Sometimes I forget that I am American

Greetings blog followers!

The past two weeks here in Africa have been a blur of business and meshed together events that I am not really sure how to sift through but I will do my best. Also, Niger has religious freedom at the current moment so I will not be writing in code this time, that was just an extra precaution anyway.

So, living in the bush is pretty fun. I didn't think I would get used to it, there are some things that go along with "culture shock" that I didn't think I would ever get used to that have become a part of everyday life to me. Here is what a normal day in bush life consists of:

Me and Lauren sleep outside because it is too hot to sleep in our mud house. We wake up at 4 a.m. to the sound of the muslim prayer. The prayed plays through a loud speaker in our village, and every house in the village can hear it clearly when it goes off. I have struggled with being fearful of this prayer and waking up in the dark to it, but through prayer the wickedness of it has become a speck on the bottom of my shoe. When it wakes me up, if I cannot fall back asleep I use that time to pray to God and thank Him for being the King and already winning the battle.
We get up out of our beds around 7 am, because that is what time our village wakes up. The morning sounds consist of goats, roosters, sheep, birds, neighbors, donkeys, and cows. We move our beds into the house, put on our skirts and go out walking. Me and Lauren walk out of our village every morning, prayer walking/exercising. On our way back into the village we purchase Labon which is yogurt in a bag, and we eat that for breakfast. We then go back to our house and read our bibles and pray until about 10 or 11. Around that time, we go out into the village with our cassettes and we go to different compounds and greet people and play cassettes with God's word on them. The cassettes are in their language, and we always give interested people a cassette to keep. We go to about 3 compounds in the morning, and we come in around 12 or 1 and eat lunch (which usually consists of a rice dish cooked by our friend Fati). We then take naps until about 3. After our naps, we go prayer walking again out of our village. We stop at another village called "Zongo" where we buy a soft drink and farimasa (which is fried bread with sugar...tastes like donuts). We sit and eat/drink in the shade and visit for a while with each other and the Africans. We then head back into our village and spend time with our neighbors, playing with their children and sitting with the women. Fati brings us dinner, we eat it, and right when it gets dark, Barbara comes on.

Barbara is a french soap opera that our neighbors play out of their tv and 50 tall ghetto antenna each week night. It is not common for bush people to own tv's, fyi. But at night, all the married women and children in our village gather around this tiny tv right next to our house and watch Barbara. They love it. They give their commentaries in Zerma and I try my best to follow, but I am unfortunatly usually always out of the loop.

After Barbara, we pull out our beds and go to sleep. Our days are very simple and we have worked into a routine, but adventure still happens, and we are lucky if we ever get a day that follows that scheduale closely. That is just a general idea of our days.

The other night as I was washing my face in the bowl in the back room, I heard a screech from our front room. I ran into the room only to find Lauren attempting to kill a GIANT scorpian with her flip flop. I screamed "You can't kill it! It's too big!!" because it was the size of a kitten (maybe a little smaller..) and so Lauren screamed for an African child to come. Along comes Ali, our 12 year old saviour. He killed the scorpian by first hitting it with a shoe. He then stabbed it through its heart with a stick, and finally he grabbed a stone and he smashed it. He looked up at us in the moonlight and said "A Bon" which means "it is finished."

Some exciting things that I have been able to experience include riding on a donkey cart, taking a bush taxi across town, riding on a boat across the Niger river, peeing outside in a dust storm, and holding a baby goat.

As far as Jesus' work is concerned, the people in our village are starving for him and flocking toward his word. People come to us asking for cassettes, asking about Jesus, and just the other night a younge girl came to our house asking for me to play the bible for her. It is obvious that God is leading these people on a path toward Him. It is obvious the people who are interested in the gospel and those who are not. We experience God rawly out here, and it is very obvious where the work of the Spirit is. I am overjoyed by the way that our love for the village people spreads among them. We love the children, and the children run off and love each other. We love our neighbors, and they leave with smiles on their faces. The most beautiful thing about the love is that it belongs only to Jesus.

The men in the village are becoming more and more interested and accepting of the gospel. The more we pray for them, the more they open up. We have one team mate who has lead a man to Christ already.

It is hard for people in this area to make a decision to follow Jesus because they are controlled by fear and oppression. When we prayerwalk to pray the God would break down strongholds and continue to lead these people toward freedom to follow him. When I first started living in the bush I was very discouraged because I did not see any fruit of God working in the people in the village. I wanted to see people become Christians. I am not worried about that anymore because God has given me a peace that His work is so much more than anything we can measure. There is so much trust that goes into following Jesus, and every day he commands us to love like he loved. I am able to do that with his strength now, and I am able to see fruit everyday.

Please pray that God would help me and Lauren work well together, and please pray for the men of the village to become hungry for Jesus and fearless to follow him.

Thank you so much everyone for supporting me. I know I say this everytime, but honestly, everytime I call home and check my email and the comments on here I am encouraged GREATLY and I cannot thank you enough for that. Also, I feel the supernatural effects of the prayers from back home, so keep praying!

If God is teaching me anything in Africa it is to not take life so seriously, to trust Him, and to love. I am learning how to REST in Jesus' peace, and even though I am living in the midst of lost people in a foreign land, God is giving me supernatural peace and joy that does not match up to the obvious circumstances, so praise God for that.

I will report back sometime between the 16th and 19th!!!
Love Hailey