Friends and neighbors...................................

During the years at Santidougou we had many friends, almost all Bobos. With the exception of a few familes of other tribes who lived near our village.  There was the family of the gendarme, whose son was a deaf mute. He was a good friend of yours, John, I think mainly because he had a donkey and how the two of you loved to ride that donkey together!

It was from their family that I first learned about the importance of African funerals. One day I saw my friend, Lydia, from the village walk by the door - it was the middle of the week and she was all dressed up. So I asked where she was going and she told me that someone had died in the gendarme's family and she was going to greet for the funeral, so I asked if I could go with her. I quickly put on some shoes and accompanied her.  The whole town of Santidougou and many other people filled the large yard. I asked Lydia why she hadn't invited me to go to the funeral and her answer was, "We always thought white people were not interested in our funerals as no one ever attended!" A good cultural lesson for me and from then on we always attended the funeral proceedings (sometime for days) after that. When we got back from our greetings, I told Dad that he should go also and so he dressed appropriately and went to greet, which was greatly appreciated.  From that time on, whenever someone died in the area, someone always came and announced it to us also!

Some of the young Muslim men from the village interacted with Dad about Christianity and some were converted. Dad had an evening Bible study for them - among them Théophile who later became one of our translators working with me on the translation of the Bobo Bible.  His father died a Muslim but his old mother came to Christ and if she is still living faithfully attends the church there.

The Christian families (which were few when we arrived) were also our friends. We visited back and forth. The women of the church were friends and soon after our arrived I invited them all to a meal at our house.  They arrived, dressed in their finest. I knew they did not have much meat in their diet and so I had Yusufu make hamburgers and buns and french fries. We had a fun time talking and laughing, but after they had gone I realized that not one of them had done more than nibble a bit at their meat. They ate the fries and the buns, but left the meat!  Another cultural lesson: they are only used to having bits of meat in a sauce and not a big hunk of ground meat like that!  So whenever I had friends in for dinner after that, I always had rice or couscous and sauce and they ate heartily!

Dad also made good friends of the Muslims, young and old, in town. And I made friends with their wives. In fact, I even helped to deliver their babies once in a while. And we ran them to the city hospital when needed.  Many came and talked religion as well and eventually we saw a large contingent of the young men trust in Christ and come to church. 

Another regular friend was Moktar - maybe some of you remember him.  When he was sober he would come and have long conversations with us. But he was also a heavy drinker. When we lived in Bobo, he came to the house one day, drunk as could be! It was at noontime and everyone was at lunch in our house - the president of the US Alliance churches and our executive committee and Dad.  They all got a big kick out of this Fula coming in like he belonged to us and emoted all over Dad!  We of course had to converse with him in French or Jula, but we wanted him to hear the gospel so he would understand it.  We had some Gospel Recordings records in his dialect of Fula and he would sit on our front porch and listen to those recordings by the hour.  Who knows what he retained of the Gospel.  To be Fula was to be Muslim and as far as we know he never changed.

When we moved to the city of Bobo we had more friends: local pastors, ex-pats working or living in the city, commercial people and of course many local city people of various ethnic groups.  There was a lovely Malagas lady who was a dentist in town. She was also a Protestant and used to attend our French service at the downtown church.  There was also an Austrian lady, not young anymore, who had married a very important iman in the city. She had a twelve year old son who went everywhere with her. We were just on speaking acquaintance with her. In one house we had some Dutch neighbors, lovely people. They also had a child. We exchanged meals and saw each other to chat on a regular basis. There were René and Stevie Braveman, who were in Bobo for a while on a study assignment.  They also had two children and a few times you girls babysat for them.  We were in Seattle some years ago and were able to contact them and went out to dinner together. Then Dad was there on tour and saw them again. And we hear occasionally from them on FB. Good friends. 

We also had friends among the Lebanese in Bobo.  The Saade family was there when we arrived and owned a grocery store  in town.  Their business expanded and they eventually owned the Auberge, where we went to eat in their restaurant and swim in their pool. They were always very friendly and you were friends with their son, John, - was it Michel?  They had a pool at the Auberge and good food, so it was a favorite place for us missionaries to spend a pleasant evening.

Another Lebanese had a grocery store near the market where we shopped. They knew we had a daughter and family in Lebanon and we would chat about that sometimes. When you came to visit, Cheryl and Darrell, we were all invited to their home for dinner. Dinner started at nine pm and ended at twelve with strong Lebanese coffee.  We also entertained them in our home. 

When one lives overseas, one meets some strange characters sometimes, and such was Vandenberg.  He said he was Belgian and he lived mostly in Dédougou and Tougan up country from us.  But we also knew him well as he came to the mission in Bobo.  He bought a VW van from one of our missionaries, which used to belong to us.  This was a man who knew little of God and some of our missionary men spent hours talking with him. He loved eating in their homes and being friends with them and so also listened to their Gospel. Eventually he married a very lovely Fula lady (common law marriage).  We had just finished conference in Bobo one day and in came Vandy, distressed because the battery was dead in his car and he could not get another one. One of our men, who knew him well (he thought) graciously gave him a battery he had and Vandy and wife pulled out of our mission yard. Dad made the remark, "That's the last we will see of him!" And sure enough it was true.  He was a crook, hunted by the police, and they had heard he was associated with our mission so came down to question us.  Nobody, to our knowledge, ever heard of him again.  You win some and lose some!

There were also French women, with children, who had married Burkinabe men and were being mistreated by them or else they could not fit into the local culture. I spent some time listening to them and talking with them. Eventually, they made their way back to Europe and abandonned their Burkinabe husbands.

Our nearest neighbors were Pastor Thomas and his family, who came from Sangha in Mali and became first African pastor of the downtown Alliance church. They lived on the same compound as we did and Mark, you and their young son were inseparable buddies.  They also had a teenage daughter.  Female excision was practiced in their Dogon tribe in Mali, but Thomas would never permit this in his family. One day when he was out somewhere, his wife decided to go ahead and do the excision on their daughter.  Someone came running to the house (Dad was not there) and called me to come quickly, that there was terrible trouble. When I went into the house they took me to the little washroom and showed me a little potty full of blood and clots that had come out of this child when her mother clumsily tried to excise her! I was horrified and knew we had to get her to the hospital. Thomas and Dad were not there, but Mary Kaye Pease was in town and she had a van in which we could put the girl, lying down. And we all tore off to the hospital!  They were able to save her life, but just barely - we were all praying hard as the doctors worked on her.  And the pastor was very unhappy when he got back. She was in the hospital several days before she was well enough to come home.  What an experience that was to go through!

When we lived on the mission compound we also had the secretary who worked in the office - there were a number of these through the years. Betty Canberg Smith was a friend of ours and of you girls.  She eventually came back to Toccoa and married and is now in our church here so we see her regularly.  Kauffmans lived there also and what great friends they were - and are!

In Bobo I regularly used three languages besides English - Bobo, Jula and French. So that was a big change from the bush. My ministry also changed, as I was mission hostess and in charge of the motel we operated for our people. And eventually I got involved in a lot of other ministries in the city as well - more about that later.