to Ghana for vacation sometimes.  In those days we did not have a lot of American type food items in our stores in Burkina, and we were able to stock up on various grocery articles in Ghana.  It was also fun to be talking English to everyone there. (Once we got used to their accent.) Dad had to learn to drive on the left side of the road as well, and this was especially fun going around the big roundabouts in the city of Accra - seemingly going the wrong way!  He did a great job.  One year we got back to Bobo - after our long trip to Ghana and back - and they stopped us on the road outside the city of Bobo, asked where we were going. When we told them Santidougou, they said we would have to remain in Bobo for a while as there were severe cases of smallpox in the villages outside the city.  So we camped out in the Bobo guest house until it was safe to go to our village!

In Ghana we visited Tamale, Axim (on the CI border) Accra and Kumasi.  We found people very friendly and there were good accomodations everywhere and lower prices than we paid in French country.  We loved going to the shore there - at Accra and Axim.  I don't know if you remember this, Debbi, as you were very young, when Elin was just a baby.  We had met some American embassy people in the north of Ghana and when they heard we were going to be in Accra they wanted us to visit them for a meal.  So we accepted and arranged an evening to go to their home.  They lived in a very lovely embassy house and had all kinds of beautiful china and crystal goblets, etc, so the table looked beautiful.  That is, the adults' part of the table looked lovely - but you two girls and their daughter were seated at a table beside ours, and there was a ragged tablecloth and tin plates and plastic glasses.  You were used to using the same china as we did in our home and knew how to act at the table.  Debbi, you were most insistent that you wanted one of those pretty glasses (goblets) and I had to try to hush you up as you drank and ate out of your inferior tableware!!   What an evening. 

The Assemblies and SIM had mission stations all over Ghana and so we got to know some of their people as we stayed in their guest houses.  The Ghana government also had furnished government houses which you could rent for a pittance and we stayed in those also, especially at the ocean.  We always felt like we had had a real change when we spent a month in Ghana.  There was one government home outside of Kumasi where we spent a week one year. Elin, you were a baby and the man who came to do the laundry for us each day would bring it back in the afternoon all clean and ironed - he even ironed the diapers!  They fed you kids early and then you went to a playroom while we had our dinner more leisurely.  It was a restful spot and several of us missionaries went there together one year.  But as Ghana lost most of the British in their country, the conditions were not as good there, and so we had to find a new vacation spot.

We did find one - right near home: the Guinguette!  (more about that later)

One year Grandma and Grandpa Kennedy flew to Bamako to spend a vaction time with all three of our families - Albrights, Kennedys and us. It was a fun time being all together, and we filled the GMU guest house in Bamako for ten days.  Another year - when you were in Paris, Bubnas, for language study - Dad and I bought air tickets to spend Christmas with you in Paris, and see Josiah for the first time.  You had invited African friends for Christmas dinner, some of whom we knew too. And then we rented a car and took Fernand Sanou back to Normandy where he was in the university - and we got to see some of the north of France as well as Paris-ville. I remember we had saved some gift money and Dad sold my electric sewing machine - which I never used - in order to afford the tickets for the plane trip!

It took ingenuity and planning ahead to plan a family vacation each year.  But we did it and had fun.  Vacations at the Guinguette are now history, but we had years of good times there too.

THE DILEMMA OF SCHOOLING..........................

I was born to be a missionary, I grew up in other cultures, learned other languages from the time I was two years old.  I felt called of God to "mish".  And felt God had also equipped me for that work. 

But there was a large thorn in my missionary life - the dilemma of schooling my children.  Interestingly enough, I was a missionary kid and even attended MK school.  But it never got any easier through all the years I had to do it, to send my children off to school.  I cried inside  of me and shed many visible tears as well - when we said goodbye and after you had left for school.  I never got used to it, although I had plenty of practice! We were allowed to teach each of you a kindergarten course, so you were six when you left for boarding school.

I am so thankful that the Alliance has changed that ruling.  When you were all little, there was no choice:  just boarding school for you all.  Nowadays, there is still the choice of boarding school, but one can also choose to teach at home or to form co-op schools in an area where there are several families.  Debbi, I am so happy for the work you do, making educational trips to various African countries to help mothers enrich their children's cirriculum and help in problem solving.  It is a new age, and I say Bravo!  I wish we had had that choice when you were all young! 

Not that boarding schools are all wrong - they are great for some kids. You have had some wonderful dorm parents - and others who were less than wonderful. Some of you blossomed at boarding school and others suffered emotionally.  In our day, we could not get to ICA very often because of the distance and the bad roads. If you travelled on the train going to Bouaké as chaperone for the kids, you noticed how differently kids dealt with the separation.  Some cried all the way to Banfora. One young boy would start to eat his bag lunch before we pulled out of the train station and ate till it was gone, then just sat looking out the window - what was going through his mind?  Others chattered the whole trip with their friends.  It was a mixed crowd! 

We did make one trip down to the school once a trimester. You had to count your days carefully as you were only allowed a certain amount of days away from your work. Those precious days were marked with red on our calendar. Sometimes our three families would try to make it the same long weekend - Albrights, Kennedys and us. We always stayed at the Alliance guest house. There were things to do - the pool and picnics and games.  When Mark was in first grade, he had done something displeasing to a dormparent, and he was sent home (on this weekend with his parents of all times!) with one of those lage folded sheets of French graph paper, with the tiny squares. And he had to put a check mark in each of those squares before he returned to the dorm Monday morning!   Such a ridiculous punishment required family solidarity and we all took turns fulling in those tiny sqares for Mark! 

Actually, Mark was one of those "good" dorm kids. He was seldom punished that we knew about.  Dating was beset with many rules at ICA. And Mark wanted to ask a girl he knew to go out to the restaurant with him and with us while we were there on a visit.  First he had to pass through his dorm father (a big muscular ex-policeman) to ask permission to date this girl - before he asked her!  He made it through that hurdle and then found that he also had to go through her dormfather to ask if he could ask her out.  For a shy kid like you, Mark, this was a lot of hoops to jump through!  But you made it and everyone said yes, including the girl!  And we had a nice meal out - but you had to be in on the dot of nine so everyone was watching the clock!!  Especially in a French restaurant where the service was slow!

All kids react differently to boarding school rules. John and Cheryl, you were happy go lucky about things.  Debbi, Elin and Mark, you were more afraid of breaking the rules.  Things have changed at ICA - as elsewhere.  And friendships were made for life at the school!  I always marvel at how people appear out of the woodwork to get together when there is an ICA reunion!

We often had staff who filled in and did not understand MK's - and that was fun!!  I remember once when we went to ICA and John, you and Rollo were in fourth grade. You had been asked by this cranky lady (her husband was the high school teacher who swore in class at the kids!) who was your teacher to make a project for some course. I do not even remember the course, but what I do remember is this teacher called us aside, telling us that you boys had dirty minds as you had collaborated to make a bathroom. There was a toilet with moveable top and a tub and so forth. Actually, we thought it was pretty clever!    Some of these short term people never understoof MK's very well.  But you did all make it.

You had some very good dormparents at ICA, many of whom pray for you and love you and always ask about you.  Dad used to have to attend the ICA board meetings, and he always came away frustrated by the far-right theology and practice of some missions involved.  One mission director (from another mission) wanted to abolish all girls and boys swimming together at the pool.  Another group always prefaced what they had to say in meetings with, "Mah Bahble sez........")  with open Bible in hand. Once in a while Uncle Russ would just call a halt to such discussions.

