Thursday, December 18, 2008 9 PM

Friends and Family

Today we went once again into the town of Kante’ which is about 1 hour drive north of Karra where we are staying while up north. The pastor at Kante’ is Pastor Nijombe who is a wonderful man of God. He wakes up at 4:00 each morning to pray and it shows. If everyone was even 5% as faithful as this man the world and Christianity would be stronger than ever and known around the world.
We arrived in Kante’ about 9:30 to a crowd of about 150 Lamba people waiting for us outside the church. Nijombe and Jonathan explained the way to salvation to the group and many, many of the people raised their hands to accept Christ. I sincerely hope that many of them were sincere and understood what they were doing. Among the audience was the Chief of the Town. I never understood (nor do I remember) his name but he was held in high regard among the attendees. He was a very gracious and noble man and it was very pleasurable to visit with him. (My French has increased dramatically with these people…but still not as good as I’d like). After about a 30 minute sermon by Nijombe and Jonathan we began performing the eye clinic. From about 10:15 till 5:30 we saw about 120 patients. Many of the people in line were students aged from about 12 – 20 who had nothing wrong with their vision. It was good to see them and interact with them however their spot in line may have taken away from someone who really needed to be checked.

Even though we saw some 30 or so students who did not need glasses we came across some older people who were very happy to finally be able to see. It makes it all worth it to see the joy on their faces.

One interesting thing we saw today occurred on the way to Kante’. As we were climbing a mountainous pass someone saw a Singe Monkey running down the road in our lane ahead of us. It was strange to see the monkey “running” the way it did. Randy and I both thought it looked like a Kangaroo in the road…matter of fact that is what I thought it was at first. When we got up to the monkey it stopped on the side of the road and just looked at us. Kinda looked like a baboon in the face or at least I thought. No one had their camera out at the time but Randy jumped out to get its picture…don’t know if he got anything worth looking at or not.

Another really neat scene that we saw late in the day was watching some of the women filling the baptistery up with water they carried on their heads. Each bowl of water amounted to about 10 gallons best Charles Ray and I could figure. I think there were 5 of them that made two or three trips each. 80 pounds of weight on the top of there heads has got to smash together their vertebrae in their neck you would think. They’re tougher than me that’s for sure.

One of the “Coincidences” that occurred this morning was that we met a pastor who is a native Lamba who is here at our center translating the bible to the Lamba Dialect. He had 80 bibles for us to take to Kante’ for Nijombe. Jonathan and he are meeting right now discussing how we can be more effective toward the Lamba people on future trips. This man is a great resource for our missionary works in this part of the country. I’ll let Jonathan speak more about this on later blogs as he has much more information that do I.

We all miss each of you dearly and look forward to seeing you. It will be bittersweet when we leave. We have really grown fond of the locals that are traveling with us from the Wuiti Church. They are all great guys. I don’t think though that any of us will miss the heat.

Good luck to the Bobcats. Seems all we talk about is the mission trip and the Bobcats! Someone better get us a DVD copy of the game for us to watch when we get home because we are having Bobcat football withdrawals!

Thanks for the prayers!
JG