Getting to this conference was at times a little difficult. Yep that's me on the back of a motorcycle on a dirt road. I volunteered to drive the motorcycle, but the owner wouldn't let me. I wonder why??? O.K. I confess, I volunteered to ride to bike, the rest of the crew followed in the truck. We stopped in two cities this time for the Orality conference. Daloa and Danana. Both of these cities were in former rebel territory. Danana is about 5 kilometers away from the Cote d"Ivoire/Liberia border. This was an 8 day conference. We didn't have hot water at anytime for showers, we slept on thin mats and the electricity was barely workable. We were roughing it I guess you could say.
This is me teaching the story of the temptations of Christ from Matt. 4. I spoke in French and then the guy to my left translated it into the local language called Yakouba. This was one of the more difficult tasks I had to do, and I had to rely a lot on Jeff and Barbara Singerman to help me answer there questions as it was hard to understand. When someone asked a question, it was asked in the local language and then translated into French. Thanks to Jeff and Barbara I made it through. Sometimes it was translated as well into English. We were at the border of LIberia which is an English colony, but there English is very hard to understand at times.
We had about 60 to 70 people join us for this conference. Not all of them were Baptist as we found out with our stories and their responses. Several times Jeff had to stop the conference and explain Baptist beliefs and that we were Baptist and this is what we believe and how we will teach the conference.
Plantain anyone??? These people are loading a truck with plantains to go to the other cities of Cote d'Ivoire. One road was completely blocked by plantains, stacked higher than our truck. These guys are grabbing the plantains and tossing them up to the guys in the truck, who are then stacking them. They will stack them about 10 feet higher than the top of the truck.