You boys were involved in sports and you girls loved to help out with the baking in your dorm kitchens. And you all made it through OK.  Aunt Joan was a great favorite and the Ritcheys and the Stombaughs...we are grateful for all of them - and others - who helped to shape your lives when we were not there. 

Cheryl, you had gotten very involved in the Bobo youth group and wanted to stay home one year and go to the local French High School. We got permission from the Powers that Be, and you were able to stay at home. You had close friends and used to stay with the Koblavi girls and you went to classes at Collège de l'Avenir - up by Maranatha, where I taught Bible and Dad built new buildings for that campus.  It was a happy year.

When you were growing up, here is how I saw you................

Cheryl, you never thought of the consequence, but just plunged into events!  (Maybe that has qualified you for the great work God has given you to do!)

Debbi, you were always a helper - at home and at school.  (And you are still that... I can never believe all the work you are involved in, helping other missionaries, your family and the church.)

Elin, you were always timid when you were younger, and you were the most homesick of all five of you kids.  (God has made you into a well-organized, caring and gifted woman - who reaches out to both family and others, no matter what culture.)

John, you always lived on the edge, from your boyhood on through your teens. (Through many experiences in your life, God has made you a loving, caring person - always thinking of the other person, never selfish.)

and Mark, our baby, you always tried to get along with everyone. (From your shyness, you blossomed into a wonderful man of God, gifted in administration and a great husband and father.)

And so Dad and I are so proud of all of you and who you have become in Christ. You have all given us wonderful mates and also beautiful grandchildren .....and now even a greatgrandchild!  We are indeed blessed with a thoughtful, caring family.  

There is still a little part of me that cries inside because you are so far from us......but that is how mothers are!!

1970: a year of happenings.......................

John was such a village boy and was so happy at home, but fearful if we were not near by.  He would have had to have special permission to go to ICA that year (because of his late birthday)  and we did not feel he was ready for that.  He did everything with the village kids - even lining up with the school kids in town when they got their innoculations.  There were about eighty children in a class at the Santidougou school, and when the dispensary people came from town to give innoculations, John lined up for his shot with the rest of them. The Dr. told each child to stand, forming a line, with his elbow stuck out and his sleeve pulled up.  This way he could go down the line and swab each arm with alcohol and then go back down the line giving each child the required shot. When the Dr. got down the line to about arm number 23, he saw that this arm was white, so he threw out his (by now) dirty piece of cotton and started over with a new alcohol swab for that little white arm! 

We also had the idea that perhaps John could enroll in CP1 at our local school (which Dad had built and staffed with Christian teachers) and thus have his first grade at home. John march proudly off to class with his little slate and chalk.  But after having to sit still for long periods of time while each child had to individually pronounce "a" and then "i" and so on, John was bored out of his tree, and so we decided that was NOT a good idea.  So he just waited till the next summer and started school at ICA. I taught him kindergarten.

We also had a shock in early 1970, when we got a telegram from ICA saying Cheryl (who was then in eighth grade) would not be admitted back in school for that semester.  PANIC! Dad called the school - not an easy thing to do, but he finally got through.  It was a minor infraction that she and a friend had been involved in - and would have been handled differently by other dorm parents - but they would send her books and lessons home and she would be admitted back the next semester!   Wow! What a shock!  Here was I with a pre-schooler at home and carrying Mark in the seventh month - and now I had an eighth grader to teach!  Dad went down and talked to the school director, and to show just how insensitive the school leadership was at that time, they later wrote and asked if Dad would speak at the 8th grade graduation since his daughter was graduating!  Dad declined - I am not sure that he did it gracefully!!  We did take her to graduate with her friends.

It turned out to be a great time for Cheryl and for all of us. She did her studies every day and had her little brother at home. It was almost as if the girls who had to STAY at ICA were the ones being punished!  It also meant that Cheryl would be home for the birth of our new baby!

I was thinking recently of how God weaves the tapestry representing our lives. The picture He is weaving is a beautiful and complete picture, but underneath the thread is hanging down and the colors are blurred and we cannot really see what He is making of our lives.  And thus it was for us during that period of time.  But when the tapestry was finished and we can now look back at the other side, we see the beauty God was performing in our daughter's life.

Cheryl always loved nursing - she used to help her Dad in his dispensary and she was more than happy to go with us to the Ferké hospital for Mark's birth.  We had a lot to do at home and did not want to be at Ferké too long, so we waited until it was almost time for him to be born.  And I started to have some labor pains before the date, so we got ourselves ready in the middle of the night to leave for that several hour trip - on horrible roads - from Bobo to Ferké! 

At this time, we had an open jeep for a work vehicle and our family car was a VW BUG.  Remember those??  Small, cramped....and we had Dad, John, me, Cheryl, a new puppy and all of our baggage.  We also took along a large heavy quilt and a pillow and my bottle of alcohol I used for deliveries.  If I had the baby on the road, I figured I could tell Milt what to do and thus the quilt and the pillow.  By the time we got to Banfora, my contractions had slowed down, (we had stopped also in Bobo to tell my parents that we were on our way!) and so we stopped at the empty mission house in Sienna for a couple hours of rest.  Then up again and on that horrible road - it was not paved at that time! - and we finally bounced into Ferké about daylight, a little the worse for the wear!  But the baby was securely intact and my contractions had stopped.  (One of the nurses told me later that she was so glad I did not deliver then, as I looked so horrible weary! - I wonder why??)  We had sent Yusufu and his newly married bride, Ane, down by train so as to have a cook and a housekeeper during our stay.  Jessie had been assigned as our mission nurse to help with delivery - but when Mark decided to be born (two weeks or so after arrival)  Jessie was occupied with hospital work. But Dad was there with me.

You have to realize that the "labor room" at the hospital was VERY tiny!  There was room for the patient's bed and a chair beside the bed and a little crib there. It was also the place where they took care of their preemie babies, which is what Aunt Jessie was doing.  I knew the time was close and Dad called Dr. Steve to come - Steve wanted to air condition the delivery room so he ran out to start up the greasy machine and came back with his dirty hands, calling for his sterile gloved - he knew the baby was ready to pop. Fortunately Dad was there to direct operations and said it was too late for the delivery room, so Mark was born right there. When they pulled out a clean sheet to put over me, a scorpion fell out of the sheet on the bed - again Dad to the rescue to kill the scorpion!  Can you imagine having a baby and at the same time being bitten in the seat with a scorpion!! I can still see Dr. Steve calling for his sterile gloves and Mark was already breathing his first breaths.    I never did see the inside of that delivery room!!

But you, Mark, were not breathing normally. You were kind of a grey color, and the nurses were all fussing over you when they took us both back to the little house where our family was staying.  Aunt Linda was head nurse and I could hear someone saying in a panicky voice, "Call Linda!" I was wondering what was going on!!  Linda walked in a few minutes later while the other nurses hovered over the little crib they had put you in, and I kept asking what was wrong. Linda had picked a pretty rose on her way into my room and without even looking over at the crib she congratulated me and gave me the rose - then went to the baby. (Talk about the right psychology!  I had been getting panicky about you!)   She went and turned you on your side. Evidently you had swallowed a lot of fluid during birth and you also just wanted to sleep.  She showed me how to hold you and flick your little feet to keep you awake, and after Dad and I spent the night doing that, you were a normal rosy color - and again a big Pierce baby!  What an experience!  We were so delighted to have you as part of our family!

We went back to Santidougou and settled into life there. I had produced another son for the village and everyone was happy!  So were we...........................

Life goes on ....with John!

