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Greetings from Cameroon!
My last newsletter lauded the joy of rainy season. Though the last few nights have been cool, it has been quite the opposite lately. This year’s dry season has brought an extraordinary amount of harmatan (the dust we get that supposedly is blowing all the way down from the Sahara). For all my friends who live in farming communities – think of that haze of dust that hangs in the air during harvest and the cloud that rises off a gravel road when someone speeds past . . . now multiply it, sometimes exponentially! When you breathe, it even TASTES like dirt.
I was trying to explain to some of the ladies I know who work as ‘house help’ (cleaning and cooking for other people) how strange it would be for most North Americans to hire someone to do that type of work full time. Part of the discussion centered on how labor is comparatively expensive in North America but many people have dishwashers, washing machines, etc. In the midst of our discussion I also realized that we just don’t have to deal with dirt in the same way people do here. I grew up on a gravel road, so I am sure there was just as much dirt in the air some days. However, our windows were closed/sealed the majority of the time. Here many windows don’t close, and even those that can are left open almost all the time to allow for air circulation. We can wash the tables in my classroom multiple times a day, and they will STILL be covered with dust when you walk in a couple of hours later.
The few months since my last newsletter have been full, as life tends to be no matter where I find myself, but good. The RFIS running club has been on their annual trip up Mount Cameroon this weekend. Next week our high school students and the majority of our staff head down the road to a campus in Mbalmayo for our annual high school retreat while a handful of us stay in Yaoundé for our annual middle school retreat (which I somehow ended up in charge of this year….) Pray that God will move in mighty ways through times of worship, the words of the speaker, small group bible study and discussions, and the many activities that have been planned for the week. Please pray for health for everyone–where else is one of the things on the official packing list ‘a malaria treatment’ for each student?!
As I have mentioned in the past, the school’s enrollment has been low the last few years, so there is a lot of discussion right now about how we ‘fix’ that and what size we really need to be in order to run efficiently and accomplish our goals effectively. One of the needs we keep coming back to in these discussions is someone well-trained to help our English Language Learners. So many of our prospective students just don’t have a level of English proficiency to succeed in this type of school, and rarely have we had someone with significant training in that area here for a long enough period of time to build a support program for those students. Please be praying for direction as we seek how God will help us to meet this need.
In the midst of our ‘normal’ life, grief and loss have also made their presence known. As I am sitting and writing this, there are two young men digging a grave behind my house for our dog, Tozer. This is the third dog I have buried in the past two years (plus the 2 that have been lost by neighbors on our compound in that same time period as well as 3 cats). That situation sits heavily on me this morning, but pales in comparison to so many other realities. This past week, a Cameroonian friend shared that her father was very ill, Friday he passed away. Victoreen, a lady who cleans for a friend of mine, hasn’t heard from her husband in months. He was working for a construction company in the northern part of the country, and we have recently discovered that about the time she stopped hearing from him, there was a construction crew in that area kidnapped by Boko Haram. We don’t have details or know for sure, but that is our latest information. Another friend’s wife has been dealing with a very difficult pregnancy. And those examples are just in my little community here, and the people I interact with on a daily basis.
In the midst of all of this we hold on to the Truth that God is good. Are we always going to be happy? Is life always going to be easy? Nope. In fact, we have been warned to expect exactly the opposite of that, but in Christ there is Hope.