Light of Togo

Making Progress
As I have mentioned in previous letters, I am currently devoting the majority of my time to studying Kabiye.  Just about two weeks ago, I finally felt like all this studying is starting to pay off as I began forming simple sentences.  What’s unfortunate is that the Kabiye people assume this means that I will understand anything they say.  That is definitely not the case!

Health Concerns
Over a week ago, we noticed a gland under Joshua’s right ear starting to swell and become painful for him.  After seven days, two doctor visits, a blood test, a throat culture, and speaking with an American doctor on the phone, we were still baffled and the swelling was getting worse.  Finally we talked to another doctor on the phone who gave us a good indication of what it might be and how to treat it.  That was two days ago, and since then he has been doing much better.

We are pretty sure that it was a bacterial infection of some sort.  It is definitely a test of faith at times living in a place where you can’t drive 15 minutes to the nearest fully-equipped hospital.  We are very thankful that God directed us to speak with the right people at the right time.  It’s good to have the energetic old Joshua back!

As I’ve mentioned a couple times before, Joshua has fit right in with the Togolese people and culture.  He seems to handle change and new experiences very well.  One of those new experiences is fufu.  He tried it for the first time just a couple months after our arrival here, and he loved it.  This shocked me, since I can’t stand the stuff!  It’s a nearly-tasteless, chalky, pasty, gooey substance that  you dip in some sort of sauce.

Well, Joshua likes it so much that he asked our house helper, Yvette, to make it for him.  She was very glad to do so, and Joshua was very glad to eat it!  Here’s a short video of her preparing it, Joshua trying to help, and Joshua eating it.  You’ll notice that they mash it up in a wooden bowl using a large wooden stick.  They slowly add more and more water until it becomes very pasty.  The best way to describe the texture is wet Playdoh!

Joshua’s fufu from Jesse Shanks on Vimeo.

What do you get when you combine a broken bridge, 200 semi trucks, angry taxi drivers, and four tired missionaries?  A big adventure!

After a few days in Lomé, Jim and I started heading back for Kara around 11 am, which normally means arriving home around 5 pm.  Around the half way point, however, things started to get interesting.  We came up on a 4 mile-long line of semi trucks that had been building up since at least Monday.  It was at this point that we just “happened” to run into a couple other missionary friends from Kara who were only two cars ahead of us.  They had a map, and we had no clue, so we decided to follow them.

We got turned around, drove back to the last village, and asked about a road on the map that could have brought us out north of the bridge.  The locals, however, told us that the road is impassable.  So at this point we had two options: sit in traffic, going nowhere; or sit on the side of the road drinking Coke, going nowhere.  The decision was unanimous.

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Once we started seeing vehicles coming from towards the bridge, we figured it was time to move out.  Our progress was stopped short, though, by all the traffic trying to go north. After two hours of stop and go, we were diverted off the main road and onto a narrow dirt road.  This road wasn’t at all a problem for our 4×4 vehicles, but there were all kinds of small cars, overloaded taxi vans, and huge semi trucks trying to make one lane into two.  As night fell we slowly crept along, hopping out of the vehicles from time to time in order to direct traffic, push vehicles out of the mud, or just to find out why we weren’t moving.

A couple hours later, we were past all the traffic and on our way to wherever that road would take us.  Five and a half hours after starting into the traffic jam, we came out a whopping 7 miles north of where we started!

Now it’s late, we’re tired, we’re hungry, but at least we’re past all that mess…right?  Let me interrupt my own story here and explain something.  I have learned two things about frustrating circumstances in Africa: first, that you don’t get too excited about a bad situation getting better because it’s usually not over; and second, that you don’t get too worked up about it because it just makes everything worse.  Just take a deep breath, say “WAWA” (West Africa Wins Again), and go with the flow.

So, not even an hour of driving on the main road brought us to the toll booth where we would normally pay 300 francs and pass right through.  But not tonight!  A line of taxi vans was blocking up both lanes of the road, making it impossible to pass.  Walking up to the booths, we saw a group of about 150 people standing around, some talking, some arguing, and some shouting loudly at nobody in particular, and some just watching the whole scene like a movie that you don’t want to be in.

We eventually found out that several taxi van drivers wanted to protest the bridge situation by blocking the road and refusing to pay their toll.  We soon realized that there was nothing we were going to do or say to fix the problem.  They wanted to voice their complaint to the local authorities, so until they showed up nothing was going to change.  We had the idea of just jumping the curb with our vehicles, and going around everyone, but we seriously felt like it wouldn’t have been the smartest move at that point.

We felt like the best place to be at this time was back at our vehicles, which is where we stayed until everything settled down.  Once the local “préfet” arrived, they came to an agreement that those who wanted to pay their toll and leave could do so, and those who didn’t could stay as long as they wanted.  The only problem is that the people blocking the road were the ones staying and they had no desire to move so that everyone else could leave.

