Sustainable Ministry / No Word for Love

Hello everyone! Sorry it has been so long since I posted a blog! I am definitely not the best at keeping up with blogging. My team is currently in Montenegro (Month 7) getting ready to head to Romania for Month 8. However, since I am pretty far behind, this blog will be about my Month 4 experiences in Cote D’Ivoire.

First, let me begin by saying West Africa was just a whole other world! I didn’t feel like I was experiencing culture shock at the time, but looking back on it I am just in awe of how different it truly was from anything I had ever seen up until that point. I am thankful that we were assigned to experienced American missionaries as our ministry hosts in Cote D’Ivoire, because we were able to ease into West Africa (as much as possible anyways), and they were able to clarify and explain many things along the way. For the first two weeks of April, we were in Ferkessedougou, Cote D’Ivoire at Hospital Baptiste. We would get up and do prayer walks in the morning around the grounds of the hospital and then maybe do some painting or yard-work some days. Our primary ministry though was going around and meeting with many different American missionaries in the area, and we were able to see all of their different ministries. Some of the different ministries we saw included Bible translation into one of the local languages, a widow’s group, a school for girls, a farm for Christians who had been shunned by their Muslim families, a Christian radio station, a medical clinic, the hospital we were at, and much more. One of the things that was most impressive to me was how successful the American missionaries had been at starting the ministries but then slowly turning the ministries over to the Ivorians. It was awesome to see so many ministries now being run by Ivorians for Ivorians without any American influence! I was just really encouraged and inspired by the work that has been done in that area not only to share the love of Jesus, but also to give the people of Cote D’Ivoire the tools to provide for themselves rather than having to continually rely on support from elsewhere. There is still much to be done, of course, but the work that has been done and is currently being done is astounding. I am thankful for those first two weeks in Cote D’Ivoire because I really got a good idea of what sustainable ministry can look like in which spiritual AND physical needs are being met.

For our second two weeks in Cote D’Ivoire, we stayed in a village with an American missionary couple. Again, our hosts were wonderful, and they were able to explain and clarify things that we were not accustomed to. Some of the villagers lived in concrete homes, but many others lived in the mud and straw huts that we would see on TV. The children in the village were too many to count and they seemingly couldn’t decide if they were more afraid or more intrigued by the 6 white (they count Hispanic and Asian as white there. If you’re not black, you’re white) missionaries they were seeing roaming around their village. But most of the children warmed up to us and so our team had a lot of fun with the village children as we played with them and just tried to show them love. In addition, we were able to see the process of translating the Bible into the language spoken in the village, Palaka, which was very cool to see. One of the amazing things that we learned from our host was that there isn’t a word for love in the Palaka language. The closest word they could come up with means “It is pleasing to me.” So when the villagers talk about their spouse, children, etc. they really don’t say that they love them, but rather that they are pleasing to them. That was just mind-boggling to me that the word for love doesn’t even exist in their language! But, the longer we stayed in the village, we could see why. The men often have multiple wives, and they beat them in order to gain their submission and respect. The children are treated like princes and princesses until they are 2 and then they are basically on their own besides having a place to sleep and the occasional leftover scraps or meal. (Now that’s not to say every situation was like that, but that was the village norm.)So once we learned and saw that, we also learned that many of the people in the village, and even the children we were playing with, didn’t truly know what love is. All of the sudden the love that we were trying to show the children and the villagers in general took on a whole new meaning! We realized that the love we were trying to show them was a foreign concept to them, let alone trying to share with them about a God who loves them for who they are! I could write pages and pages about our experience in that village, but the biggest takeaway for me was just that there are still cultures in this world where love isn’t even an option! I just have so much respect for the missionaries who have taken love into cultures where it previously didn’t exist, like our ministry hosts have done in that village!

Overall, Cote D’Ivoire was one of my favorite months on the World Race. The experiences from Cote D’Ivoire are ones I will never forget, and a lot of that has to do with our ministry hosts. They were absolutely fantastic and I just thank them so much for sharing their wisdom and experiences with us! It was truly a blessing and a privilege to serve alongside them!