Thursday in La Mé

  La Mé, Cote D'Ivoire
Friday, September 21, 2007

Today was a very full day.  Paul arrived promptly at 8:00 with a taxi and driver named Veïgène, at least that's how it is spelled phonetically.  He was in a fairly-recent Citroën which still had a functioning adjustable air-suspension (a hallmark of Citroën).  When the engine starts, the car glides upward slightly like a hovercraft.  Veïgène will be my driver for the next three days, as I spend time in La Mé.  There is a room I can use in La Mé at their auberge, and I have stayed there a number of times in the past to save time going and coming and to save some money, but it's pretty "buggy" and there are holes in the mosquito net.  Time before last when I stayed there I got out of bed to find a five inch-long millipede of the venomous variety, crawling energetically toward my bed from the gap between the old, rusty air conditioner, and the edge of the hole in the wall it didn't quite fill.  After that I brought lots of insecticide, and created what I hope was an insect/arachnid/myriapod kill zone on the floor.  The gaps in the wall bother me a bit since the auberge is on the edge of the jungle.  I have a good excuse to stay in town this trip; I need to be on the Internet every day to keep up with preparations at the different French-language festival sites, so I'll be going back and forth every day....
 
It took an hour to drive out to La Mé.  The deal with the car is that we pay so much per day for the car and driver, and we put our own diesel in.  It's a reasonable deal, but we have to be careful about the gas.  When we stopped to put fuel in the car on the way out, I asked Paul how many km it was out to La Mé, and asked the driver about approximate mileage the car gets.  I calculated how much we would need, and mentally added a margin of safety.  I said to put 5000 CFA worth in, about $12 US.  The driver suggested twice that much "just to be safe". In the past, I learned the hard way that creative accounting can be done every night rather than at the end of the whole job.  The driver or car owner could easily think tonight: "well they've put in too much diesel for today; so the left-over belongs to me" and siphon it out of the tank this evening, leaving us to put more in tomorrow.  So I'll try to put in just what we need each day, with a small margin for safety.  Sufficient unto the day is the diesel thereof.
 

The road to La Mé

Toxic waste dump

As we arrived in La Mé, we drove in through the village

La Mé

to the Church hall which is still under construction.  The walls and roof are now on, but the windows and door are not in place.  They underestimated by quite a lot what they would need to finish it, we provided what they estimated in January of this year, but there is still quite a bit of work to be done.
 
Most everyone was waiting for us as we arrived at the church hall.  We shook hands and Paul made some formal welcome remarks, then invited me to make my comments.  I passed along greetings from my family, the other church brethren in Africa and from the President and the Home Office staff.  Then I updated them on news of the Church internationally and in the francophone areas in particular.
 
About 10:00 we started a Q&A Bible Study.

Sitting down for the Bible Study

We did that first since not everyone could be present until the afternoon, some couldn't get off work.  It was quite an interesting study. Questions included end-time prophecy, particulars of Sabbath observance, the spirit world, what happens when a man with several wives becomes a Christian, the destiny of man, conflict resolution among Christians, what life will be like during the millennium, and many other topics.  Two hours went by very quickly and it could have gone on even longer if Paul hadn't decided on a break for lunch.  We agreed to pick up again at 2:00 pm.
 
Several people stayed to talk to me privately about personal issues, as the other went to their homes to eat something.  About 1:30 Charlotte Bleu brought me a small bowl of fried potatoes with a tomato and onion condiment on the side.  She apologized for the fact that this was all she could offer.  "I was going to serve some fish too, but it didn't smell very good" she explained, meaning the fish had gone off.  After thanking her sincerely for the lunch, I ate about half of it; I try to eat enough to be polite but always leave them some to eat too.  It may have been all she had.  They don't have much at all, but these members are willing to share what they have with a willing heart.

See out the window: bath time

 
 
At 2:30 I showed the video of last summer's trip.

Watching the Video

 They especially enjoyed seeing the photos of La Mé that I had included, but they were impressed to see scenes of church members all over the world:  Mauritius, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand, places very strange and exotic to them.
 
Around 3:00 we started the Bible Study of Holy Land geography and chronology using the PowerPoint presentation on my laptop.  I took questions as we went, and I asked them lots of questions too, most of which someone was able to answer.  A number of them know the Bible pretty well.
 
We finished around 5:00 and I wanted to start back by then to avoid being on the roads after dark.

Fascinated children

We agreed to meet tomorrow morning at 9:00.  We'll have the baptismal counseling at that time; hopefully we'll have some baptisms tomorrow afternoon.  The drive back into Abidjan went without particular incident, though it is a colorful trip to say the least.  There were the usual bad passages of road and masses of people walking, and milling about, dilapidated busses and trucks clogging the roads and billowing impressive clouds of diesel smoke.  I made it back to the hotel right at dusk.