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.

Recent events

Sorry for our absence from the blog! We've both been ill (again) and that knocked out all of our energy, hence the lack of communication...

Anyway, we're back on our feet now and wanted to share a few little things that happened in the last couple of weeks.

Last Friday, Denise and Maman Jean came round to make the unleavened bread for our Communion service. It was the first time they had made it on their own (Elmire taught them how to do it once a few weeks earlier) and it took several attempts to get it right. Cooking bread on a charcoal fire is not straight forward! They persevered for a few hours and finally produced the goods (which I forgot to take a picture of!).

Here they are in action :



And their mischievous helper, petit Jean :



In the evening, we had an unusual sky... It felt somehow bigger than usual and clearer... As we were on the bike going to church, I tried to describe to Etienne how it seemed different, more UK-like, and he suggested that the dust that usually fills the air seemed to have disappeared. It's amazing how accustomed we have become to a dust-filled environment! If we keep going on about how clean the air seems when we return, please forgive us! Here's the beautiful Friday sunset:



After church, everyone stayed behind so we could phone Pastor Badé in America. There was a real party atmosphere - everyone was so excited to be reconnecting with Pastor and they especially enjoyed making jokes about the 'cold' weather over there ;-)



On Sunday, Etienne woke up still feeling unwell (he'd had really bad diarrhoea since Thursday), and we were in the middle of a conversation when suddenly he jumped out of bed and vomited all over the corridor floor... I can't begin to explain what the smell was like, but I thank God for two things: 1) that He gave me the strength to clean it up, and 2) that the floors here are covered in tiles rather than carpet!! Poor Etienne then dragged himself to the toilet where he hurled several more times. It was straight to the clinic after that, one week after we'd been there for my sickness. They'd given me antibiotics for a chest infection and iron tablets for my anaemia (no wonder I was feeling so exhausted). With Etienne's symptoms, they assumed that he had an intestinal infection, so gave him a couple of injections as well as some antibiotics and something else (not sure what!). So here's what our breakfasts looked like over the past week:



Life in this country is really hard sometimes! But mangoes never fail to cheer us up :-)

This week has seen some serious progression of the church building, including the re-building of the wall that fell!









It's a shame we won't be here to see the building to completion but we can always come back and visit in the future.

Exactly four weeks from today, we will be landing at Heathrow airport!!! :-D :-D :-D

The ups and downs of this week...

Ahh... We reach the end of another week and we now have just 4 weeks left in Kandi.

Here are some pics from this week.



Denise and her son Kevin have insisted on helping us with housework a few times a week - they are our heroes!! On Monday, we finished our cleaning session by doing a puzzle of France that Etienne's parents gave us to share with the kids here. What a lot of departments there are in that country! It was good fun sharing with them where our family and friends live and describing some of the places we've visited there.



An evening shot of the new church building. The work was progressing well. (Note the appearance of the 'walkway' on the left side of the main building...)



The sole ATM at the sole bank in Kandi broke over a week ago. Somebody has been spending time trying to repair it but it seems like there are still problems. Please pray it gets fixed soon as we need it to access funds to continue the building work!



Er... Yeah... That walkway... The wall fell on Wednesday evening. That was just a little bit stressful to say the least. Fortunately we were able to have a meeting with our excellent builder on Friday morning, where he explained what had happened, why it happened and what we need to do next. Within a week, the wall should be all sorted!



On Thursday night, we arrived at Raoul and Denise's courtyard for our weekly prayer meeting with a lot of stress, but our lively worship time and soul-nourishing prayer time soon banished all that :-) Thank God for our brothers and sisters in Christ who encourage us when life is hard!



Possibly our favourite moment of the week! Friday night meal of nutroast (thank you Mummy for sending us a dry mix !) with pasta, avocado, tomato, pea and onion salad. Mmm mmmm mmmmmm!!

A Happy Sabbath indeed :-D

An early morning farewell

On Sunday, a small crowd gathered at church at around 7am to pray with the Badé family and wish them all the best for their 4-month furlough (fundraising trip/recuperation time) in the States. This was the last time we would see them on Beninese soil since we will be in the UK by the time they get back...



Little Alfazania (right at the front in the middle) turned up to the farewell meeting with her refugee bag full of clothes. I thought that perhaps she'd decided to donate some of her unwanted items to the kids that Eliora and Elie will meet in the States. It turns out she was told she could go with the Badés to America... Please parents: Don't lie to your children! She was absolutely devasted and sobbed uncontrollably when she realised that her trip was not going to be happening :-(

When we got back from church, it was time to move house. Since we didn't have a kitchen in our flat, we decided it would be best for us to move into the Badés' house.

Here's our new bedroom with en-suite shower room:





After spending Sunday afternoon with the youth and then playing a game of football, I felt positively rough and have been in bed ever since with a snotty cold!

I am really praising God for my wonderful husband this week! He hasn't slept much since we moved here (small bed, saggy mattress, power cuts...) but has tidied and cleaned the house (with some much-appreciated help from Soeur Denise), taken excellent care of me, kept an eye on the building site and cooked some delicious meals, like this one:



Yum yum!!