John, one of your favorite events of the day at our home in Santidougou was when Yusufu threw out the garbage in our open garbage pit at the back of our yard.  You and all your friends raced out there and found all kind of goodies:  old tin cans, paper, bits of food and so on.  And each child had his own stash of goodies from the Pierce daily garbage disposal! 

You and your friends also loved to get the ingredients from Yusufu in the kitchen to make your own rice over a little campfire. Sometimes you shot lizards or mice which were added to the pot, and you begged the rice, oil, tomato paste and onions from our kitchen.  Your friends had been lighting outside fires since they could walk and they taught you and later you taught Mark, so we were not worried about you around fires. .  After the food was cooked and cooled, you all gathered round the pot and ate with your fingers in true Bobo fashion.

You had a big red wagon and the village kids loved to push you around in that. One day we took your picture in that wagon - it had been raining and you had a big umbrella over your head and your friends were pushing you.  You looked like the king of the village with your slaves pushing you.  You also had a friend who was a lot older than you and was a deaf mute.  His father was a policeman living at the edge of our town and he owned a donkey. One of your favorite sports was to get on that donkey with your friend, yelling all the way down the road, as the two of you rode that animal at top speed! 

When you and your cousin, Tim Albright, were about four and five, you went with Dad and me to Sanekui where Aunt Donna and Uncle Jim lived. There was a large crowd of pastors meeting there in a conference - Dad was there to represent the mission, I went along to help Aunt Donna with the cooking, and you and Tim and Steve were just running around the area.  One of you got the idea one morning to climb up on the roof of a building which was right alongside the thatched shelter where the meetings were going on.  We knew nothing about your antics until one of the pastors attending the conference came to the house to tell us the three of you were doing antics and making faces at the delegates, cracking them up to the point that no one was listening to the message!  So we got you down from there and decided that the best place for the three of you was the shower!  You were covered with dust and we took your clothes off and put you together in the shower to wash off the dust and dirt. We figured we knew where you were - in the shower. When I went in to check on you, here was a dazed scorpion in the shower - the three of you had been dancing around the cement shower area, under the water, and had not noticed the scorpion  He was so dazed he could not even sting you! 

Back at Santidougou our big Lassie dog had about eight beautiful little German Shepherd puppies.  They were in the garage and we would let them out to crawl around her during the day.  Dad went to look for the puppies to put them in another place and he could not find them anywhere!  He had looked and looked and finally came to the house to tell me.  You, John, overheard him and said you had taken care of them. He led you to a large empty container in the garage and opened it - and there were all the pups, dead, suffocated from the heat and no air.  You had no idea what you had done.

At that point, you spoke nothing but Bobo.  Because your grandparents lived near us, you did learn a couple of phrases like "good food!" when we ate with them.  Our family and our whole village spoke Bobo and that was your language until we took you on that first furlough.  You did learn some English to play with your cousin, Michael Kennedy, who lived in Bobo. If I had errands to do in town, I would take you along and let you play while I shopped or taught a class, and then came back and picked you up to get home in time for supper.  One day I totally forgot that you had come with me - and I was all the way home to Santidougou before I discovered what I had done. Dad drove back to town and picked you  up and you were not too happy with me!

Furlough time came around and your main language was still Bobo. You understood English as the rest of us in the family spoke it and we figured you would soon learn when we got to Nyack and everyone else was chatting in English.  Which was exactly what happened!   We also enrolled you in a pre-school class where all the children spoke English.  And before we knew it you were chatting along in either English or Bobo.  That was the furlough when our "Bobo son", Tite Tiénou, started Nyack. He was sitting at the table beside you one day and at opur home and we were all chatting in English. You kept looking at him and finally you asked your question: "Tite, why didn't you turn white like me when you learned English??"  I guess you always thought of yourself as black when you spoke only Bobo - and with your knowledge of English came a color change!

You carried some of your village habits back to Nyack with you.  One of them was raiding the garbage cans.  You thought you had found a gold mine with all those overflowing garbage cans along our street in Nyack!  You got the neighborhood kids to join you, and you brought back all sorts of "treasures"! The boys next door to us had a very proper mother and she was not amused when her sons came back with broken toys and old puzzles and books which they had found on the street before the garbage man arrived!   The two boys came to the door one day and asked,  "Aunt Nancy, can we store our treasures at your place - our Mom won't let us take them in our house!" And of course I obliged!  You also shot squirrels with your slingshot and skinned them and nailed them on a board to dry.  Our neighborhood kids learned all kinds of fun tricks from you!!

The event that took the cake was while you kids were staying at our house, with Grandma Pierce taking care of you all while we went to Council for a week.  Danny Moore was a favorite friend of yours, and the place you loved most was Mr. Fredericks' workshop. When he was out with his truck, the two of you would explore the wonders of his workshop!  He was the man who took care of all the missionary homes and his workshop was well stocked. You were pretty careful not to go in when he was there, as he would paddle you if he caught you!  Somehow you managed to filch an open can of bright blue paint.  You took it up the our yard and proceeded to "paint" your wagon!  There was no brush so you and Danny just used your hands!  You knew you were in trouble when you realized that paint would not wash off your skin and came home with the wagon, parked it by the back door, went into the bathroom by the door and locked yourself in! (Danny went home to his house, covered in paint! too)  Grandma saw the blue paint everywhere and wondered where you were - she finally traced you to the locked inside bathroom!  And she had to coax you out and clean you up - and I don't remember if the wagon was ever the same again!  Bless Grandma, she never told us about it on the phone but waited till we got home and saw the "painted" wagon!  You were never one to lack for ideas - I understood you, I am high in ideas too! But a I try to use them more creatively.....

We sent you to a pre-school so that you would learn English - and it worked. By the end of furlough you were speaking all English and had to re-learn Bobo when we retuuned to Africa.  At the final session of pre-school, each of the twenty students had to tell one thing they had learned that year at school.  Your contribution was:  "I learned that I have an inside voice as well as an outside one!"  A great lesson!

The teacher one day called me aside and said, "You know, I think John may have a problem with the fact that he only has sisters.  He keeps talking about his imaginary brother and talks like he knows him well and he lives with you."   After asking a few questions, we realized it was Tite he was talking about - Tite was his big brother! 

And so we decided - after getting back to Upper Volta - that it was time for John to have a little brother!  

KEEPING UP WITH JOHN............................

I was just reading this morning that God has fearfully and wonderfully made us.  And I see how true this is in our five children and our grandchildren.  All coming from the same mother and father, the same ancestors, our five children are at once the same and so different.  Cheryl, I was not sure I could take another child with as much energy and outgoing personality as you, and God sent along Debbi with a calmer outlook on life, endowed with thoughtfulness and even a bit of timidness. Then came Elin, a homebody, most content when clinging to her mom and later more attached to her dad.  And then we had John - full of energy and inventiveness from the day you were born!  We had a hard time to keep up with you, as you will read in this post.  But God gave us Mark, the child of our older age, timid, clinging, malleable and a great last child!  Each of you is very special, and it has been the delight of our lives to see you develop and marry wonderful spouses and produce such a bevy of beautiful, remarkable children.... and the line goes on, with little Levi joining the family!

