RETIREMENT..................................................

The Psalmist says, "Many, O Lord, are the wonders you have done, the things you planned for us no one can recount.  Were I to speak of them, they would be too many to declare!"   This has been the story of our lives....God has blessed us in so many ways - too numerous to recount them all. 

But after a lifetime of doing God's work in another country, there comes a time which we call retirement.  Much as we tried to put it off, it eventually caught up with us, and in 1998 we were scheduled to retire from overseas ministry. So we had to seek a resting place in the States.  The usual retiral age in Alliance missions is 62 for singles and 65 for marrieds.  In our case, Dad was 72 and I was 67 when we officially completed our ministry in Burkina Faso.  We really had not planned ahead for where we wanted to live on this side of the ocean - and it was during our last year, as we were working hard to finish up the Bible and other jobs, that we both came to the idea of retiring in Toccoa - since both of you boys lived here then.  It had to be of God, as we had had no experience of Toccoa and had only ever made a couple of fleeting visits here during the years.  But in retrospect we see this was God's will for us, and we have become transplanted Southerners! 

We had been assigned to tour in the North and so lived that first half year in a missionary apartment on Nyack campus.  Then headed South in December - that famous trip when I went to sleep at the wheel and ran off the road into a shallow gully. I almost didn't need a place to retire!  But God spared me and we eventually got to Toccoa and settled in. 

We were assigned to a Spring tour as well, and then IM sent us back to work in San Pedro for that one year. An interesting, eventful year - again in God's providence we were able to put the finishing touches to the Bobo Bible that year and also write a teaching manual for the pastors to use in teaching their people.  As well as receiving people from forty different missions and churches as guests at the San Pedro Guest House which we managed. Then back to Toccoa again.

A little later on, we again were asked to go back to Mali for a year, this time to direct the work of that field.  Our home did not remain empty during that time, but was a refuge for other friends who were between houses or jobs.  And so the Shadys, Strongs, Wahls, Michael Albright and Mark Pierce's have all made a home here for a while. I wish I had kept a guest book of all the people who have come our way - many for meals, some for a longer stay.  We have been blessed by all of them.

For some years, after being officially retired,  we went on regular missions tours in the United States and even in Puerto Rico, which we loved.  This helped to bring in a little money.  I taught one year of French at TFC and enjoyed that.  We both began subbing in the public school soon after our return from overseas.  We started out in the Middle School and then went on to sub at the high school.  I was curtailed in my subbing when I had my brain tumor, but Dad still gets called in from time to time. Not bad for 83 years old!   

There are also lots of opportunity for ministry here in Toccoa.  Occasional teaching at Toccoa brings us in contact with students, and we continue to have students in our home for meals.  Those who examine candidates for overseas ministry in this district have also involved us on many occasions to help examine candidates for ministry.  This helps to keep our hand in missions also.

Dad was involved in sponsoring an inter-denominational fellowship of churches here in this city, and this has brought us into contact with many people outside of the Alliance.  We have a number of black churches here in town and the surrounding towns, and we have frequently visited them.  Dad is honorary pastor in a couple of them, and they greet us as one of them when we visit.  For a while we went to early service in our church and then visited one of the black churches in town each Sunday.  Dad is also a member of the anti drug coalition here in the area and meets regularly with them.  Each year we participate in the anti-drug march here in this town.  So our lives are full of variety and we have many friends, both at our church and in the local community.  All of this adds a certain richness to our lives. 

Getting involved in working in the jail has been an additional ministry - but I will talk about that next time.  Suffice it to say, we live rich, interesting lives and praise God for His care for us each day!

Thanksgiving blessings..................................................

 Darrell and Cheryl, you are such intrepid workers in living the Gospel among Muslim peoples. And you keep on keeping on. We are so proud of you.  May your tribe increase!

Steve and Debbi,  we admire your perseverance in ministryand your proficiency in communicating through words and actions to all levels of West African society, with good success. God bless you in this new venture which you are undertaking!

