Kids Bible Club in Doure

This evening, we participated in another Kids' Bible Club in Doure. Local children's leaders led the singing and told the Bible story, and Rebecca and I brought a small craft for the children to work on.

There were 105 children who came to the club. At the end, when the children's worker, Renwende gave an opportunity for the children to ask Jesus into their heart, 5 children raised their hands and came forward for prayer.

These children were from an unbelieving home but after hearing about the love of Jesus, they wanted to invite Him into their hearts.

We are thanking and praising Jesus for the work that He is doing in the tiny village of Doure.

27 July, 2011

This has been such a busy time that it has been hard to find the time to write.

Maria Casaleggi and Rachel Holper from St Louis came and worked with us and have already left. Thank you so much, Maria and Rachel, for sewing into the lives of our children and for blessing us with your smiles and warm hearts.

Kelsey Graczak and Rebecca Dalton, also from St Louis, traveled back to Burkina with me and they still have about 2 more weeks with us. Kelsey and Rebecca have cared for our babies, played with the older children, participated in sponsorship distributions, held VBSs in neighboring villages, and many, many more things. They have definitely left their imprint on us and all of our children.

Anna McLees, from Virginia, has been with us for one month now. Anna is a teacher and also a talented artist. Anna has worked with several of our primary school age children tutoring

them in reading, writing, and math. She also painted a mural on one of the walls of our older baby room. Rebecca also helped in this project. Thank you so much, Anna, for all that you have done for us and for our children at the orphanage.

Finally, we finished the food distributions for June. We held distributions in six different centers and each child's family received a 200 pound bag of corn and some soap. This is a picture of distribution day at the Sayo church.

Three weeks ago now we started a weekly Bible club for the children in Doure. The first week there were about 30 children in attendance. The second week there were 60 children and this past Sunday, there were 90 children at the Bible club. We are training 2 of the children's workers of the Doure church to hold these meetings. We sing with the children, tell them a Bible story and then do a simple craft or play a game with them. This past week, the pastor told us that there are now about twice as many children coming to the Sunday morning service as there were before starting the Bible club.

We are thankful for this opportunity to sew into the lives of this next generation of Burkina society.

Mobile Nursing Clinic

Yesterday our nurse, Bea, held the weekly children's clinic in Doure. Kelsey and Rebecca and I went along to help in whatever way we could. There is a new pastor in Doure, Pastor Salomon, who came by to greet us.

Because we are now in the rainy season, the number of children at the clinic was down. But, still Bea treated 45 sick children.

This week, Bea treated several cases of malaria and typhoid fever, many skin disorders including fungal infections and impetigo, and dysentery. The little girl in the picture with the green dress was treated for a serious fungal infection on her head and she had received multiple bee stings on her face at school this week. All of the children received medicine as needed and the mothers were reassured that their children would be okay.

Child Sponsorship and Widows Basket

Yesterday we visited Doure, a small village about 14 kilometers from here, where we held a child sponsorship food distribution and a widows' distribution. Seven children and ten widows participated in the distribution and each person received a 200 pound bag of corn and some soap.

There is a new pastor in this little village so it was our first time to do a distribution with him at the church. We were very happy to see that the church is thriving. In fact, they are putting an extension onto the church because there is no longer enough room in the building for all of the people.

We had a planning meeting with Pastor Salamon and a youth worker and have arranged for a weekly meeting for the sponsored children to start this Sunday. This will allow the church to more closely follow the children to see that they are well, that they are doing well in school, and that things are okay for them at home.

The children wrote letters to their sponsors and we took new pictures of them to send out soon.

Final Walk-through

When you do a construction project here in Burkina, throughout the time of the work, you pay the contractor 90% of the cost of the building. The remaining 10% is held back for one year as a guarantee for the work. If there are repairs that need to be made during the first year, the cost of these repairs are subtracted from this 10% amount.

This past week was the one-year mark on the completion of our secondary school building. We held a walk-through with the contractor and the quality control specialist and found only 2 small cracks near the roof on one end of the building. The contractor repaired these cracks and we scheduled a meeting for everyone concerned to sign papers that the work was finished.

In our construction experience here of building six buildings, I think that our school building is in the best shape of any of our buildings at this one year mark. We are thankful for the help of the Lord and for the faithfulness of our contractor and our quality control specialist. We have a building that will stand for years and years to come where our children will learn math and science and French and also that they have a Father in heaven who loves them.