But back to keeping up with John....  You were a good baby, the only one I think who would never take a bottle and nursed till you were almost a year old.  You walked early.  In the Spring before you were a year old, we made the long trek to Monrovia, Liberia, where we had rented a house belonging to Radio Station ELWA. We were going for a month's vacation there (a three day trip from Bobo - passing through thick forest country and crossing forest streams on two planks so that Dad had to be sure he had a wheel on each plank!) and it was beautiful to see the ocean spread out before our eyes and know that we had arrived, late one afternoon.  Grandpa and Grandma Kennedy were also there on vacation and had been there before us. Grandma decided to fix a meal at our house and had just put a pot of macaroni on to boil before we pulled in. After we unloaded a bit, Grandma had to run over to their little house to get something, and told me to check on the macaroni on the stove which was cooking in a pressure cooker (but without the pressure being used).  Her cooker was different from mine and when I tried to take off the top to check the pasta, a wave of boiling hot water and macaroni, rose up and inundated my whole front - from my forehead to my lower abdomen. I screamed and Dad came running, had someone turn on a cold shower, tore off my clothes and put me under the cold water to reduce the heat in the burns that covered the whole front of my body!  What a mess!  When my mom returned, she found me on the bed, naked, with Dad trying to put cold wet cloths on my body.  Debbi, you were sure I was dead and kept crying to see me. I insisted they let all three of you girls see me and explain what had happened and then you left the room and were content to play. 

The doctor came and checked me out and basically said that ice water on my burns and rest was the only cure for my painful problem!  Dad had to bring you, John, to me to nurse and hold you at right angles so you wouldn't inadvertently hurt my burns.  What a situation, and at the beginning of our vacation!

Two good things: (1) I was not in our village where I would have had company day and night and no rest  and (2) we had brought Yusufu along so he could take care of the cooking and household!  Poor Yusufu agonized over my burns - we were so thankfyl he was there!

Actually, many of my burns cleared up quickly, there were just a few really deep burns and I had scars from them for a long time - but in time they too disappeared.  After I got over the shock of this accident, I would go down to the beach and go in the water a bit, but that salt water burned the open places.  And I was still not completely healed when we had to return the three day trip to Burkina. What an experience!

To be continued.......................

Th birth of a son....actually, two sons!

We came back from that summer at SIL - eleven weeks of master's credit - and we felt ready for a change. But glad for what we had accomplished. And it was time to get you girls into school.  At SIL that summer, someone had worked with you in reading, Cheryl, and you were all set to go into second grade and you, Debbi, into first.  We always went to Simpson Church in Nyack and you had good friends there and at school - and fitted well into American culture.

Dad, of course, went on tour - that first tour was thirteen weeks!  LONG..... Then he was home over the holidays and in January back on tour again.  Larry and Grace Wright and Tim were also on furlough and lived across from us.  So when Timmy was born, and our husbands were gone, as soon as  word came from  Uncle Jim and Aunt Donna about the birth, we headed together in our car to Maine to see my little sister's new baby!  That was a long trip but well worth it, and we spent the weekend with them in their little home in Maine. Later on Timmy and our John would become close friends...but that is for another chapter.

Remember the Mission Time Bank??  Ah yes, we had to make up that time we missed in Burkina and took to study, and so that meant leaving the US in February. We decided to go by freighter.  Two weeks at sea, great cabins, all meals provided, and we could take a huge amount of baggage with us as part of our fare! This was just what we wanted!  And it was the term we took back all the furniture for our home in Santidougou - and later in Bobo.

When we got to the ship in a Brooklyn port, we found that there was nothing but a rope, crosswise ladder to climb on to get on the ship. mIt swayed a bit!  Dad had no trouble and he carried Elin,  neither did Cheryl; I didn't like it but made it OK.  And then there was Debbi....no way was she going to climb up those swaying rope stairs - they were scary!  Finally a big burly ship hand picked her up and tucked her under his arm and climbed quickly up to the ship where he deposited her on the desk!  Once aboard she was fine!

These freighters to West Africa were always a real vacation. We were on board for two weeks, stopping at various ports in the Islands and West Africa. The food was good, our staterooms were top notch, there was a little parlor with library books and games available.  We ate with the officiers and it was white linen tableclothes and china as well as good meals.  We took plenty of games and toys for you girls and all had a great trip!

The schooling for you two older girls could have been a problem.  No way were we going back to Mamou! The Baptists had started a school in Bouaké, Ivory Coast, and so we wrote asking if you could have a place in first and second grade.  This meant finding dorm space also. There was only a Baptist dorm at that time, and the Parelius's kindly crowded you into bedrooms with other girls. We spent a couple of days getting you settled. Dorm life was simple at that time, and so was the food. I remember one time we went for supper and Uncle Bob and Aunt Mary Kaye were there too.  Supper was hot rice, with milk and sugar, and the kids were all excited because they even put out raisins for you to eat!  Later on the food improved immensely. And we always appreciated the gracious way the Baptist folks accepted you girls and made a special place for you in the middle of a school year.

And so we were back to the boarding school syndrome - I never did get used to that and shed many tears as I missed you.  But you all got a good education, and made special friends, with whom you interact even today.  And Dad and I continued on, with Elin, to Bobo and back to Santidougou and settled in again in our village. 

I had just started my pregnancy with John, and when it was time for me to see a doctor, I went to a very nice French doctor in Bobo.  My lovely sage femme from your birth had moved to Ouagadougou and a French lady had replaced her. No way I would have anything to do with that lady - I had seen how cruel she was to some of the women from the village I had taken to the hospital.  I liked the French doctor, but there was a rule in the hospital - he could see me every month during my pregnancy, but when it came time to deliver, that was the midwife's job at the hospital.  So I asked him if he would come to our house in Bobo and deliver the baby there.  To which he readily agreed!  So I was checked by him every month, and when it was time for me to deliver, we moved into the guest house Bobo.

As always, the mission assigned a nurse for my "confinement" and this time it was Marg Rogers, who was head midwife at Sanuekui dispensary in Mali. She was qualified and had delivered dozens of babies, so it was nice to have her with us.  We had moved in to Bobo to await your birth, John, and it was a Sunday evening. We had had company there in the guest house for the evening meal, and we stacked the dishes for Yusufu to clean up the next morning.  During the night I began labor!  The kitchen in that house was in the middle with a large bedroom on each side. One side we lived in and the other side we had prepared for our baby's birth.  Dad quickly washed up all the dishes so there would not be a mess for the doctor to walk into! 

I was in labor the rest of the night and on into the next day. Dad called the doctor who came to the guest house and he suggested that Marg Rogers deliver my baby since she had had so much experience!  He stayed too and of course Dad was there. And a little after noon, you were finally born - a big baby, more than nine pounds!  I got cleaned up and got into a comfortable bed to rest, admiring my brand new baby - a son this time!  The village would be elated!!  And Elin was taking her noon rest while you were born, and was she ever happy to find her brother actually born when she wakened, and she could hold you.

News of your birth got around and the very next day a big group of women from the church came to see our new son!  You were so little and so brand new, and I can still remember the struggle inside I had as the women passed you from one to the other, right around the circle!  But I decided right then that God could take care of you and protect you, and this was the only way to conform to the culture - so I did!  Of course, they all prayed beautiful prayers over you and I was so blessed!

We had planned on staying in Bobo for a few days before we took you to Santidougou. I knew the Santidougou villagers would not all be cleaned up when they came to greet our son, and wanted to protect you a little while longer from contact with germs!  But in the Bobo yard, there was a French lady staying in a guest room with her huge dog.  The dog was called Zénithe, and he was always escaping her and running around the compound. She would be right after him, screaming loudly, "Zénith!  (Zat-neet)  After two days of that we decided Santidougou looked pretty good  - germs or no germs! -and we returned to our own home.

Our first son, John (or Zan, as the people called you).  The whole village had to parade through the house to get a good look at you - the old women and the old men and the younger people too!  Our reputation had been saved - we finally had produced a son!