Joel and Elin,  you are such a great team as you complement each other in reaching an unreached level of African society -  again!  You have persevered under hardship.  May God continue to give you wisdom!

John, you have shown perseverance and grace as you have endured much hardship  without giving up.  Your resiliece amazes us!  Know that we are always here for you and we know God has special blessings ahead in your life!

Mark and Katy,  it is a delight to us to see you combining your gifts and your training as you teach and train those four beautiful children and succeed in business.  May God's face continue to shine upon you!

We are the luckiest parents in the whole wide world!

THANKSGIVING ...........................................................

THANKSGIVING -  It's a time to reflect on God's goodness and a time to give thanks fot the sunshine and the rain which He allows in all of our lives.  As human beings, we love the "sunshine", but God knows we also need the cloudy weather and the occasional storm  to make us more dependent on HIM. 

As I reflect on our life, past and present, I am thankful for:
-  Our parents
       Who taught us to love God .......
       Who cared for us through the good and the hard times ......
       
-  Our siblings
       Dedicated to the work of the Lord in various ways and several denominations

-  Our college years
      My four great years at Houghton College where I had little money but many friends,
        where finding a dime in my coat pocket for a cup of coffee was a bright spot for
          this poor college student!
      We are thankful also for Nyack College which brought us together as God had
          planned long ago.... That was an exciting year - met in November, engaged in
            February - and married in June!  WOW!

-   Our fifty six years of marriage to the same partner - a rarity in today's social climate
          even for Christians it seems....  for Dad who prepares breakfast for me every
             morning and showers me with his love and blessing!

-   For God's gift to us of forty three years of  exciting - and sometimes challenging - 
         overseas ministry.

-  For providing a comfortable home here in Georgia, where we have adapted in part to
          being good Southerners!  For giving us a ministry even here.

-  For First Alliance church where we worship and have fellowship with other believers
          as well as ministering through this church to the local community.  We are also
          thankful for Long Hill Chapel and Marion Hill Alliance who supported us through
          prayer and giving during our lives in West Africa.

-  For many friends in several different countries and for Facebook and SKYPE which
          keep us in contact with them even today.

-  For good health again after two years of illness...God needed me here a while longer!

And above and beyond all these personal blessings, we are most thankful for you five special children, you are the greatest!  And so are your spouses, whom we think of as our very own.  Your children and their spouses are all so special to us....and we just wished we lived a little closer to that darling Levi, our first great grandchild!

So many desciprtive words come to my mind as I think of you all.......
       generous  -  fun loving  -  devout  -  faithful  - understanding  -  happy  -  loving  -      caring  -  intelligent  -  supportive of us and each other  -  kind  -  empathetic  -   innovative  -  articulate  -  the list could go on and on.....  You are the greatest!!

How often we hear from other peopl the word, "You have a wonderful family!"  And we echo to ourselves,  "Amen!"

MORE TRIALS......................................................................

To be alive is to be influenced by both joys and trials in our lives.  We cannot escape the trials but we can at the same time practice peace and joy in our lives.  This fruit of the Spirit which God wants to develop in all of His children - JOY.  Many times trials and conflict can drive us closer to our heavenly Father - which we have experienced many times.

Dad went to Nigeria for seven years, making that trip a couple of times each year. I went twice with him. After experiencing Nigeria, I was glad God called us to Burkina. The Nigerian people are great, but when we were there their country was a circus!  We lived through some unbelievable trials in Nigeria.  Just driving with a Nigerian pastor on the highways was hair raising. We had been warned to never ride with him at night as he did not see well!!   When our taxi driver lost the bolts holding in place his gas tank and he kept going, with the sparking tank bumping along the road, we thought maybe we would not make it back to calm Burkina. We finally got him stopped and he got us in another taxi, but it was a close call.  Andrew and Esther Schaeffer lived in Nigeria as long as they could, but the uprisings there forced them to leave finally - and Burkina has been blessed to have them. 

