What it’s like living in THE BUSH

Sorry I have been kind of MIA for a while now. Like the title of this blog says I have been living in the bush of Côte d’Ivoire. We have been in a small village with no electricity or running water. And definitely no WiFi or way to communicate. WiFi is an hour drive away and that’s what we had to do so I could get this blog to you guys.

So here’s a little snapshot about what it looks like to live in the bush:

* One person who speaks English besides my team. The village speaks French and Baoule.
* No electricity which means no lights when the sun goes down, no stove to cook on, no way to charge phones or any other electronics, and anything else you can think of that uses electricity.
* No running water. We get our water from a well with a pump and it tastes great! This also means that there is no running water for showers. We take buckets showers which is exactly what it sounds like: a bucket of water and a wash cloth.
* We do actually have a western toilet but it doesn’t flush on it’s own. We take buckets of water and pour it down the toilet to flush.
* Very large spiders and snakes.
* No A/C or ice or anything cold.
* Lots of mosquitoes which means sleeping with mosquito nets.
* Sleeping on “mattresses” on the floor.
* Roosters crowing morning and night and chickens EVERYWHERE.
* Children EVERYWHERE.
* Church under what is essentially a tent.
* Lots of drum music.
* Washing clothes by hand.

What ministry looks like:

DIFFERENT

No one speaks English except Ezekiel. So communication is kind of hard. We live in the village so we don’t really go home from ministry. There is a pavilion thing we hang out under and the kids are always there. So loving on kids is huge even through the language barrier. We have church Sunday mornings, Wednesday nights, and Friday nights. We preach and do a little bit of worship at those. Also, because the Americans are at church people who don’t normally go will show up. We’ve done kids ministry where we go out into the village and sing songs, play games, and random other things that kids enjoy. We’ll do what we call outreach which is going into the village at night where they have music and there is a lot of singing and dancing and hanging out with people. Usually someone will preach them too. We also have what we call evangelism where we go out into the village, door to door, and pray for people and talk to people about Jesus. I can’t even explain how just our presence here makes a difference in so many ways. Ezekiel prays that missionaries will come out of this village. He hopes that people will see there is life outside of Assafou (the village) and are encouraged to tell people about Christ. We’re not just doing one kind of ministry here. We’re being. We’re living.

MINISTRY IS LIFE
AND
LIFE IS MINISTRY

and that makes a difference.

I hope this gives you a better idea of what my life has looked like over the past month. I will also be posting some pictures and a video to Facebook!

Thank you all so much for your support!