You made our life interesting, John, as you grew up....but we will save that story for tomorrow.  You became a legend in our village! 

And so Keeping up with John will be my next post!

A HEART WRENCHING EXPERIENCE............

We had our three beautiful girls - Cheryl, Deborah and Elin - and they had a good life. They had adjusted well to the village.  My parents, their grandparents, lived half an hour from us in the city of Bobo Dioulasso.  But the time came when Cheryl had to start first grade -  our only option was to send her to Mamou, the Alliance boarding school in Guinea.  I had attended there for a couple of years and so I knew the school and actually had had a good experience there.  But I remember when my mother brought my sister and brother (twins) to Mamou. She stayed a couple days and then had to leave on that evening train.  They were inconsolable for a while. I could help Donna who roomed with me, but David was on the other side of the building, down the boys' hall.  John Ellenberger, bless him, offered to be big brother to David and took him under his charge until he got used to being so far from home. 

Do you ever get used to being away from home as a child??  I wonder.  There is always that unfulfilled something inside you that longs for your own parents. It is especially hard for a very young child. I was in seventh grade when I first left for boarding school.  I am thankful for the many options available to missionary parents nowadays, and so glad our Debbi is now able to be part of a team of educational consultants for the Alliance in Africa. Local schools and home schooling are now allowed, as well as boarding school.  Nine of our grandchildren have grown up outside the USA, and have used various options for their schooling.  But back in the 1960's there was one option for us - Mamou, three days trip from Santidougou.

We took the girls by car down to Kankan, Guinea, where we could take a train to Mamou.  (This is really Milt's story and he needs to tell it, but I will do my best.) The two younger girls and I stayed in the city of Kankan while Cheryl went with her Daddy (and some other MK's going to school) on the train which ran from Kankan to Mamou - and beyond to Conakry. I cried many tears but had my two younger ones as consolation.  Milt had this all night train ride with the gang going to Mamou. The toilets stopped up and water was running down the aisle. It was a difficult trip, but they finally arrived at Mamou about six in the morning.

Word had not gotten through to the school personnel that this trainload was arriving that morning, so no one was there to meet them in the early dawn, with the rain pouring down!  He somehow got connected with someone from the school to come and get them and a car came to pick them up.  The boarding school is on a hilltop, outside the city of Mamou and the scenery there is beautiful - forest country.  But there was no beauty in it for Milt as he had to leave his daughter there alone. 

The day was rainy and that evening , as the rain poured down on the tin roof, everyone met for a meeting in the big living room.  As the meeting progressed there were sniffles here and there as the kids thought of far away homes. And Cheryl realized that her Daddy was leaving her.  We bless the memory of Fordy and Rosalyn Tyler, who were dorm parents there at that time.  The had Milt come into their little apartment and took Cheryl from him when he had to leave to catch his train. Of course, everyone was crying, including Milt.  Fordy and Rosalys, bless them, kept Cheryl in their room and in their big bed between them that night so that she would get some sleep.  And she made the adjustment - and so did we, as we drove two days north back to our village, minus one child!

We counted the days till we would see her again.  Letters were almost non-existent in those days, and the ones that came were usually a smiley face and CHERYL in big letters! So we waited for the day in December when the kids came home from Mamou. Again Milt had to drive to Guinea to bring her and others home. I will never forget when the car drove into the mission yard in Bobo where I was staying with my mother. I hardly knew my daughter - her hair was cut very short and was covered in red dust, and her whole person was covered in that red dust from the trip! She had also lost all her front tooth, and had a huge grin when she saw me!  But it was wonderful to see her. Milt said she didn't talk to him the first day, just grinned!  I grabbed my child and rushed her into the shower and got her hair washed - wanted to make sure that was really Cheryl underneath all that red road dirt.  (Those were the days before paved roads in West Africa!) 

Soon Mamou was forgotten as we all settled into village life in Santidougou again.  But a change was coming for us - we decided to leave the field a couple months early in order to get to the States in time to attend the Wycliffe language training course in Oklahoma.  This meant Cheryl would miss the second half of her first grade at Mamou. The school principal and family were making a trip up through our country and were at our home for dinner.  We decided to ask them if Mamou could give us some books so that we could complete Cheryl's first grade since we would be gone to the States before Mamou classes started again. (There was always a break in the middle of the year.)  The answer was a firm NO.  We still felt like we needed that summer linguistic training since we were in a new language and had had no training in phonetics, etc.  So we went ahead and made plans to leave in May, leaving for our first furlough with our three girls.  All the permissions were given to us and we flew back to the USA just in time to go to Alliance Council out in Arizona. 

We had bought a new VW bus when we got to the States, which would accomodate our family, as we had a lot of trasvelling to do.  We took our plane fare for the Council trip and put it into gas for the car, and were able to invite Uncle Jim and Aunt Donna to go with us. They were pastoring a small church in Maine and Aunt Donna was pg with Timmy. The seven of us crammed into the bus and had a wonderful trip all the way to Phoenix. We enjoyed the trip out - the scenery was new to all of us.

Two memories stick out in my mind from that Council.  Cheryl and Debbi were staying with some friends of ours who lived right outside of Phoenix, but Elin clung to me and there was no way we could leave her.  She had had enough changes in her life, from the village to the USA.  You were very shy, Elin, so sat quietly on my lap through all sessions. I had bought a bag full of quiet, small new toys for you and that kept you happy through all the meetings. 

The two special memories were these:  the first morning we went to breakfast and were sitting at the table across from LL King.  Someone came up and announced to him that AW Tozer, the big Alliance preacher, well known, had just died. And he was also scheduled to speak at Council.

The other memory from that Council had to do with the missionary rally the last Sunday afternoon. It was held out in an outdoor stadium, and there was a speakers' stand out in front of the stadium. Our family had been asked to sing a song in Bobo as part of the missions program. We had primed you girls and we were all dressed and ready for this. You, Debbi, were afraid of heights so felt a little shaky up in that speakers' stand. And you, Elin, were shy about seeing so many people!  But there we were... and the program went on and on. It was so long that they decided to cut out some items and our song was one of them.  They just skipped over our song in the program and went on. But we did not dare to take you girls down out of the speakers' stand for fear they would remember we hadn't sung and called us up to sing!  It was a LONG afternoon for all of us.

Aunt Donna and Uncle Jim and we went out to California for a few days and then we flew the Albrights  back to Maine and we drove through the Grand Canyon area and other beauty spots and  ended up in blistering hot Oklahoma!  And that is where we spent the summer, working on linguistics at a master's level in the University with SIL professors.  

The SIL was well set up for families taking classes - they had child care all day while we adults were in classes. Elin, you screamed every morning when we left you until you found a lady you got used to. You other girls had a ball there.  We lived in some pretty basic dormitories and the temps were up to 106 degrees every day!  No air conditioning in the dorms but there were cooled classrooms.  No cooking as everyone ate in the cafeteria. 

It was a summer of hard work, but I was able to take our Bobo language and do a complete phonetical and grammatical analysis of a text. For a practical project, Dad had to learn something of the Kaiowa Indian language, which has voiceless vocoids (vowels that have no sound, just formed in the mouth!), something our African languages never had.

That was our first furlough and a short one, as we had to make up the months that we had left early in order to go to school.  The missions had a time bank at that time, and your days were counted on the field - they had to come to a full four years for each term, and you had to make up the time if you went early or went back late!  That was abolished after a few yerars.  But it was back to Africa early for us.  We went by ship so that we could take our house furnishings with us at little cost.

