Living in Assafou, Côte d’Ivoire has been very difficult at times but also very easy. Not having internet or electricity has been an adjustment, but has also forced me to submerge myself into the community that the Lord has placed me in. One evening I decided to go to the local gathering area, the water pump. In evenings it is the area most of the villagers are because there is a soccer game going on. But this past Monday there was no soccer game, instead there were a couple guys teaching the younger boys how to ride a motorcycle. I walked past the guys and ended up sitting on the ground and kids from all over surrounded me. They began to point to different body parts and saying what they were in Baoule, the local language of the village. As they went through them all, I began to tell them the English version of the part and they would just laugh. The women began to come closer and watch as I interacted with the children and were intrigued. One mother even came up to me and dropped her baby girl in my lap and walked away. Was I alarmed? Not really, because I love to hold babies and the kiddos around me do so well with babies! So I sat there, with a happy baby in my lap, children around me laughing at my English, and parents watching me.
One of the teenagers grabs my arm and points to the village where we are staying. In the distance we could see flames engulfing the nearby farms and smoke rising higher and higher. You see, the thing about Côte d’Ivoire is that fires are common because that is the way the farmers prepare their land for the next harvest. So what is so important about this specific fire? The wind that day- caught the small fire and pushed it to areas where it should not have been. It took a fire of one farm to a fire of multiple farms and was close to 40 yards away from one of our homes for this month. What made it more scary is the fact that we couldn’t find our host, Papa Zeke, and we had no idea if it was under control or not.
What did I do? I prayed as I watched over the village. Smoke began to fill the area where we have meals, and the other ladies on the team began to retreat from that area to the water pump as well. We all began to pray that the Lord would have control over this situation, because we personally had no idea what we could have done. And in that, a nearby villager who does not know the Lord made a decision to set his farm area on fire to fight back the big fire. So for a while, we thought the fire was in our back yard, but what we didn’t know was that this small fire was the Lord’s provision over protecting us. His conscious decision to help us is the very reason that I have all my possessions and all of our team is safe. It is the very decision that saved the fire from getting worse and spreading more. It is the very decision that helped a man contain his flame in order to protect the village.
It can be scary when you don’t know all the parts of a story, but sometimes the Lord holds back knowledge from you to see if your faith in Him is stronger than what you are going through. So, this month has been remarkably amazing, and remarkably hard all at the same time. There have been things that have caused me to not think about too hard, but then there are other times that things have happened and I’ve had to think so long and hard about them. That’s just a few of the things that the Lord has been working on me with this month. So as this month comes to a close, I hope that you would pray with me over a few things for this village.
- Full time missionaries who speak Baoule
- Full time children’s ministry leaders
- Children to have the desire to get a job outside the village
- People to worship freely and openly
- Sickness and healing to happen for the children
- School missionaries to come into town and help teach English as well as Bible classes
- The church to find funds to be able to build walls and a new building to worship in
- And a few others that I will post in the following weeks.
Love you all and thank you for reading this! I pray that the Lord is blessing you just as much as he is blessing me! XOXO
