We're home!

After 11 months on African soil, we landed safely on French soil (a stopover in Paris) and then English soil yesterday morning. We were very very tired but so happy to be home!

Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers and best wishes while we've been away. Our God is a great God who has sustained us, taught us many things, given us new friends and filled our hearts with joy even in trying circumstances. Maybe we won't see some of our new friends again on this earth but we look forward to a grand reunion with many Béninese brothers and sisters in heaven one day soon :-)

Happy Sabbath!

Tonight's the night!

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!! We are SO excited to be getting on a plane tonight and being reunited with our friends and family tomorrow!

And this week we saw once more how God really is in control of things. On Saturday, we went to the nearest Adventist church (about 500m from where we're staying!) and received an eager welcome from a guy called Virgile, one of the Sabbath School committee members. He ushered us into a room at the end of the service with a load of other visitors and asked for our prayer requests. We shared our worry about getting the repatriation money (about £300 of AFM's money) back from the Bénin Treasury. He prayed about the issue, then gave us his details and told us to phone him when we had the 'ok' from Immigration. The immigration man had been particularly grumpy on Thursday when we saw him and told us to come back on Tuesday for the 'ok' piece of paper. Late on Monday morning, Etienne suggested we go to immigration just to see how things were doing and try to encourage people to move faster... Over here, paper can sit on people's desks for days/weeks, and they can ignore it until they get a kick up the backside to deal with a particular name. After 2 hours of waiting and nudging various people, we left with the 'ok' - a day earlier than expected!

We immediately phoned Virgile, who said he would come to our hostel to meet us. He came about an hour later and prayed with us again. Then he shared with us how he is a colporteur and over the last few years he has developed a good relationship with a Muslim lady who is really interested in the books he has on health. She just happens the be the Assistant Director for Bénin's Cabinet of Finance and Economy...
http://www.finances.bj/spip.php?article434
She was the Director of Treasury before her promotion so would have received our request for the repatriation money if we were here a year earlier. She was completely lovely, connected with us immediately because she grew up in Kandi, and made several phone calls to all the people at Treasury who would be dealing with our request, telling them it was urgent and they needed to sort it out quickly. We headed straight to Treasury with Virgile, and made our official request. The next morning, Tuesday, at about 8.30am, we received a phone call to say it was all ready! That's unheard of! We dashed over there, and still had to wait a couple of hours, but left before midday with all the money in hand!

Praise God for opening these doors for us! He is awesome!

"The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you." Deuteronomy 31:8. Yes, He does!

And to celebrate, we did all our packing on Tuesday afternoon, lol...

Update from Cotonou

Greetings!

We are still alive... Just lacking in Internet data!

We arrived safely in Cotonou last Sunday after a wonderful last weekend in Kandi with our dear friends. Since then, we've been to the local Adventist church, visited the market and craft centre a few times to buy some souvenirs, sorted out our visas (the system at immigration is now working!) and slept... Lots. Like 10 hours a night and then a 2 hour nap during the day. That's been really good!

Left on the agenda for this week is attempting to get back the 'repatriation deposit' of about £300 that we paid to the Bénin Treasury back in November. Immigration currently has our file and they need to give the 'ok' before we can go and see Treasury and ask them to give us the money back! In November, Treasury told us to allow one week for the process. We allowed 11 days. What they didn't tell us was that there was a process before the Treasury process. And that process involves Immigration, who are notoriously slow. So if we're lucky, Immigration may say 'ok' tomorrow afternoon, and then Treasury will have 3 days to give us our money! We've been praying about the whole thing for a few weeks, and at church yesterday, the 'Welcome' guy asked if he could pray with us after the service and we shared this problem with him. He prayed with us, then told us that he has a friend who works for the Treasury and said he would make some phone calls for us. That's given us a bit of hope!

Apart from that, we'll be visiting the pizza restaurant down the road to make up for our lack of cheese and mushroom intake over the past year and sleeping some more !

5 days until we're home!! :-D

Last Sabbath in Kandi

Wow.... The end of our missionary year is just about here. The last month has been a bit of a blur to be honest!

Today will be our last Sabbath at Kandi church and we're looking forward to spending most of the day hanging out with God and our dear brothers and sisters here :-)

We have the last gifts to give out...



A potluck lunch to enjoy...



(Nutroast and chocolate brownies... Mmmmmm!)

And a building project to say goodbye to!



Hopefully we'll be able to come back and visit one day... Or else we'll meet with the Kandi crew in heaven! What a day of rejoicing that will be! :-D

Happy Sabbath !

Papa Hodé is doing well at home

Last night, we heard the good news that Papa Hodé had returned home so we went to visit him (along with half of Kandi it seems - it was really busy over there!).

After his scans were viewed, the doctors decided he was recovering fine and would be ok to go home and continue to recuperate there. It turns out that nothing was broken in his foot - it's just very very swollen.

We still don't really know much about what happened. Papa Hodé was asleep, lying on the third row of seats, in the Peugeot 505 estate and the car rolled several times before stopping over 50 metres away from the road in the 'bush'. Sounds pretty horrific.

We thank God that he is recovering well and is now back at home with his children.

Update on Papa Hodé

Thank you for your prayers. It seems that Papa Hodé slept well last night and this morning the doctors are not too concerned about his skull or foot. They expect these things will recover fine in time. They are worries about a pocket of blood that has appeared under Papa Hodé's eye though so please continue to pray for healing.

Papa Hodé has requested to be moved to the hospital in Kandi to continue recovering but the doctors want to monitor his face a bit longer to decide if he needs to see a specialist or not.

What's really sad is how often these kinds of situation happen in Bénin. Roads are incredibly dangerous and the majority of vehicles are simply not roadworthy. Let's hope that the Minister for Transport here will make some good policy changes very soon to reduce these unnecessary road accidents.

Church member in horrific car accident

Today we heard the news that Papa Hodé had been involved in a terrible car accident. We don't have much information but we know that three people died including the driver and Papa Hodé is at a hospital in N'dali with a fractured skull and a broken foot. He's able to speak but he's not aware of where he is. His brother is currently there with him and is keeping us updated.

Three of his children (Suzel - 15, Muriel - 13 and Kaleb - 10) are alone in Kandi as their mother went to Cotonou over a year ago and never came back. His youngest daughter (Ruth - 4) is living in France with relatives.

Please keep every member of this family in your prayers as well as the families of the people who didn't survive. Thank you.