And now after this family interlude - back to: A son at last!

OUR LIFE IN SANTIDOUGOU.........................

Those first couple of four-year terms, we lived right there in Santidougou.  This gave us the chance to learn the language well, to begin producing a literature for our people, to help grow the church throughout the district, and to give you kids a stable home in Africa.

Later on, as our ministry changed and we were more involved in Mission administration and the development of church leadership throughout Burkina, we had to leave our dear village and move to the city.  One year we had to move as far as Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, to plant the first Alliance church there.  But to all of us, Santidougou was home.

From the beginning we were involved in church planting through the Bobo area.  Our target people were the Bobo - first called Bobo Fing, then Bobo Madare. But the people referred to themselves as just plane Boboe.  And they adopted us into their trible also.  Language learning was first on our slate of things to do.  The language was not written down and so we started with transcribing the oral sounds we heard, then analyzed both the sound system and the grammar.  Each day I would process what I learned, put it on paper and then give it to Dad, along with exercises for him based on what we learned that day!  It took a while but then we started to produce some books - primers to learn to read, then readers so the people would be able to practice their reading skills. We even produced a monthly news sheet from all the churches and this gave something new to read each month.  We did booklets on various subjects to teach our people - books on marriage and alcoholism and story books.

Dad wanted to have a training seminar with the few beginning pastors we had, and so we translated the Timothy letters from the NT. Our first Gospel we translated was Luke, as it gave the birth of Jesus right through to his ascension.  Then Acts came next, the beginning of the church.  And on and on it went until finally after a couple of terms we produced a New Testament.

Those were busy days - we burned the "midnight oil" (literally as we had no electricity so used kerosene  burning lamps at night.  You kids were always a part of what we were doing and even liked to put together little booklets from the scraps of paper we produced, as we mimeographed our way through literature for the Bobos to learn to read. 

One day the church leaders came to me and asked if I would start a girls' school there at Santidougou.  The Bobo custom for a young man to marry was for his friends to "steal" a girl for him from a village and bring her to a family member to wait a few months for marriage.  The church leaders wanted to produce trained Christian wives for their young men, and so they established a girls' school at Santidougou. A couple was sent in as houseparents and I had classes every morning with these girls.  It was a great way to have lots of language practice and I soon developed fluency.  It was also fun for you girls to have Bobo girl friends living in our yard and you hung out with them.

The Alliance churches in Burkina started a New Life For All evangelism program and we translated the material and joined our people each evening as we sat outside the village, praying by name for people in the town.  This program over the years produced many believers and again we were involved in training them along with our pastors.

Uncle Dave and Aunt Margot came to Burkina as missionaries while we lived in Santidougou. They had first gone to Mali but were then sent over to Burkina where they were assigned as workers with the Youth.  They developed a wonderful program for the youth of the church and saw many young people come to Christ through meetings and personal contacts.  It was fun having them living in Bobo and we had many visits back and forth.  They were coming out to Santidougou for dinner one night and were late arriving. When Dad went out to check on them (no telephones in those days!), he found them stranded by the side of the road. A tire had come off their car and rolled way into the field where it was finally found and put back on! 

Uncle Jim and Aunt Donna also came to West Africa and were stationed among the Bwa people in Mali. We had occasion to visit back and forth with them also. More about that later.  We felt very fortunate to have so much family in West Africa, as so often missionaries are separated from their relatives.  However, we felt like the rest of the missionaries were also our family - as well as the Bobo people among whom we lived and worked.

Grandma Pierce came to visit us a couple times in Santidougou.  She came from a very proper New England home, and I know it was a stretch for her to see where we lived and adjust to a visit with us.  Our house was open and we tried to keep the mouse and roach population down, as I could not stand either.  While Grandma was with us, one night a mouse visited her dresser drawer and nibbled the roses off her beautiful pink sweater which had appliqued rosebuds on the front!  After that she put all her good things into a closed suitcase! And we tried to keep from laughing at the idea of that mouse eating her artificial rosebuds! 

One thing that happened as a result of Grandma Pierce's visit was that we got a beautiful clock.  In her home in New England, she had a beautiful clock in every room in the house!  And we had watches - but no clocks!  She mentioned it while she was there, but we didn't think anything about it.  Several months later, Tom and Doloris Burns, our field director and wife, came out to our place for dinner one night. He noticed a package slip in our PO box in Bobo and so went to the PO to pick up the package so he could bring it to us.  The customs men had the right to charge customs for packages, and the man looked at the large package addressed to us. He asked Tom what was in it and Tom said he had no idea, perhaps some toys for our children. (It was near Christmas time) We opened the gift right away, and lo and behold, a beautiful mantle clock which struck each hour!  We had that clock on our piano all the rest of our years in Africa, brought it home and it still sits in our living room striking the hours in our Georgia home!   The people of our village loved to listen to the clock that talked!

I need to get on to John's birth - our child of "worth" for our village, but that will be for another day......A Son is born!

OUR FAMILY INCREASES..........

Before talking about the increase in our family, just a few more items about our first days at Parehon.   We felt totally at home there, and as we learned the language better, we felt like local Bobos.  And were treated as such.  The town was divided in two parts - one side of the road were the fetish people (our side) and the other side of the road were the Muslims.  The mosque was on the Muslim side and the church was in the mission yard.  The fetish people did their regular sacrifices and gatherings, and basically the Muslims all joined them for those as well.  We were always among those who heard all the village news - births and deaths and any other unusual happenings in our village.

You kids liked to watch the masked dancers (which you called the grassy men). They had costumes of grass died red or black. They wore large carved headdresses.  There was one fetish that the women were not allowed to look at, and no women came out of their houses when that fetish manifested itself. 

There was also another masked group of fetish dancers called the Boli.  They walked on stilts and were all dressed in white costumes and looked like ghosts.  These only came out when the moon was full and coincided with some other aspect of nature. Their dances were beautiful  and these dances were only performed at midnight and beyond.

We had been in Bobo one day and stayed until quite late at night. Of course, we had no town lights and we just lit some lamps and got everyone to bed since it was late. We had just fallen asleep when we were startled awake by shouts and gunfire!!  We could not imagine what was going on!  But when Dad went out, he encountered a military commander who apologized.  They had staked out our town for military manoeuvers and had not informed us, so we found ourselves in the middle of a mock war!  All in the life of living in a busy village! 

Even before I finished language study, I had begun to work on reading primers for our people. We set up an office and workshop in a new building Dad had had built in back of our house.  We had two offices there and a mimeographing room, plus an outside kitchen for heating bath water, etc.  You kids probably remember our printing Bobo materials there in our office - thousand of pages of reading primers, little reading booklets, S.S. lessons, and the first copies of NT books which we translated. You used to help us collate the pages in the evening.  In this way we produced thousands of pages of material for the Bobos to read in their own language.  More about translation later. 

We also had seminars for our pastors, training for our Sunday School teachers and short term schools to train the young and old from the several churches in our Santidougou district.  In addition to that we would pull our old house trailer out to a bush village and set up there for a week or ten days, teaching all day in the open or in a mud church.  We lived in the open and you girls loved it when we went to these villages.  You played with the kids all day and fell onto your mattresses at night exhausted.  You would get so dirty playing in the dust of the village, and we always made sure we gave you each a sponge bath at night before you slept. In the village of Leguema the water matter was hard - the women would carry buckets of water up a steep hill from the creek below to keep us supplied while we were there.  One night after dark, there was only half a bucket of clear water left and we had five of us to take sponge baths!  Elin was a little baby so we bathed you first.  Next came you, Debbi, and Cheryl followed you.  The bit of water that was left in the bucket was for Dad and me!  Did we ever appreciate our abundant Parehon water after that trip!

