What my brain has experienced lately....

Blog 1/10/11

Wow! This month is already blazing by already! Praise God for his goodness and new mercies in this new year!

God has been teaching me a lot lately. I’m going through a theology course on how to study the bible which is opening my eyes to reading the bible in completely new ways. I’m also working on memorizing several chapters that I love. I have a goal this year to memorize Romans. Also I finished Mere Christianity (finally), which challenged my thinking a lot. My heart has been receiving a lot of healing, and my head a lot of new ways ot thinking. Good stuff!

Here’s an update on life here….

This morning I went into town by myself for the first time! Well, other than the one time I rode a bike into town to meet Sefiou. It was a lot of fun, though a bit out of my comfort zone…I hung out with some vendors in the panya

market, walked around town to familarize myself a bit better, and took a moto taxi back to campus. Probably other than having an entire 1 hour conversation (plus or minus) in [broken] french….the most interesting part was probably when a group of 10 or 15 guys crowded around me trying to steer me to their bus that was going to Abidjan. They were all saying, “Aller à Abidjan, aller à Abidjan.” HAHA, I’d say Abidjan definitely is the last place I want to be at right now. If you don’t remember why, just look at the pic I posted above from Abidjan. Don't worry, it's not like that here.

Over Christimas break, I went with Rod, Devin, Chazz, and the Grudda family to a town an hour east of Korhogo called Komboro Koro. It was a village way off the beaten path, mud huts and all….definitely a new experience for me! We built a roof for a new Baptist church that was being constructed. It was a lot of work, and really rewarding!

Oh, and before I went there, I spent a night in Korhogo with Meleé (a Christian radio DJ there) at the radio station. That was an interesting experience too.

In 2 weeks I am going back up to Korhogo to have my 9 month homestay with an Ivorian family. I have been placed with a family from the Koko church, the biggest church in Korhogo (that I know of). I think it has something like 600 members, and after talking to Rod, Bakary, and Pastor Kao, I am pretty excited about the ministry opportunities there. I’ve got to keep in mind though, that the reason I’m here is not to do ministry – I’m here to learn. Yes ministry is very important – serving nationals builds great relationships and trust with them – but I need to focus on being a learner first and foremost. It’s ALL about building relationships, and if I can’t show that I’m willing to learn from them, then relationships are going to be hard to build beyond a superficial level. It will be a great exchange on life experience, love, wisdom, perspectives on life and God, etc…I’m stoked!

French wise, I’m still pretty shaky, but I feel that I have received all the tools here at École Baptist that I will need to be an effective French learner during my homestay. And that’s what the goal here was French-wise – to equip us with all the basics, so that we can master them later when we are in enviornments that are predominantly French speaking. One thing that was encouraging today: I had a conversation with a worker at Ecomax about language. He said that he was from Nigeria (hence English was also his first language) and that when he moved here he lived with a family and learned French in 5 months. That’s exciting to hear! The kind of experience I’m getting here, you just can’t buy in schools. In a matter of months I can learn french as well as someone who goes through years of courses. I get to learn it through speaking, not just on paper, an advantage you’d be hard pressed to find in most parts of the world.