I think we'll be eating a lot of spaghetti over the next seven weeks! No doubt the Badés will be enjoying some burgers and fries with ketchup soon! :-D

Michée, Elmire, Marina, Eliora and Elie-Dana, thanks for everything you did for us. Have a safe and enjoyable trip and we pray that all your fundraising will be done sooner than you think!

Sweaty man!

Just when we thought the hot season was over, it seems to have returned with a vengeance... Or at least much greater humidity than before.

For example, look at the photo below (note the giant sweat patch in the middle of the T-shirt and lots of sweat blobs on the shorts). It was taken after an activity.

Was the activity:
A) 2 hours of football,
B) 1 hour of running, or
C) 20 minutes of eating lunch indoors ?



You guessed it! After eating lunch, we literally had beads of sweat covering our arms and arms sticking to the plastic table cloth, trails of sweat dripping down our fronts and backs and sopping wet faces... That somewhat takes the enjoyment out of eating.

Really really really can't wait for the rainy season to begin !!!

And then the sand arrived!!

Here's the current state of the building site after a tonne of sand got dumped!



What a great playground for the kids, lol...

There are lots of 'sand pits' around Kandi because the whole town is like a giant building site. Everyone seems to have a stack of bricks and a pile of sand on a plot of land: a house just waiting to be built. And in the meantime, the kids can all practice their gymnastics moves!!

'Chaînage bas'

As a result of the church building project, I am just about fluent in French African-specific building construction vocabulary ! No idea what most of the words mean in English though!!

So what I can tell you now is that we have 'coulé' most of our 'chaînage bas' at the front of the building and the 'coffreur' is finishing his contribution to the 'chaînage bas' at the back of the building. The 'ferrailleur' (that's ironmonger I suppose) has been very busy making 'étriers' for the 'poteaux' (pillars) and now there are some new guys shovelling 'remblai' to fill up the foundations at the front of the church.

If you didn't understand much of that, here are the latest pictures!













You can see the copper wire in one photo - that's to protect the building from lightning strikes.

Here's a zem (moto-taxi) delivering some 'fer de 6' (iron bars with a diameter of 6mm). Basically, the iron rests on his front mud-guard and he drags it along the road, usually with lots of sparks flying up!



And here is the beautiful greenery of Kandi! If only it was like that all year round...

Me and my African baby

Ok, for all you grammar freaks, I know it should 'My African baby and me' but that just doesn't sound as good :P

Having secretly wished to try out carrying a baby African-style for several months, I jumped at Maman Bio's suggestion that I put Danny (Pastor Raoul's youngest) on my back. He was already asleep in my arms - probably the only baby in this country who isn't the least bit scared of my white skin!

Here we are after tonight's Revelation seminar at church...



He was very content (and so was I!) for ages, right up until he saw Pastor Badé's car light up and realised his parents might be going home without him! Wouldn't be the first time some parents have left church without their child, lol... I'm not scarred ;-)

Although I'm not convinced carrying a baby like that is good for its growing bones, it's really quite comfortable and very easy to get on with various tasks as both hands are free!

Broody? Oh yes!

Muddy puddles on site

Despite the torrential rain of Sunday evening (Praise the Lord for the rain!!), the building work is full steam ahead. There are some muddy puddles in the foundation trenches but nothing unmanageable. The walls which will form the foundations are now quite high at the front of the new church building so we start to realise how much it will stick out of the ground! The reason for that is that our plot of land is very low compared with the road level, so the building has to be raised up to avoid flooding issues. (There were some major flooding issues in Kandi on Sunday. The road outside Educolo was totally flooded. Elsewhere a bridge over a gutter was destroyed - possibly before the rain came - and a relative of one of our nodding acquaintances stepped into the gutter to cross to the other side during the storm and was sadly swept away to her death.)

Here's the building as of yesterday:







And Etienne doing a stock check with our OCD (excellent) stock manager, Papa Pierre:



And finally, some large puddles outside CEG2:





The temperatures are slightly lower than before because of the rain - good news!!!

Women's Ministries

Sunday saw the relaunch of Women's Ministries at Kandi Church. Denise was recently elected as the leader so Elmire is training her up !

Six of us met up to study the Bible and pray together and then learn how to make washing up liquid as a way of saving money (you get ripped off if you buy it from someone else!).

The process was pretty interesting...

1. Get a big bucket and some women with stamina.



2. Squirt lots of a special type of gel into the bucket.



3. Mix it like crazy for ages until it goes white and a bit thick.



4. Add some salt water slowly and mix slowly.



5. When it frothes up, realise that something has gone wrong...





6. Add more salt and more water and stir with you hand. Then make sure you do not rub your eye!



7. Add some acid and colouring, because pink is much more fun than white!



8. Put it in a bottle!



Gifts always put smiles on people's faces, especially in Bénin!! :-)

Displaced!

When the construction work started, the small room which is normally used for Children's Sabbath School became a store room for concrete...



Since there was no room left inside the building, we sought refuge in the small patch of shade at the back of the Dialogue Centre. Unfortunately the tilt of the Earth has now changed sufficiently that there isn't really much shade left there on a Saturday morning!

One of the deacons saw our suffering and suggested he build something to accommodate us (and also provide shade for the workmen during the week). We are very happy with the result!!