When Dad reached the age of sixty-five - and I was five years behind him - we were so busy in ministry - planting churches, translating the Bible for the Bobos, teaching - with no thought of retiring.  Bob Fetherlin came for a field visit and we invited him for dinner at out house, as we always did.  His first comment was something about starting the process for getting us retired!  We were flabbergasted!  This was the farthest thought from our minds.  I guess we finally convinced him and we stayed on another term or so. And to his credit, when Bob needed a couple to fill in on two other fields - Côte d'Ivoire and Mali - he called us back into harness.  And we were a lot older then! 

The missionary who is very close to the local people sometimes has a hard row to hoe. He is often told everything that is going on in the church, including the scandals that are sometimes brewing. This was our lot.  What do you do with that information?  We heard early on of a high church leader who was involved in adultery and other missionaries did not know it - and had a hard time believing it.  It caused some division among mission personnel.  In one case, the man was someone who had been very close to us - his wife was my close friend, he and I taught together and served on a board together. His sin also raised real conflict in the church. This was towards the end of our ministry, and caused us much sadness.

There was also serious sexual misconduct on the part of a missionary which shocked us all and threatened to cause division in the missionary staff.  Disaccord over national church issues also caused conflict within the mission, and this was a difficult time for all.  In all of this, we continued on in our work, pleading with God to regularize certain conflicts. Some of them were resolved and others never did come to a good conclusion.  One thing we learned was that sometimes we have to just leave some trials in God's hands and accept the results.  A good lesson to learn.  We came out of it all with sorrow, but no bitterness, and that was all God's doing in our lives.

Perhaps some of that last term conflict in Burkina, which we experienced and resolved for ourselves, was the thing that some years later helped us to face a year in Mali without going under!  We loved the Malians and our ministry among them. Several pastors were men I had trained at Maranatha Bible Institute and that was a gift to me.  Dad also had many friends among the Malians from his years as field director of both countries, the Mali-Upper Volta field.   We had some great missionaries - there were thirteen new ones, and it was my delight to meet with them once a month for cultural classes and discussions.  This was a field of many nationalities of international workers.  And they did not always think alike!  Too often we had to be the arbitrers of conflicts that arose.  Our Chilean couple did not understand much English and a little French only - Spanish was their language which we did not speak.  This family arrived to spend a lifetime in Mali with only a couple large suitcases, period.  We were able to help them getting a house furnished. They looked at us like parents and we learned to love them very much.  But in a staff like that, there were a lot of conflicts that developed.  We found that the church and the Mission were not speaking officially to each other - never met together. Dad worked hard on that one and brought about some good things.  We felt like it was one of our hardest years - and yet a very blessed one as well. 

In spite of the vaious kinds of testings and conflicts we went through during our forty three years of overseas service, we have to force ourselves to remember some of these negative incidents.  We saw God do wonderful things in the lives of others and in our own lives.   And He preserved us through the testings and trials and conflicts we encountered as well as through the great host of good times.  We are most blessed!

TESTINGS AND CONFLICTS..................................................

The saying goes that Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.... and even when we are living and working for the Lord, some of those troubles dog our footsteps.  Because of sin, we have to suffer - and during a lifetime of overseas ministry, we have had our share.  However, since Dad and I both tend to be "half full glass people" (in contrast to half-empty glass people), we have been able to weather many storms and come out (without too many scars) on the other side.  The very nature of world missions contributes to encountering conflict and we need to learn how to avoid it if possible - and deal with it if it occurs!