Which brings me back to our Santidougou bathroom, with the little basin set in an iron ring.  We were expecting you, Elin, and you would scarcely fit in that little basin for a daily bath.  So Dad and I decided to give ourselves as a family a special Christmas present - a real sink with faucets and all in our bathroom.  They had them in Perissac in Bobo and so we splurged and got ourselves a white sink and that is where I bathed you as a baby.   Later on Dad also put a black and green tiled cement tub in a corner of the bathroom, and we loved using that during cold season.  Again water was scarce and we all bathed one by one in the same water, adding another teakettle of hot water with each new bath!   Those were very basic days for us!!  But we were happy and never felt underprivileged. 

And now for our growing family.... we were excited about your coming birth, Elin. You were due towards the end of December, and you were the only one of all five children who surprised us by coming early!  Our field conference had been held in Bobo early in December and so we were there for that.  Conference had followed their usual procedure and assigned a mission nurse for "the confinement of the Pierce's" - how do you like that for a title??  Marian Pond, nurse in Sangha. Mali, was given to us as nurse to help with the baby and mother, and she stayed on in Bobo since our baby was to be born later on in December - and Sangha was a LONG ways from Bobo!  We went home to Santidougou and resumed our schedule there until the night of December 11th. I was uncomfortable when we went to bed, and it got worse to the point that we decided it was time to go to Bobo, as my contractions were getting stronger by midnight.  So we loaded the family in our VW and took off for town where we wakened my parents.  As the contractions got stronger, we alerted the midwife that we were going to the Bobo Hospital and thought the baby would be there by morning.

Just a word about our midwife, Madame Diallo.  She was a beautiful little round Fulani woman, trained in widwifery and the most pleasant person imaginable.  She was the head midwife at the hospital and I had seen her several times.  She was there at the hospital to meet us and we went directly into the delivery room.  I noticed the blood on the sheet from the last delivery, as I climbed up on the delivery table - but at that point, I could have cared less, I just wanted to have this baby!  And at five in the morning you gave a lusty cry, Elin, and you joined our family!  Dad and Grandma Kennedy were both there in the delivery room also. 

Dad went back to the Mission after I got settled into a bed in a hospital room. They had a little child's crib right beside me bed - and you were such a beautiful little baby girl, Elin.  Dad announced the news to Labari, the ancient yardman who was in charge of the Boble mission yard. Labari's first question was "What did she give us?" And Dad answered "a girl" ! He was not happy with that news and wanted to know when I was going to give birth to some children of worth??  He wanted a boy!  But we were very happy with our Elin Mae.  Elin, you were our smallest baby, and you were also the only one of all five of you that we gave the name of a friend.  Elin Mae Duncan was a friend from Nyack, an MK also (from Indonesia), and I loved her name so that is where your name came from.

We just liked the name Cheryl Lynn and so named our first girl that.  Debbi has my middle name, Lee. John has Dad's first name, Milton, as a middle name. And Mark has Dad's middle name, Amasa, as a middle name. 

I was in the hospital three or four days and had lots of visitors, and then we decided it was time for us to move back to Santidougou!  Marian Pond went with us and helped as she could, but she said she had never been with a family for a "confinement" as easy as ours!  Dad did most of the work and the baby did well and so did I. But we did enjoy her visit and remained friends for life.

And so our family grew as you joined us, Elin!  We had taken mostly barrels of household stuff with us as an outfit that first term. But we did have one crate and had put all of our baby furniture in that. So we had a crib, a canvas and aluminum baby carriage and a Baby Butler, which served as a high chair but had a play table around it also. We had used this furniture for our first two girls and it came in handy for you - and also for your brothers later on.  We had found an old rocking chair in our Santidougou house, left there by another missionary. Dad repaired and painted that, and I loved rocking you and your brothers in that old chair!

Speaking of furniture, our second term we took a very large outfit, several crates.  We took a couch and two matching chairs, plus good beds, dressers, etc.  Martin Sanou was our yardman, as you remember, and he was helping Dad uncrate the furniture when it arrived at our home in Santidougou.  When he saw a couch and two matching chairs, he was amazed and ran out to tell Yusufu, "The big chair gave birth and had twins!" We had taken a dining room set also, and all of that furniture served us through our eight terms in Burkina Faso! 

Our Life continues in Santidougou.................

AND NOW TO WORK!!

Language study was a serious item in those days and, as a new missionary,  you were given a couple of days to unpack and settle in and then you were supposed to start language study. I guess my Dad (your Grandpa) was in charge of our language study, but we were pretty much left on our own as no other missionary knew our language!  I had the good fortune to have learned Bambara (or Jula) as a teenager and so I asked the local preacher (who had been trained at the Bambara Bible School) to act as our language helper. He needed the money and so we thought he was a good choice as he lived right in our extended yard. So we had not been in Santidougou more than a few days when I started language study.  Saying a Jula phrase and writing down the Bobo translation. And at the end of each lesson, I would analyze what I had written, including what I thought to be pronouns, how to say various verb forms, and lists of vocabulary. I loved it!  (A parenthesis here: I do not know if this pastor had a form of sleeping sickness or if he just got sleepy repeating the same things over and over, but I often found him dozing off during our language lessons. Not terribly inspiring!) 

What I learned, I would teach Dad and he would study it with another person, and thus we progressed from day to day.  Every week or so, I would gramatically analyze all of the material I had illicited into categories: verbs, nouns, prepositions, etc. 

In the meantime, you girls were adjusting to life in Santidougou village. And learning the language as you played. You had a pack of friends and they were there at dawn to wait for you to wake up and come out to play!  And of course you learned the language quicker than we did.  You had a box of outdoor toys and the kids loved to investigate those toys - things they had never seen before.  I had an old wooden, jointed doll that had been made in 1911, and was really an heirloom - but somehow it found its way into that box. You kids even named the doll Duasura, after a funny girl in town - and in time that wooden doll was torn to pieces. And that was the end of my childhood antique doll! 

The neighborhood kids were always at our house early in the morning, as dawn broke. Dad was  up early but my inclination was to sleep a while in the morning - for about the first week we lived there!  Our window sills in the bedroom were low, so that any air there was outside would reach us on our beds to keep cool in hot season. Each morning, the first words I would hear were:  "A nyi, a nyi."  "Awo a sege, a sege!"  And as I opened my eyes, there was a line of little brown eyes peering at me above the wimdow sill by my bed!    So I always had an early start to every day.  And the kids patiently waited for us to eat breakfast and pray together before you joined them to play for the day.  It was a fun life for you. And good for us too.

Dad got a job he hadn't counted on in our village - village nurse/doctor.  There had been a nurse stationed there some years before we arrived and there was no other medical help in town, so she took care of everyone's sores and diseases.  You all know how squeamish I am about anything medical, and so the medicat ministry fell to Dad. He usually started about six am, stopped for breakfast at seven, and then finished up his line of patients afterwards.  Plus all the emergencies that came to our door very often, day and night.  He did refused to do baby deliveries, so I got roped into some of those. We did have a midwife (an old Bobo lady) in town so I only got called if it was a pastor's wife or a Christian - or something they could not handle.  Little did they know, I wouldn't be able to handle it either!  But I did do a number of deliveries - among them the wives of our pastors.  And it always gave me a bit of pride to see my children I had delivered when they were grown up and functioning adults!