With the situation having settled down a bit, and us getting more tired by the minute, we went back to the curb-jumping idea.  We moved several small concrete barricades out of the way, payed our toll, jumped the curb, and drove off into the sunset.  Well, the sunset part isn’t exactly true since we missed it by several hours.

In all, the 6 hour trip took 12.  A 12 hour trip doesn’t sound that bad, but I’m sure you’ve heard this phrase before: “You just had to be there.”  Honestly though, I wouldn’t have traded it for anything!  It was a great adventure and something that we’ll remember for the rest of our lives.  I can imagine us missionaries sitting around 20 years from now laughing about the “good ‘ole days.”  Just do me a favor and please tell me if 20 years from now I’m repeating this story over and over again as if it’s the first time you’ve heard it.

I’d like to ask you to pray for my trip to Lomé today.  I’m taking the Huffs down so they can pick up their vehicle from the port, while Jim and I will do some shopping and other errands.  Please pray for our safety there and back on Thursday or Friday.

Asking for prayer for safety on a trip sometimes seems like such a “catch phrase” kind of thing to say, but after taking a couple long distance trips here in Togo, I take it very seriously now!  During the pastors’ conference, we were coming down a mountain around a curve when all of a sudden a guy on a motorcycle was in the middle of our lane coming straight at us.  To make matters worse there was a large semi in the other lane, which gave the motorcycle guy no place to go.  But, he was completely unaware of all this because he had his head turned almost completely backwards talking to somebody behind him!  With only a split second to react, I honked and swerved as far off the steep road as I could, which gave him barely enough room to squeeze between me and the truck, just inches away from hitting our bumper.

This is just one of the many “incidences” we’ve had already in the short time we’ve been here.  So, when I ask you to pray for our safety, it’s because we really do need it!  Thanks very much!

In one corner, the unsuspecting missionary.  In the other corner, the heavyweight champion of African sicknesses.   In the first of many bouts to come, Malaria threw the first punch and knocked me flat on my back for 48 hours, but thankfully due to a very effective treatment we found I am now back on my feet again and recovering from it.  Tiffany had posted on Facebook that I was sick, so thanks to all who were praying for me.  I’m sure it will not be the last time that we meet this opponent, but we sure do hope that it’s very infrequently!

What I’m very thankful for (other than the obvious, which is of course that I’m not dead) is that I did not have many pressing obligations this week, so the sickness did not set me back too much in that respect.  I am also thankful for a wonderful and as-close-to-perfect-as-possible wife who took great care of me while I was stuck in bed for two days.  Thanks Tiff, you’re the best!

I know that it has been an incredibly long time since I have posted anything on our blog other than the monthly updates.  Yes, we are still alive, and I do plan on writing more often once we have an internet connection of our own.  For now, though, I want to tell about what’s going on with our container and to ask you to pray for the situation.

The container arrived in the port on April 24th, so we drove down six hours from Kara on the 28th, expecting to get the container out of port and up to Kara by around the first few days in May.  Well, we’re still in Lomé!  Without going into a bunch of unnecessary details, the basic problem is that something on the container’s paperwork doesn’t appear to look right to the port authorities.  So, they have decided to open the container and go through it.  They might get around to doing this on Monday or Tuesday, and the whole process could take several days.

There are several things to pray for in this situation:
Pray that nothing gets stolen while many of our things are laying on the ground outside of the container.
Pray that they will be content to only look through a part of the container instead of every single item in every single box, which literally could take a full week.
Pray that after looking through everything they will not assess an insanely high value to everything, which would then mean that we would be paying much higher taxes than necessary.

We are completely confident that all of this is just part of God’s plan, and that He has a very good reason for it all.  That doesn’t necessarily make it easy to go through it, but it does give us the assurance that God is seeking to do something through this that we either don’t understand or that we don’t yet know.  Thanks so much in advance for your prayers about this!

One of the biggest adjustments to living here in Togo is the weather.  We come from the beautiful, but cold and rainy Northwest.  Coming here was quite a shock to our quickly thawing bodies!  Right now we are entering the hot and dry season.  There is a unique weather phenomenon here called the Harmattan which blows hot dusty air south into Togo from the Sahara Desert.  In a month or so it will cause temperature of up to 130 degrees.  I’m not too sure exactly what the outside temperatures have been like lately, but I do know that we walked into a 93 degree room the other day and it felt very cool and refreshing, almost like air conditioning!

Joshua has been dealing with heat rashes now and then, so please pray for him.  He’s a real trooper though and doesn’t complain too much.  He’s doing really great here, and enjoying all the new sights and sounds that Africa has to offer.

So, if you find yourself freezing this winter, remember to pray for your overheated missionary friends!