Just this week we participated in a panel for the missions department students at TFC. The subject was CONFLICT on the mission field and how to deal with it.  I came across a helpful little book recently, and its basic premise is that there are hot country peoples and cold country peoples in the world.  The cold country people are task oriented and the hot country people are relationally oriented.  The ordinary cross cultural worker from the USA (a cold country), for example, is very task oriented. He is trained for that, and he is suddenly confronted with people in another country who are totally relationally oriented.  If we think back to some conflicts we have been confronted with, we can see how these opposing views work against each other!  Becoming relational in an African or Mid-Eastern society is so important, as all of you can attest to.  Some international workers struggle with conflicts all their lives because they never understand this concept.

Conflicts are of many kinds:  involving language or culture, with the local national church, with co-workers, both local and international; also the conflict of ideas and orientation (local vs American) and (in missions) even conflict with the home board. As international workers, we should not be surprised by conflicts we face - the NT is full of conflicts and we are constantly admonished by Scripture on how to deal with them the way the Lord intends. 

After we left the USA - to embark on a lifetime of work overseas - our first time of testing came when we arrived in Paris and saw where we were expected to live. I have described it to you before - one very small room with two double beds for the four of us to sleep, study, play and what have you?  The kitchen which we could see through a basement window was filthy - every plate of food arrived at our table in the dining room with a ring of grease around the edge.  Soon both you girls had diahrrea and there were only cloth diapers in those days.  Poor Dad - he could not understand a word being said around him and we had to also be studying French fulltime.  I am sure he must have had some times when he wondered why he had ever signed up to be a missionary! We were in that living situation for two months, and then moved into a small apartment and things were better after that. At least we survived!

We arrived at Santidougou, working with the leaders of the three local churches in that district.  The people had appointed church leaders and they had services and we joined them in worship and in learning the local language.  Former missionaries had worked in Jula instead of learning the local language, and so the church had made up their own rules and lived by them and the "white people" did not know the difference. As we began to learn the language and ask questions and understand things,  we found the church was full of crooked leaders:  people with more than one wife, even the main leader of the churches had two wives (one was his church wife so we only saw her!) and there was a great deal of beer drinking, as native beer is part of the old Bobo culture.  This all began to come out, and the fat was in the fire - as they say!  One young pastor had only one official wife himself (and he was the president of the group of pastors).  But he also helped train young girls to be Christian wives for our young men - and part of that training, it seems, was to personally instruct them sexually!  This went along all right until one young fiancé found out that his fiancée was pregnant by the pastor, and he raised a palaver on the eve of the wedding.  Dad helped them to decide that that wedding should not take place.  And it took a while to straighten out thatr conflict!

Part of that whole palaver was a convocation by the director of the mission, and all the pastors and church leaders were present with us in the Santidougou church.  The pregnant girl was also there and they called me to take her into a hut and examine her to make sure she was pregnant!  Now I ask you.... I knew when I was pregnant myself - but sure did not know about her since my language was not strong then.  But when I pulled up her skirts and checked her out, she was already several months along and so it was not hard to know she was pg!  We landed up in the midst of that conflict - and this was the incident that made the church ask if I would have an engaged girls' school at Santidougou.  This worked out better than giving these young girls to one pastor and his wife to disciple!

We went through many bouts of sickness also, and those were times of testing.  Dad very frequently had malaria when we were new missionaries.  He also had bouts of gout which were very painful and one time he even had to walk with crutches for a while!  He was delivered from that and has not had gout in many years now.  That is a very painful disease.  Sickness in Africa comes with visitors - "the white man (or woman) is sick? We must go and visit them for their sickness!"  What you really would like is to left to your misery in solitude! But what you had was a stream of sympathetic visitors, greeting you with the Bobo greetings and then sitting on the floor chatting with each other. A real social occasion for everybody - but you!  Debbi had those awful burns and so did I.  Cheryl's little black puppy bit her playfully and soon afterwards turned totally rabid!  We all had to have shots - 18 or 21 of them depending on our weight. John, you were only about four and you hated going in every day to the dispensary to get those shots in your tummy!  I had hepatitis so badly, someone packed a suitcase for me as they thought I should be evacuated to the States.  But instead I stayed right there and laid flat all day and all night until I finally got back to my normal color again!  

