Deadlines!

Well, I hate deadlines as a rule, but they sure do force you to get a lot done quickly sometimes. We have a wedding here on Saturday. Two more days. Magdelena's family is coming down from Germany and Bruno's are already here. That is stretching us to the limit on apartments. Herve offered the Apartment B sides, both the "untouched" bit and the "just finishing one" in order to accommodate everyone.

The problem, of course, is that renovation and construction never happens as fast as you hope. Tonight, late, 5 folks are coming on an airplane and we have to have beds in place and a functional bathroom and doors that shut and lock.

From these photos does it look like we'll make it?

The kitchen cupboards have been a real challenge. I should have known better than to turn a 135 degree angle! We've talked and talked and I've explained and re-explained and exercised lots of patience. In the end, it will work, but it wasn't what I was after.

And then the bathroom!. It will be great. But when we went to put the toilet in, it was squeezed against the little half wall for the shower stall. So we broke out tile and added a bit of sewage line. That was two days ago. Today, our very last day, we realized that the sink was going to block the door. So we agreed to shift it left by 6 inches. But when the guy went to mount it to the wall, he drilled right through the water supply line!

Well, at least the back door came. And the bedrooms are finished, really. The wardrobes don't have shelves back in or a place to hang clothes yet, but we have a few hours to go!

If only that one painter hadn't enthusiastically continued to work today. I'm afraid it will be a bit heavy on fumes in the living room!

We'd appreciate your prayers.

Graduation from the Discipleship Experience

We had the marvelous privilege last Friday to graduate the first ever class of students from our Discipleship Experience training program, the Ecole Vuadens, as I mentioned in the last post. Here they are posing with Balla: Omar, Mamadou, Pape, Joseph, Ndiaga and Ndiaye. (Not necessarily in that order!)

Balla spent the last three months with them, in the end primarily teaching Bible. They did a complete survey of the Scriptures, taking the time to discuss and deal with issues as they came up. This intense, interactive give-and-take style was revolutionary for these guys. During the graduation ceremony each of them stood and talked about the course. Their testimonies were more than enthusiastic. They talked about feeling as if someone had turned on the light, showing them that they had been in the dark. They talked about realizing they had been to other training programs and completely missed what was going on for lack of basic Bible background. They talked of gaining confidence to discuss spiritual issues now with any Muslim religious leader in their town.

As you can imagine, this was very, very encouraging to us as missionaries and to Balla as their teacher. This was our goal: to equip young emerging leaders with what they needed to walk with the Lord and grow in their own context. We knew that they would come with minimal Bible knowledge. I am surprised at how minimal it really was . Yet, they came with real faith in Jesus and an unquenchable thirst to know more. Being able to dig in deeply with a man who knows the Word and do it in a language they are comfortable in and with enough time to think and discuss, all of that was ideal for these six.

Praise the Lord.

The next step, after Balla gets a little recovery time, is to look to the next step. We want to evaluate and revise. We also want to offer this training to city churches and their young leaders. What does that need to look like? We'll let you know! And we want to stay in contact with these first young men as well, sending Balla out to encourage and challenge them. We'd appreciate your prayers.

Well, I planned to head to the bank this morning. But a Senegalese holiday got in my way. So I am starting the day with a post here. God knows what He's up to, so I'll enjoy the day He's giving me!

It's Ascension Day. For many of us Evangelicals that is an unknown holiday. I guess that my Lutheran friends and perhaps the Methodists haven't lost it. But in my adult life, I can't remember ever marking this event. Ascension is a day for remembering Christ ascending into heaven to sit at the Father's right hand until He comes back. Crucified, risen, ascended and returning soon. We have Good Friday and Easter for the first two, but haven't generally included in our calendar of remembrances a day for Christ's going back to the Father. I think that is a weakness, myself. It is one of the key events that form the foundation of our faith. We need to be reminded and a yearly holiday is a great way to do it. So, today I'll try on my own at least to meditate on the event and Jesus current position and the implications for me. He is Lord of the living and the dead, as I read in Romans 14 this morning.

Well, holiday or not, things are busy this week at the Phare! MTW has been here all week running training for their church leaders upstairs. Balla is finishing up the last couple days with the Discipleship Experience guys. (We've decided to call it the Vuadens School in honor of the retired Swiss missionary whose training program inspired us to do this.) ITES is in full swing with night classes and library hours and all.

And construction stuff continues at a rapid pace. We're trying to finish up the apartment down below. (The former D/D2 rooms that I think we'll be calling the Gambia Apartment. But don't hold me to that until the sign is actually hung!) We are putting corrugated fiber-cement roofing back up on the courtyard. We've bought all new materials, in the end, since the beams and roofing were pretty well beyond recycling. The cupboard doors and wall cupboard for the kitchen also showed up yesterday. They're getting a last coat of varnish before being installed. Only two things are left: installing the A/C and having frames made to hang the mosquito netting on the beds.

And we're awfully close to budget. I can't do the final report yet since we aren't quite done, but from the estimates I have, we'll only be slightly over what was received. And given the slide in the dollar I won't be surprised that when I go back and look I'll find the CFA cost was what we expected. We'll see.