The first baby I was called for was at four am.  We had a book "Where there is no doctor", and I had read the maternity section of that. That was my training, period! The book said you should have plenty of boiling water on hand (I always did this - but never knew what to do with it except to wash the mother and child after it was all over!) and a bottle of alcohol and some strangs of knitting wool.  Plus a blanket to wrap the newborn in to keep him/her from getting chilled.  So I had my kit ready and when the call came, we started boiling water. It was Rhoda, Tite's mother, and she was in labor with Nahome.  It was a pretty straight forward delivery and all went well - the baby came head first, I cut and tied the cord, washed the baby and wrapped her in a little new receiving blanket from our baggage!  I was pretty proud of myself, albeit a little shaky!!

I think the funniest story of Dad's medical work happened after Royles came and we were leaving Santidougou for Bobo and Royles were taking our place.  Joan was squeamish about sores and so forth like I was, and so Rollo was going to inherit Dad's medical buiness.  He had Rollo work with him a few days and one afternoon they had a Fula lady patient.  You will remember that the Fula women had a custom of breakfing down a young girl's breast as they matured, and thus the grown women had these elongated, flat breasts. This particular lady had a large ulcer on the underside of one of her breasts, which had to be treated and wound with white bandages. Dad had Rollo hold the flat breast out away from the lady's body while he wound the white bandage round and round.  After that, Rollo declared, "Hey, I'm not sure I'm prepared for this ministry!"

We lived in Santidougou that whole first term, and we always think of that as our village, even though we lived many years in Bobo-Dioulasso later on.  As I was finishing up my language study, it was time for us to have another baby. So I had a goal - when I gave my final Bobo language exam (which was to be a Sunday sermon delivered in the language) I wanted to be able to get close enough to the pulpit to be able to read my sermon notes in Bobo!  And so I planned that for a Sunday service when I was about seven months' pregnant with you, Elin.  I did OK with the message - Grandpa Kennedy was my language supervisor - and I passed all my language exams before you were born in December of 1960.

And that bring us to....Our family increases!!

AFRICA - at last!!

It seemed like we had been a LONG time actually getting to Africa!  We had home service (two years) and French language study (one year) and now we were finally on the ship sailing for West Africa!  While we were still in Paris, we had gotten the news that the field conference stationing committee had assigned us to Baramba, to the Girls' School there.  In those days it was the Mali-Upper Volta field together and appointments were made by one conference stationing committee to the two countries.

Being appointed to Baramba was OK with us.  Dad did mention the fact that he had a wife and two daughters and now he was being sernt to live at a Girls' School, but we accepted the appointment. We were to learn Bambara - which I already knew from my childhood in West Africa.  We had two single women in France with us, and they were also to be stationed with us - two more ladies for Dad!  Nureda Carter had been in corresponence with a man back in the U.S. and when he came to visit her in France, she decided to go back to the States and marry him!  One less lady for Dad!

Then the Floyd Bowmans visited us in France on their way to the States for furlough, and they brought the news that the excom had just met and re-stationed us!  Carolyn Wright was to be in Bobo to be bookkeeper there. And our family was to be stationed at Santidougou and learn the Bobo language!  Wow - what a switch!  So before we left Paris, we knew we were to be stationed in the Upper Volta part of West Africa and we also were to learn an unwritten language.  Which we accepted.

When we got on that small passenger ship at Bordeaux we had about two weeks at sea.  We did stop at the port of Conakry, where the Bowers family departed the ship, as that was their destination.  The Arnolds, Pierces and Carolyn Wright were scheduled to leave the ship in Abidjan. And Grace Nelson and Betty Keiffer would stay with the ship until they reached the port in Gabon, their destination.  The days at sea were relaxing, there were play facilities and good staff to care for all of you children. We fed you before our meals and then you went happily off to play in the playroom while we adults had a leisurely meal.  We felt rested and ready to debark the ship when we reached Abidjan mid-afternoon!  On the dock stood two excited father-grandfathers - Walter Arnold and Leroy Kennedy!  They were there to meet us and the Arnolds, and were delighted to see their grandchildren for the first time!

Arnolds had time to get to Bouaké so they drove right through - but we had a dirt road to travel all the way to Upper Volta and Bobo. It was rainy season and the roads were bad, muddy and full of potholes! So Grandpa decided to do it in two days. He had planned to put us up in the Park Hotel - the only hotel in the city of Abidjan at that time!!  We did have dinner there, but the rooms were full and we had to sleep on some single cots, all in a row, in the Methodist church in Abidjan that first night!  After doing some shopping the next morning, we took off for Toumodi and stayed the night with the resident Alliance missionaries there.  The next morning we took off for the Upper Volta border and then Bobo-Dioulasso, where Grandma Kennedy was anxiously awaiting us! 

I pictured Bobo as an enlarged bush town as it was when I had left it eight years before. On the ship from Bordeaux to Abidjan I had saved up as many apples as I could every day and had brought a nice bag for my mother, as I knew she loved apples.  It was my surprise to find they sold apples right in the Monoprix in Bobo.  We had also filled a trunk with food - spaghetti and pasta and other groceries.....and again we found they were all available in the city of Bobo.  We had  Monoprix and one Lebanese store, both well stocked with all the imported foods we would need!   Dad also took us to a hardware store and bought us two twin metal beds with new mattresses.  We were able to use the old mattresses in the Santidougou house for you two girls.  After that first day of shopping, Dad took us out to Santidougou to meet the villagers and see our house, in which we would live for many years. (Also the house where I lived just before I left West Africa to attend High School in the USA). 

Again I was surprised to find the house had an indoor flush toilet!  We used to have an outhouse, a little distance from the main house, which was now empty and Dad eventually made that into a pigeon house. The indoor toilet was a nice surprise.  Dr. R.R. Brown, pastor for years in Omaha, made a trip through West Africa and found there was not a house there that had a flush toilet. He went back to the U.S. and bought a truckload of toilets and sent them out to have them installed in the missionary homes across West Africa! A great gift.  Besides the flush toilet, there was an open shower in one corner and an iron ring stuck into the one wall with a small enamel basin set into it.  There was an inside pantry and an outdoor kitchen with a charcoal pit for cooking.

The house was smaller than I remembered it, but it was fine for our family of four.  You all remember how close to the village our place was and of course everyone in the village came to meet us that first day. The people did not wear a lot of clothes - the women wore no tops and the men wore homespun cotton baggy pants. The kids wore nothing for the most part.  Grandma had temporarily hired Paul to do housework for us. He could also cook a few different meals so we took him on temporarily at least. Grandma had also hired Yusufu to sweep and wash the house before we got there, and we kept him on to do housework and help where needed.  He started with us the first day we arrived, and was with us to see us off on the plane from Ouagadougou when we left more than forty years later.  He was like a big brother or uncle to all of you kids, really a part of our family. And still is!

You girls stayed in Bobo with Grandma Kennedy while Dad and I commuted to the village to get the house set up for living.  We had sent our barrels ahead and so were able to unpack our household effects, make beds, get our kerosene frig going (we had bought a new one).  Paul had worked for several families before he worked for us and so he felt in charge of the house!  When we decided to put our big kerosene frig out in the dining room - rather than in the narrow inside kitchen where the frig had always been - Paul tried his best to dissuade us!  He was too old for the work he had always done and so we had him train Yusufu and gave him the road.  Yusufu learned quickly and he was always a part of our family, a wonderful man. 

AND NOW TO WORK!  - we had a whole lifetime ahead of us and we were ready to get started!!