Personnel conflicts and testings are harder to bear sometimes than physical plagues. I will save that for next time......  In every situation - whether physical or other - God has made a way of escape and we came out on the other side stronger and wiser.....

TRAVEL and COMMUNICATION...............................................

My head whirls with the va et vient of the international workers in our world today.  I hear So and So from "East Overshoes"  is in Seattle speaking in some big church - and I am thinking I have been praying for those people as they just arrived back in Papua - or wherever!   And then I go to church and see people from other parts of the globe whom we just farewelled last year, and here they are back again like a " bad penny" returning!   But things have changed...... travel is easier and sometimes cheaper than it used to be.  People are allowed to be more connected to their families and can get permission to go to weddings and funerals and graduations and so on and on.  These changes are certainly not all bad.  I had to learn to know my folks all over again after not seeing them for four of my changing teenage years.  We were able to make it for some of your weddings, and that was a treat.  But the down side is that it is hard enough for new people to learn a new culture and language, and if there are too many interruptions in that process, it is telling on the ministry on the field.  But the present system is sure not going to change and we are glad for any visits we have with our kids, even as other parents are.  And we are certainly looking forward to being with most of you overseas in a few months. 

We were talking about travel and communication the other day together, and I decided to go back through the years and ruminate on the way things were, how they developed and the way they are today.  I was reminded of this today when the SKYPE rang, I waited for the phone to pick it up (Dad was out visiting an ex-prisoner) and the voice I heard was a young man whom we had befriended and mentored years ago, who now lives in Ouaga.  We had a nice long chat!  And inside I mourned the fact that you kids all grew up not having that kind of privilege - to talk with us regularly and we with you. 

Occasionally we would receive a phone call - but it was always because someone was engaged or getting married or had had surgery or some other momentous debate - because phone calls were so expensive. 

To go way back in antiquity, I remember when I was a little kid and we had friends who had a "rumble seat"  in their car.  You probably never saw one. But for me that was a treat when those friends would take me for a ride in their rumble seat!  As I grew up in Africa, most of our missionaries had pickup trucks.  We kids used to ride in the back, surrounded by stacks of luggage and gas bottles and all covered with red dust at the end of the journey.  At night my Dad would occasionally take some of us kids out hunting for deer with a searchlight, and we would stand up in the back of the pickup bracing ourselves against the cab, looking for animals.  And that was fun!

Phone calls during your childhood and teen age years in Africa were reserved for sickness or death or some big event that was going to happen.  When you had an emergency appendectomy, Cheryl, we got a phone call from the hospital and Aunt Evelyn and You talked to us briefly.  The year you and Jennie got married, John, I had been teaching down in the Republic of Guinea, and when Dad met me at the airport, he gave me the news and said you were calling back so you could tell me your plans also. That was when you had a job in Puerto Rico and had to advance the date of your wedding which we had planned to attend.

Air letters were only supposed to take ten days to two weeks to arrive from America, but sometimes they were longer than that, and that is how we got your news.  It was always a BIG DAY for us when one of those blue airmail letters was in our mailbag!  There were not even air letters when I was in college, and my parents always wrote one page typed each week, typed on the thinnest paper they could find and sent by air to me in college.  Postage was very expensive in those days also. But every week I received one of those air letters, regular as clockwork - for four years!  No phone calls that I ever remember....

Today we have the blessing of faster mail, FB and emails, cheap phone calls and even seeing each other on SKYPE as we talk!  What a communication revolution!  Those old telegrams we used to get were sometimes really funny as the spelling would get mixed up with the transfer of language!  But a letter from the U.S. took three weeks to arrive, so in case of an urgent message, a telegram was sent. 

