Martha with Abi in our kitchen

Our house in Ndu

I first of all want to say how sad we are that we have not been able to keep you all up to date with our adventures in Cameroon.  What we had intended for our blog to be, has not been possible since we have not had internet access.

But our thoughts have been with you as we are experiencing life here.

I hope some of you have had a chance to look at our friend’s blog @

marieanddrew-petersensinaction.blogspot.com.  The Petersen’s are here from Minnesota for two months as well.  They will be here four more weeks than us. 

They are here under Wycliff Bible Translation.  Although their purpose here is to have Drew working with cement repairing the front steps of the classroom building here at CBTS. Their family is here experiencing life with us and many of the blog’s she shares are what we are experiencing.  In fact, we often talk about her next blog.

The reason they are able to blog is that they had been given an MTN Internet Stick and for some reason, we have not been able to get it work on our computer, not for lack of trying.  The conclusion is that we may have a Firewall that is blocking it. 

Anyway, I have been journaling and so hopefully I can use this blog to fill in some of the gaps.  It is really hard to imagine how I will keep this short enough since there has been so much since we have been in contact.  I will try not to bore. 

Grap a cup of coffee and take a moment to relax and enjoy.

We have been trying to make the most of every experience here.  We are learning to live life simply, by necessity.  And although it has taken a while to adjust, I must say, I am enjoying this pace of life.  The work is mostly about meeting our everyday needs.

Our typical day, which is not all that often, is to wake at about 6:30 am.  That is late for Cameroonians.  We have roosters crowing and goats that have been tied on to our property nehing somewhere close to our windows by 6:00am. 

In the mornings I try to get to the chapel service at 7:30am and have the kids eat their breakfast and clean up before I get back to help them with their schooling.  Schooling is dragging out and I hope these last two weeks will be the most productive J. 

The afternoons are spent either finding some work for the kids to help out here at the campus, like working with Drew on cement, or dusting the books in the library, or finding places to play.  The boys usually find the latter.  The missionary family, the Rundus’ have children here our kids age, as well, the Petersen’s have 3 children as well.  They have all become very good friends.  The Rundus children don’t often have so many other white children hear to play with and what often happens is that they have videos or cd to watch.  We have been trying to discourage that and our kids have started to develop some significant relationships with African kids.

Abi always has someone peeking in the windows, wanting to play.  There is a primary and a nursery school on the compound and during their breaks some of the kids have made it a pattern to head to our place.  Unfortunately, their school break are in the morning and I am still trying to school. 

We have a cook named Martha that we are sharing with the Moline’s.  They are a couple here full time as well.  Tim is teaching and Amy is running the household.  She has been a great help to me as we deal with the Cameroonian way.  They have an almost 4 month old puppy that is Lab/German Shepherd mix named RJ.  The Rundus’s have RJ’s sister, Lila.  You can imagine how our boys are enjoying them.

Anyway, our cook Martha, is absolutely amazing.  She is very good at cooking Western food and especially good at baking.  Everything is made from scratch and so is amazingly delicious.  Unfortunately any weightloss that Dan and I were anticipating will not happen.

We have also hired a couple of female students, Obedience and Christina, who are sharing our household cleaning load.  Obedience comes on Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings.  And Christina came today and will come tomorrow.  Laundry for 6 people is too much for one person and so we are happy to support another student.  Obedience and her husband are students and they also have 5 children.  This is her first experience working for a Western family so her and I are both new at this.  She is learning our expectations and we are learning what to expect.  Christina is a little more experienced.  She is a widow and a mom and a student.  So both are in financial need and we are glad to help out.

Dan is now in his second week of teaching Jeremiah.  He loves to teach and the students are loving being in his class.  The Ephesians class went very well and when the Jeremiah class started he had over 10 students more than were on his original roster.  Everyone speaks very highly of him.  The hours for the Jeremiah class is out of the ordinary because it is an extra class this semester.  He is teaching on Mondays and Wednesdays from 2:30 to 7:30 pm.  And then on Friday he teaches for 1 hour in the morning.  It is nice to have him around in the days but the evenings become long without him.  But the course is just three weeks so it is doable.

When we first arrived someone said to us that 9pm is Cameroon’s midnight.  It is true because a day consists of the daylight hours.  And, typically the power goes out at around supper time for most of the evening.  So, what is true even as I write this, is that we walk around with head lamps or flash lights once the sun sets and the power goes out and find a comfortable place to wait out the power outage. 

So that is a long but quick run down of our life here.  There are so many individual experiences that I would love to share but too many for this blog. I will go to the Petersen’s and try to download this blog.  Maybe even get a few pictures in. 

We only have two weeks left here so our prayer is that we would live in the moment and make to most of our time here.  I had the privilege of being part of a women’s prayer meeting today and it is great to pray with the women of CBTS.  Pray for us that the relationships we have will be a blessing to those here and that we are a blessing.

Thank you for remembering us and being faithful with little communication.

Much love,

Andrea.

