With school recommencing at Sahel Academy on Tuesday, many students (and staff) are traveling with their families to Niamey, either by car or plane. Traveling in West Africa is challenging at the best of times, but recent events have called for increased security at the borders and throughout the country, making these trips even more challenging. Please pray for the safety of these travelers, and for calm hearts as they face these extra checks along the way.
Although we\’ve been thankful for the change of pace, we have kept busy. Lois has \’attacked\’ projects in her technology world. Most are still ongoing, but at least they are started. She\’s very thankful for a few fellow \’geeks\’ who were part of a 20-member team here in Niamey to help with a missions conference. Their advice and help has been a great encouragement.
Speaking of missions conferences, we were blessed to part of this recent Niger missions conference. We were encouraged and challenged in many ways as pastor and author Ken Burkey shared about Finding Hope in the Quitting Points of Life. Thank you, Pastor Ken and others from the team, who have shared with us and encouraged us in lots of ways this past week.
Work teams – what a blessing! Please pray for a possible work team from our sending church who will help with a major upcoming project in Lois\’ technology world. They are willing and wanting to come, but need to work through many details including finding the finances.
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Christmas Eve found Bob helping Pastor Abdourahamane show a video at their service celebrating the birth of Christ, while other EBM team members showed a video at a Christmas Eve outreach across town.
For us, Christmas day was a very quiet day – until Boubacar, our weekend guard came to the door with the book we had given him for Christmas in his hands. The book contains daily readings from the Bible and is supposed to be read throughout the year, one reading each day; Boubacar was about two-thirds of the way through the book. He told Bob it was messing up his heart. Bob spent some time explaining to him why that was so, and answering his questions. Boubacar\’s final request surprised us both. He asked Bob to show the Jesus film to our neighborhood, saying that everybody in Niger needed to hear this story. So Bob hung a sheet outside our front gate, ran an extension cord, and using his laptop, speakers, and the video projector some of you helped us purchase, showed the Jesus film to about 120 neighborhood people. We\’re not sure what the end results will be; maybe it was Boubacar who needed to hear the story one more time. Maybe he wanted to see how others would respond to this message. As the film was in French, we\’re not even sure how many of our neighbors understood it since not all Nigeriens speak the official French. We\’re planning another showing in Zerma in the near future; we want to ask co-workers to be on hand to help with anyone who shows interest in this message. Please pray for this outreach. We also ask you to continue to please pray for Boubacar. His heart is under attack as a result of your prayers. We need to pray him through this difficult life-changing decision.
What’s happening to the US dollar in the world market is affecting missionaries worldwide. We here in Niger are feeling the crunch. Please pray for those who will be considering our support needs as well as the support needs of other missionaries in the coming weeks.
We received Christmas cards, e-mails and gifts from many of you this past month. Thanks for helping us through a really lonely time!