The only paved roads in our part of West Africa during those early years were the ones in large cities.  Everything else was dirt in the dry season and mud in the rainy season.  Do you remember the rain barriers??  You could never plan your hours of travel during rainy season.  If there was the least suspicion of rain in the sky, the rain barrier would go up and no car or truck could travel on that dirt road until a little while after the rain ceased.  So in making a long trip, this had to be taken account of - to have extra food and water to drink in case of rain stops. 

In France we travelled by metro, and our metro stop in Paris was two long flights of stairs down into the ground! So when we went anywhere with you two heavy girls, we had to each carry one child and a stroller down into the metro stop and then at the destination  climb up two long flights of steps to see daylight again.  Needless to say, we only made those family trips that way when we had to.  However, we did buy a VW Kombi in France and then we were all set.  Arnolds, Bowers and we could all get into our bus on a Saturday and travel around the area seeing the sights.  It sure made language study more interesting! 

We took that Kombi on to Africa and used it our first term.  For a time we also had a Jeep as the Kombi could not pull the heavy house trailer we used for teaching out in the villages, and so we used the Jeep for that. 

Motor bikes or Yamaha dames made running around town easy.  Dad and you kids all road those. I had never ridden a motorbike and was kind of afraid of them for fear I would slip in the sandy roads.  But toward the end of our time in Burkina, I had been asked by a group in Sarafalao neighborhood in Bobo to help them start a church there. I attended and taught and helped in every way I could. But I had no car for a while as Dad would be in the bush on Sundays.  So I finally learned to ride a motorbike so I could help out with that church plant!  And I kind of enjoyed it.  But really I liked my little Toyota the best of all our cars and I drove that to work at the translation office every day the last couple of years. 

From childhoof I remember the washboard roads and the ferrys we had to cross in RCI and Guinea.  But those were mostly a thing of the past as you kids were growing up.

We were not allowed to go to the States for anything in those days - even death of a family member.  But later on we did get permission to go for weddings, using the month we had for vacation allowed us each year to make the trip.  So things began to loosen up.  And now I am not sure you have to get permission to go anywhere.  We've come a long ways, Baby!!

TRAINING OTHERS......................................................

We were always sorry that we could not have worked under the Richard Johansons for a training period with them.  They were at heart trainers of others.  Of course, they were long gone and living in Florida by the time we got to the field.  But vestiges of all their training and teaching they left behind. Unfortunately, they had loaded all their important language and teaching materials and books into a big trunk and took it with them on the ship they sailed on to leave Africa because of the approach of the Second World War. That boat sank - they were rescued, but all of their materials and treasures sank to the bottom of the sea, never to be recovered!  Such was missions in those early war days!

So when we arrived,  we had to start in from zero.  A few other missionaries (including Grandpa and Grandma) occupied the mission station during those years after the war, but one by one they left - for retirement in the U.S. or to minister in other areas.  And so we had to start at zero in many ways. 

Teaching and training others is such an important function in life - wherever you live.  All fathers and mothers should train their children, and we did our best with all of you. Parents train by example as well as words. We train through encouraging our children and showing them where they need to avoid pitfalls, through accepting them for who they are, occasionally correcting them  and most of all loving them.  We meet so many people in our lives here in the States who have no real love in their lives,  and usually they are shattered people, living in an unwelcoming society.

Dad and I see you, our now grown children, training your children in the way they should go, and it delights  our hearts.   We are also surrounded with a level of society which lives without parental training or proper mentoring - and the results are awful. The Scripture tells us that we are to train our children in the way that they should go and when they are old, they will not depart from that. What a great promise!

Going into the situation that we did as new missionaries, we had a lot of training to do.  Yusufu told me once that he had never been able to go far in school, but that he had had an education living with us and learning from us.  He was just a gangly bush teenager when he came to work for us. He knew nothing and so we started with basics. Sweeping the floor.  I had told him to pick up everything and sweep underneath and then put the item back in place. I saw him one day carefully pick up a dropped button, sweep underneath and then put it back again!  He certainly learned that lesson well!  Bit by bit, he learned to take care of the house and then to cook also.  We lived in the bush and could not buy anything so everything had to be made from scratch including our bread.  That was one thing I was not good at, making bread. And so Jessie Nehlsen's cook taught Yusufu, and as you can remember he made the best rolls and bread and raised doughnuts in the mission.  Many other cooks learned from him also!  And that is the kind of teaching we are admonished to do - teach others so that they in turn may teach others also.

