Hello from Ghana!
Sorry it has been so long since I have given any updates. Last month we were in a small village in Côte d’Ivoire with no WiFi.
Where were we?
We lived in a small village called Mahapleu. Our host we called Mama Dorcus and she had a church she ran out of her home. So, we basically lived in the church. We had electricity, but no running water, the women fetched water daily for cooking, cleaning, and showering. We had two rooms that we set out tents up in to create personal space and protected against mosquitos. There was one tent shy of enough room for everyone to set up a tent so I shared a tent with Liv. It was cramped at times, but the pillow talk before bed made it well worth not having my own tent. Liv is someone who listens well and is not afraid to talk about real life struggles, but not without including Jesus in them.
What did we do?
Preaching. Lots and lots of preaching. Individually we each only spoke a couple times, but basically every night there was a service from 7pm to anywhere from 11pm to 3am. We had a lot of very late nights. Getting back between 1 and 3 in the morning was a typical night. The services were long, but the villagers never seemed to be phased, they lived in a state of worship and the services were just an outlet for their overflowing hearts. During the day we either went door to door or walked into town to the market to speak. We walked A LOT. It was about 1.5 miles into town and we walked there daily. One day we did a prayer march from one end of the village to the other which was 8 miles and that was HOT. We were in a constant state of sweating the entire month because we were always out during the peak sun hours of the day and Africa is just hot. In a typical day we did 12-14 hours of ministry. Everything needed to be translated, no one spoke English during the month. They either spoke French or a local African language, so, every time we preached the message needed to be translated twice.
One really exciting thing I got to do was talk at the high school. It was the first time anyone was allowed into the school and I got to preach or essentially give a YoungLife club talk. It felt like such an honor and privilege to share with them because back in Michigan my YoungLife team and I prayed and dreamed of getting into our school during school hours. It felt like God was answering my prayer to be able to reach high school students, I never would have thought I would be in Africa when it happened.
Plot twist
I got Malaria, a lot of it according to the doctor. 5 other people on my team also got malaria, probably from our late nights without protection from mosquitos. No worries, it is an easy fix and we are all malaria free now.
What was my favorite part?
One afternoon I got to help get water for everyone. I had SO MUCH FUN. What language we spoke didn’t matter because laughter is the universal gift that God hadand transcends language, culture, and age. We carried buckets on our head, spilled water all over ourselves and laughed all the way back and forth from the well. It brought me so much joy.
More updates to come from the month, stay tuned!
-Michaela
