Africa - July 8

Our team attended our first church service at Daniels church called Pentecôte Apedokoe where we were fully submerged again today in the African culture. I pray that our churches back at home could someday have the amount of power and emotion that the church's have here in Africa. One of the absolute coolest things I witnessed at church was when they sang a worship song, slowly in groups the women, then men, little girls, and the little boys came to the front and did some dancing while clapping their hands.

People here call us yovo as we are walking through the village, which means "white people." It is such an interesting feeling to be a minority, however I am thankful for the feeling because I can better relate the situations back home!

Our team had the afternoon off, so most people decided to take a nap but I couldn't sleep because I felt like I was wasting time! I took my iPad, notebook and book I was reading to the roof/deck to enjoy some time in the sun. The weather is not as hot here as we all thought, but it is very muggy and I am constantly sweating. There is a solid 3 minutes when I get to shower that I feel clean! As I enjoy the rooftop I realize that there is american rap music in the neighboring house...so what do I do, start singing...Eunice and Esta (daughter and niece of Daniel) we're dancing around with me on the roof top. Our evening session was a team meeting with Daniel on our schedule for the next week, questions about Daniel, his community and family and then ideas of projects we could do for Togo and its 6,000,000 people to help them stand stronger. A few of the ideas that we came up with were: providing Ewe bibles to the villages that do not have nearly enough, figuring out a goat/ bible drive where people would donate money and it would provide both to a family and helping Daniel buy land so that he could start his own farming/agriculture business and employ people with all the profit from the business going directly to the future of Daniel's CHE program (community health evangelism.) When Daniel was a child his mother bought a goat with the intent to kill it for Christmas dinner. When the time came for that decision to be made, they so wisely decided to breed the goat and sell the babies. This is the reasoning for providing goats because Daniel believes that this will help the villages for stronger survival. Eventually the plan would be to implement goats that produce milk, however they are very hard to find and much more expensive. To end the night we discussed the plays that we were going to put on for the women and children that we will get to work with. I got to make some sheep sock puppets for the children's lessons...The lost sheep. Very excited to see how how this will go!