Ben playing with kids in our yard

Hey, here we are!!  I was able to get on to our blog with a friends computer - not yet our own!!!.  So I will cut and paste tomorrow.  But I just want to say, we think of  you all often.  I sent an email to many of you but will try to update more.  Our friends here are updating their blog regularly and they have a picture of me with the kids if you want to look them up.  They're blog address is
marieanddrew-petersensinaction.blogspot.com.  Check it out. 
Tomorrow I will try to download a few pictures and give a more thorough update.  We hear winter has finally arrived in Edmonton.  We are glad.  The weather here is very moderate.  Cool evenings, very warm days.  It is a bit decieving.  Ben just declared he has his second sunburn it two days.  He's excited to have a tan when we get back.  Well, until tomorrow, I hope.

DESIRE...

Delight yourself in the Lord; And he will give you the desires of your heart. Ps.37:4

For the past two weeks we have been winding all around Germany. The experiences have been comical, adventurous, and uplifting. Throughout the whole trip the word desire has been echoing around in my mind.  

What desire would a:

·         Family have to entrust their rambunctious kin to their vacant quaint Northern Germany home?

·         single mom and her daughter have in order to be open to host a family of six...including 4 very ‘alive’ kids?

·         What about 80 year old Tante Marta, who rode her bike for fifteen minutes each way to purchase a fifteen pound bag of potatoes from the store in time for the family’s visit ?

·         Then there is the young family just outside of Koln that take valuable time out of their pressed schedule to host this impulsive family from Canada?

·         How about the whole clan of Grabowski’s that open their doors and hearts wide open to make this past Christmas unforgettable for us?

The thread that ties all those together is love. Each of the homes that we have been in for the past couple of weeks have been immensely memorable because we felt very loved and cared for. I am convinced that each host had a desire to be sacrificing what they have in order to make our time with them very special. Their sacrifice was our reward. Their desire was our satisfaction.

Our trip through Germany also caused us to encounter the dark side of desire. The experience of the Dachau Concentration Camp, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau_concentration_camp

and the Topography of Terror in Berlin, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topography_of_Terror
cannot be put into words. Here the desire to control; to inflict pain through power; to mercilessly cause suffering upon the lives of those that you have been entrusted to protect, was horrifically evident. Here we also witnessed desire. Desire for darkness, desire for evil. Desire driven not out of love and sacrifice for the other, but rather, by hatred, power and self-glorification.

Desire...it is a powerful emotion. One that has been evident from the first humans, whose children were even warned that ‘if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.’ (Gen 4:4).   

What a contrast this is from what our Lord desires for his people:

For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. Hosea 6:6 ESV

When we desire the glory of God we are fulfilling our calling. We have shifted from the old self to the new self. This is not mere habitual sacrifice of time and our riches. It invites us into a life in which our hearts are alive in Jesus. Our hearts of stone are exchanged for a heart of flesh (Ezek 36:26). To try to be satisfied with anything less than the glory of God is only temporary and ultimately disappointing.

God desires for all of us to be saved.

‘...God our Saviour, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.’ (1 Timothy 2:3b-4)

To be saved is to lay our life completely before our gracious God. To find our self-driven desires repulsive (2 Peter 3:3) and to live in the freedom of being adopted children of the Lord Almighty. The thrill of following Jesus has no limits. His Kingdom continues to expand and includes the many that are otherwise neglected.

On Tuesday, we left Germany and arrived in Douala, Cameroon in the late evening. The heat, humidity and odours of this sea level city are wonderfully constrictive. The next morning the 6ish hour drive almost straight up over 5000 ft. to Bamenda was stunning. Interspersed by the buzzing of wasp-like motorcycles, plantations (pineapple, rubber, coffee, and papaya), security check points, and road side markets, are people. Lots and lots of people. I have never seen such an endless stream of people walking: children that could not have been four years old, walking on their own up the highway; old people, hunched over by the weight of the baskets on their backs; people of all ages pushing their carts up the endless hills; a seemingly infinite line of people, all going somewhere.

The road for us goes right into the Cameroon Baptist Convention (CBC) Headquarters. This outstanding complex is the result of the desires of visionary leadership following the guidance of the Lord. The CBC is a daughter of the North American Baptist Conference (NAB). Many years ago, the desire to bring the grace of Jesus Christ to Cameroon resulted in this outstanding mission field. With some of Cameroon’s best teaching hospitals, health clinics, schools for children, seminaries and churches the current CBC is a beautiful testimony of effective leadership. Virtually the entire leadership of the CBC is now provided by the Cameroonian people.  

What is being provided is to be marvelled at; the need of the people is even greater though. In this land that is filled with suffering and warmth, there is a need for the desires of those that have, to give to those that are experiencing the pain of life. We are not able to exist abundantly with an ‘us and them’ mentality... we are all together.  

Our friends, brothers and sisters, I leave you with the question that has changed my life, ‘what motivates you? What is your desire?’ I urge us all to reach beyond our grasp and to be motivated by the cause of God’s Kingdom. Who is in your sphere of influence that you are able to touch with love as you surrender yourself to causing them to experience the hope that passes all understanding?

One of the beauties of a Spirit-filled life is that we do not need to conform to an outside of ourselves norm or set of rules. We have the Spirit of the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe within us, so that we can be fully alive in Him.

We have been advised that the internet connection will be very sporadic in Ndu (where we leave for in the morning) so please go ahead and join the blog as a member so that you will know when we have the chance to update. Hopefully, then we will also get some photos added to the blog.

We love you all

Dan and the family