Dad was so good at discipling young men in our tribe.  He could see possibilities in people and would take them under his wing for a period of time until they could fly on their own.  He did this with our young pastors.  When they were just boys, Dad took an interest in them and then we sent them on to Bible School. And this training continued until now we have a great many Bobo Madare pastors.  This is the way he trained Tite, when he was just a young boy.  He was so bright and such a good student. Dad started to teach him English and we helped him get into the right schools. Dad also helped to train him to rein in his temper, as he had a quick temper.  Today he is such a blessing to many throughout the world.  But it started with basic training many years ago!   

We had to work in local languages - French, Bobo, Jula - in order to train people with whom we lived and were involved.  Teaching has always been my love and my calling, and so from the first I was involved in various levels of teaching - from children to young people to adults to pastoral training and finally to graduate study.  I was blessed to be involved in various forms of teaching: actual teaching classes in French, Jula or Bobo;  I also had input in training national teachers in these languages. I taught children and young people and adults. I taught women and men.  It was a delight to prepare printed materials for these students in the various languages and then to teach others to teach, thus fulfilling God's Scriptural command - Teach faithful ones, who in turn will teach others.  What a blessing for me. 

In addition to writing and teaching from books, I was also able to teach by participating in the work of the church.  I helped one church to form a Christian Ed committe - something they had never heard of.  At their request, I was a member of that committee for a time to be a model of how it should run.  I learned so much during those years - the local people taught me much.

As we all do, I made mistakes.  I was pushed to supply Sunday School lessons for our six SS teachers in our district, and so I used a Child Evangelism flannelgraph series. This was exporting something to the church that was not transferrable.  If I had it to do over again, I would have started with some basic local illustrations and items which could be better understood locally.  I did develop some object lessons later, using local objects available right in their villages, and these worked well.  It was my privilege for some years to teach CE at Maranatha Institute to young men and women coming from many areas of Burkina, Ivory Coast and Mali. Those were good years.

Dad was such a great model for the pastors in training and for young men in our area, He went to the bush with them, taught in our dining room at night, using a dull kerosene lamp in the middle of the table. Dad was an evangelist and he took young men with him and train them while doing it.  He taught by example and by words and lessons. Everyone loved him.

In the latter years of our ministry in West Africa, when Dad was field director, I took on the task of training new missionaries.  I had developed a whole cirriculum for that with lessons taught and recommended books on hand that would help them to learn culture and the ways people learn, etc; how to dress appropriately and act in an African context.

The year we went to Mali, I had the privilege of training our large group of new missionaries there also, using some of these same materials which I had used with our Burkina and Côte d'Ivoire missionaries.  We had some great interaction and fun times together in all of these session in all three countries.

In latter years I got involved in TEE and then became Africa director for TEE and travelled extensively in Africa - West Africa, Congo, Gabon - to train others in TEE. Those were interesting, busy and good days!  I learned a lot myself.

It was also a delight to me to be a member of the international board of the FATEAC in Abidjan, serving with pastors and teachers from all of our African countires in which we had work.  Some of my teaching involved getting better training, and on one occasion I even travelled to Nigeria with an African counterpart.  That was a unique experience! 

I had the opportunity to serve with CPE and CEFCA in Ivory Coast, and was privileged to know many educators and Christian leaders from many African countires.  What a blessing!  I taught also for the Baptists in Ivory Coast, Burkina, Mali and Togo. So my teaching life in West Africa was such a blessing to me - I learned much and hopefully taught others some things that they have adapted in their ministry.