We were involved in so many church and mission ministries in Burkina, all of which we loved doing. And often God increased our fields of ministry, in Burkina and also in other West African countries. The West African grapevine works very well among churches and missions, and soon I found myself invited to teach principles of TEE for the Baptists, the Mennonites, the SIM - in Burkina and also in Niger, Mali, Ivory Coast and Bénin. This sometimes meant travel by road and by plane.
In more recent years, the government has gotten involved in teaching literacy in the local languages, something we missionaries had been doing for years. The National Agricultural association prepared literacy materials and published books on farming for local populations. This was something we needed among our churches, and I organized a several days seminar in Bobo, where the government literacy man taught us in the new Jula orthography. We invited our Poundou professors (educated at Ntorosso years ago) to attend and be trained in the current spelling system. A number of our missionaries also took that training.
For many years there was no new missionary orientation to speak of in our West African fields, and so while Dad was field director I started a program of organizing monthly seminars in Bobo-Dioulasso, where our new missionaries could gather together for cultural learning, adaptation to the West African way of thinking, learning about their own actions and reactions in a new culture. We had gathered a series of very good missions books that we asked them to take home and read. And of course it was also a time for good fellowship, questions and the exchange of ideas. When Dad and I were sent to Mali for a year in 2004-2005, we had thirteen brand new missionaries who arrived on that field that year. Again we used the training program we had developed for Mali, and these times together were very profitable for all.
Teams from the States and Canada have become in vogue at this period of missions history. We helped out in some of these teams when the idea was just starting to catch on. After our year as MIR at Nyack College, the missions department arranged a tour of about twenty students to come for a three week stay with us in Santidougou. Wow, that was a challenge. They all slept and ate with us at Santidougou. Elin, you worked hard to make that team a success, helping Yusufu with the food and generally making those weeks a great experience for those students!
Dave Rambo thought that trip was such a success that he arranged to have another team come the next year. Wow! What a difference. Ralph Ellenberger came with them and there were only a handful of students who came. Dad was fulltime in mission committee meetings and other office responsabilities, so John was there to help me host that gang. This group was much less enthusiastic, they missed their spouses, they counted the days until they could leave from the time they arrived. Dad was in excom meetings and so you and I, John, took the group on a trip up country to Clousers' town of Safane. You remember their house - strictly bush, mat ceilings, no electricity, bugs and snakes around. We got their in the afternoon and I had taken along an alfresco meal to serve that evening. I spread out the food - sandwich makings (I had even bought expensive sliced ham!) and we had lettuce and there were hard boiled eggs and chips Yusufu had made. It looked pretty good to all of us and some of our guests also ate the food. One girl would not touch anything - she "didn't care for deli meats" so I offered her some boiled eggs and chips, but she "wasn't into boiled eggs"! John, you were getting madder by the moment and finally exploded, "My mother fixed this good food for all of you and I want to see every one of you eat what she prepared!" And that was the end of complaining! When we left the next morning to go on to Ouarkoye, one of the girls rolled her eyes as she shook hands with Clousers, and said, "God bless!" I guess she figured they needed God's blessing in that forsaken spot!
So we drove on to Ouarkoye and stopped in the downtown village to greet Daniel Bonzi, the church president. He greeted us all and set out some small stools and logs for all of us to sit down and talk. As we were talking, a man came in from the fields - it was planting season - and he carried a stick out in front of him with an enormous cobra (dead and a bit bloody) hanging fom it! He had killed the snake in his field and was thanking God he had not been bitten! All of a sudden, one of the girls began to topple off her low seat - her face white as a sheet! She had never seen a snake that close and was terified. The winds were blowing hard that day and the church president said to me, "It's our wind blowing so hard today that makes your young person sick - you don't have these winds in your country!" He never tumbled that it was the snake that made two of the girls start to faint. John came to the rescue and got them to stand up and get some color back in their face. Soon we asked for the road and went up to the empty mission house on the hill, where we were going to have lunch, tuna sandwiches which I had prepared and brought from Clousers'. You can turn over almost any stone on that hill and find a small viper or a scorpion, there were no trees so the dry winds were blowing. Someone said eagerly, "What's for lunch?" And I opened the cold chest and said "Tuna sandwiches, chips and fruit." One guy said, "Sorry I don't eat tune fish!" (Mc Donald's was not nearby so what to do) Trust John who gave a loud lecture to all - "My mother fixed good tuna sandwiches for our lunch today and we are ALL eating tune sandwiches!" End of words, and we all ate and went on our way back to the city of Bobo.
Ah yes, teams...they can be both a blessing and a curse! One more team experience and I won't bore you with any more. We were living in Santidougou and Bob Niklaus brought a team out from the States, five people I think. We were in Bobo to meet them and we sat around in the living room in the main house talking. Dad saw that the one lady was sitting alone so he went over to sit beside her and make her feel at home. She about drove him crazy with her remarks, and we found out later she was driving them all crazy. Afterwards Bob Niklaus asked us if we could take the one couple to our station just to get them away from this lady, and we readily agreed. The couple was from Long Hill Chapel, so that was a good connection for us. Our van was in the shop and so we borrowed Dave Shady's old truck which happened to have several basic things wrong with it, but we had learned to make it work. Coming back into town from Santidougou we enlisted the help of our guests to get us back to the city. The pickup was bright yellow. It looked pretty good but nothing much worked. Dad sat and drove with one hand and blew into a tube the whole time to make the gas come through as it should. The man rode in the back of the truck, holding on for dear life (it was on that old dirt road!), I sat in the middle and shifted with one hand and put my other arm behind the lady's back (who was sitting in front with us) to keep her door shut, as the catch was broken. And thus we bounced into town! These people were horrified that this was our transportation and we explained to them that we had a van that was in the garage right then. Well, these people did not appreciate our mode of transportation! So much so that a couple of months later when you, Cheryl, came back for summer vacation to Santidougou, along with Baba Etienne who had been at a US conference, the first thing you told us was that Long Hill Chapel had sent a check for ten thousand dollars to buy us a new car!! What a welcome surprise!
One more team story. The year we moved to Bobo to the director's job, a group of twenty Alliance women came to Burkina for a tour. We got ready for them and planned meals and sleeping arrangements, etc. Their train came in from Abidjan at about midnight. And those were the days of the curfew at sundown. So Dad got special permission from the police and they sent an armed soldier down to sit beside Dad in the Rapide and accompany him to the train station to meet the midnight train. He sat there with his rifle standing up in front of him - and these ladies had the ride of their life sitting on those hard Rapide seats, with Dad driving and the soldier guarding them through the darkened streets. They had their bags searched and it was a never to be forgotten trip for those ladies! They were great guests, loved the people, the work they saw, the food (Yusufu turned out mountains of food each day!) and to this day I still meet people who took that trip to Burkina and experienced what a coup looks like on the ground!
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