Apartment B is split in two and has been functioning as two for the last week. We isolated the right side and made it functional just in case someone needed a bed while we were working on the right side. Sure enough, while I was in a Board meeting last week Herve found himself in a pickle, needing just one more room. On Friday I spent some time fixing a door handle and lock so folks could spend the night. On the left side we'll have the major portion of the new tile work (bathroom and kitchen and one bedroom) done. Of course, it is usually the little bits and pieces that slow things down. Please pray for that.

In fact, pray for Jean Gomis, our contractor. He is headed to Guinea tomorrow with his brothers to visit the family village. He himself has never been there. Or outside of this part of Senegal for that matter. He is counting on the Lord and refusing to do all the voodoo stuff that the family is pressuring him to do to "protect" himself. This is a part of the world where the mystical and the spirit world are feared and used. Jean wants to honor God. And he wants to honor his father who is buried in the village. Pray for travel mercies and spiritual protection for this brother. We hope to have him back by the middle of next week.

Fog

We never have fog here.

And we never get weather from the west, from the ocean. We birth the hurricanes that go across the Atlantic to the Western Hemisphere. The wind always blows from the desert or the far off coastal wet lands of Ghana or Ivory Coast. It doesn't come from the sea. Never.

Well, OK. Perhaps rarely is perhaps more accurate. We lately have had several days with a moist wind blowing in from the west, smelling of the sea. And then over the weekend we awoke to fog. Real fog. Not the dust filled winds from the desert or the hazy humidity of the rainy season. It was real fog. We couldn't see the light house. Late Sunday afternoon it was rolling back in the shadows of the cliffs above the mosque at Ouakam.



I loved it. It was a taste of home, really.

But we'll have to wait a few more years to see it again here, I'm sure.

The Faith Fellowship Team

I forgot to post the photo of the team from Faith Fellowship. They did a wonderful job helping us, but more importantly they became our friends.

Thank you, Lord Jesus! What a gift the family of God is!

Oh, yeah. And in all those photos of the transformation of Apartment B, I forgot to show the little miracle that Mark, the electrician, performed for us on our main electrical panel!

Here it is before in its spaghetti form, waiting for Tad to have time to mess with it as best he could. It was functional and reasonably safe, but beyond ugly!















Here it is today!

Apartment B Transformation - Week 1

It's Sunday afternoon and the team from Faith Fellowship is winding down a bit. Some are catching a little beach time after a hard week of work. I hear a basketball being dribbled outside. Bob and Brigette are making an updated CD of all their photos for me.

This group and Jean's masons got a lot done during the week. I won't offer much commentary right now, but I'll start off with the plans we're aiming for and then pictures from around the work site that I just snapped.

I am ecstatic with the progress and really excited about what we're going to end up with.

Here is the old kitchen entranceway from the outside. The awning and steps are gone. So is the old gas bottle storage box. That's a new high window in the old kitchen and in the hallway and one of the old hallway windows mostly filled in!

The new door to the right side (B2 for now) with steps already tiled. There had been a hall window in this spot.

The new door into the apartment. This is the back wall of the old telephone room, the current entrance area for our apartment (A). It opens into the large living room of Apartment B. See the black and white tile? In the only disappointment of the week, we found a structural post in the wall just on the right side of where we wanted this door. We'll shave a bit off of it, but the door won't be quite as wide as we hoped. Still, the door will at least open into the living room and not the kitchen any more!

This is the dining area of B, now transforming into the kitchen / dining area of the right hand side aparement (B1).

Construction Central

This last 10 days has a been a mad rush of renovations, gutting and finishing and masonry and all. The team from Faith Fellowship in upstate New York arrived Saturday morning. We had to have the new one-bedroom Apartment D done in order to be able to house them, because they were coming to tear apart our largest unit, Apartment B. Of course, the very last day, Friday, we were still cleaning up paint and cement off of the new tile and caulking and all that. And to Kathy's great frustration, the furniture was not delivered on time. In fact, some of it just finally came Wednesday night. Once we have it all in place, I'll post photos. The apartment is beautiful!

Monday morning, we jumped in on Apartment B, the right side of the old governor's weekend place. The folks from Faith Fellowship had it gutted in no time. Jean Gomis had brought his crew of 5 as well. Later in the day the guys from the Discipleship Experience joined us, too. Lots of hands make light work!

The plan is to have two two-bedroom apartments.

So the windows are out on the left side of old B and the doors. We opened up a new door into the living room to act as the main door of the apartment. We opened up hole in the hallway to serve as the door for the right-hand side.

That was all according to plan. Before I noticed, though, Jean's guys had already taken out another window in that hallway that we'd planned to leave in until later. We hope to keep half of the space usable at all times during construction. So, we only wanted to open up that door and close off the halway with bricks and let folks stay in those back two bedrooms. Oh well, we're bricking up one new window on the left side ahead of schedule! In fact, at the same moment I found a window missing, I found our Faith Fellowship folks starting to tear out a door. We were able to save that one for the month it still needs to be functional!
I planned to post this Tuesday and to keep adding all week. The pace of work, though, has been too much for me. I'll try to take more photos today and post them tomorrow. This American team includes both a mason and an electrician. And the rest are enthusiastic, hard working folks. They have made enormous strides. The first stage concrete work will be done today, it looks like. We also got over to hang mosquito nets for the talibe in the BUV one day. We hope to go again today.

I think Herve had his doubts about this idea of creating two apartments from one. But as we sat on the edge of the court out front of them Wednesday night, he was very happy thinking of the space that was going to be available to him.

I'll try to post the plans next time, too, so you can see them.