Planting Apples in Africa?

With only a few hours left in Senegal, we've been working hard today to process and wrap up our involvement as an advance team for the "Planting Together" vision. We've been reviewing some of the video footage that Marta has taken, making transcripts of the parts spoken in French, and writing translations that will be used for the subtitles. We've taken time to pray together, listen to the Lord and formulate a report of the people we've met and the possibilities that exist for future partnerships in outreach. Somewhat amazingly, after a whole week of having no electricity during daytime hours, we've had electricity all day today - which allowed us to work on our computers for editing video and translating transcripts. (As four of us sat together, working on our Macintosh computers, someone joked that it looked as if we were planting "Apples" in Africa!) Very soon, it will be time to pack our bags, head to the airport and take an overnight flight back to Madrid. Then, in just a few weeks' time, when we meet as a King's Kids European leadership team in Switzerland, we'll take more time to seek God's guidance concerning the right "next steps" in the development of this vision that He's put on our hearts. Thanks for your prayers for our processing together, and for smooth and safe travel back to Europe again.

I see that they've had a rather rainy week back home in Alhaurin while we were in Africa, but I'm thankful that I'll be going back to what looks like a pleasantly dry and sunny week ahead. I'm going to be house sitting and dog sitting at Villa Rehoboth while my friends are in the UK.

Sunday at Sea

Our time in Senegal is slowly drawing to a close. We've met many people and seen several different tree-related projects. We've chatted with missionaries and given them and their families little gifts from Spain. Above you can see 5 year old Dorcas, trying out a Spanish fan in the African heat. Today we went to a morning worship service at a local church and then we decided to take a boat trip out to Goree island. Its name means "good harbour" but Goree, now a national heritage site, used to be the "holding area" for African slaves before they were shipped across the Atlantic, separated from their families and sold to rich landowners who put them to work in the cotton plantations. Many thousands of Africans passed through there during two centuries of the slave trade, and many hundreds died there too. Several of our African King's Kids groups visited Goree back in 1996, when we were taking teams to work with African American churches during the Olympic Games in Atlanta. Part of our goal at that time was for African young people to be able to ask African Americans for forgiveness for the slave trade. (It wasn't only Americans and Europeans who traded in slaves; many Africans were also involved in capturing their brothers and selling them into slavery.) So today we had an opportunity to go to Goree island, and it was a sobering experience to visit a slave house like the one where thousands of men, women and children were imprisoned in squalid conditions before the slave trade was finally abolished in the 1800s. 
It was a beautiful day, though, and we enjoyed the short boat trip from the port of Dakar to the little island of Goree. Curtis, who took a Spanish KKI group to South Africa last year, said that it reminded him of the boat trip they took out to Robben Island to see where Nelson Mandela and others had been imprisoned during the apartheid years. Mandela made a visit to Goree in the 1990s, as did Pope John Paul, who asked the African people's forgiveness for the role that European Catholics had played in the trading of slaves.

Our overland adventure

Having used "taxis" for most of the week, we hired a six seater vehicle over the past two days for our longest trip of this week in Senegal - southwards to Mbouru and then further inland to Kaolack. José Luis was our designated driver, and I have to admit that I was very thankful not to be in his shoes: a considerable part of the journey between Fatick and Kaolack was on a road that basically consisted of non-stop potholes - some of them several metres wide and more than six inches deep! It was a busy road, and it was somewhat surreal to watch cars, huge trucks and donkey carts all "slaloming" from one side of the road to the other in order to avoid the parts that were impassable. I reckon that the vehicles spent at least as much time on the wrong side of the road as on their own side, and it could be slightly scary to see an enormous eighteen wheeler truck coming directly towards us on our side of the road.

Our first stop of the day was at a project called Beersheba - which takes its name from Genesis chapter 21, where it says that Abraham planted a tree and worshipped God. The Beersheba project lays more of an emphasis on "naturally assisted regeneration" than on mass planting of new trees. This process involves teaching farmers to protect the trees in their fields from animals, and showing them how to promote growth by pruning the trees regularly when they are still small. It was amazing to see how many trees there were in Beersheba, compared to the surrounding land - just as a result of several years of protection and pruning. After we'd walked around the plantation and all taken turns doing some pruning, the Beersheba project leaders took us into a local village where we all sat on the ground and ate Tiébou Dienn with a Serer family. As well as enjoying their food and hospitality, and hearing the father's testimony of how he came to know God, we were also able to see a Serer Bible. There are more then thirty different languages in Senegal, the most widely spoken being Wolof, but Serer is the first of these languages to have a translation of the entire Bible, both old and new testaments.

After lunch, we travelled further inland (on the hair-raising stretch of road) to visit a different project, where villagers were planting jatropha trees. When pressed, the kernels of the jatropha fruit produce an oil that can be used as fuel - rather like diesel. It was late by then, and already dark by the time we got back to Kaolack, so we spent the night in an inn there, and then began our return journey this morning. On the way, we stopped to visit a couple of Senegalese YWAMers who work in evangelism and discipleship in a village near Fatick. They were thrilled to see us and, as they showed us around their mission base, they pointed out that the hedge around the property had been planted in 1997 by a team of Senegalese King's Kids. They themselves have continued to plant some trees in the area over the past thirteen years, and they are very open to hosting small European teams who'd like to join them for tree-planting and evangelism. Soon, it was time to head back to Dakar where, before going home for dinner, we went out to the most western point of the African continent and took some photos of the pelicans and the sunset at the beach there. Tomorrow we'll be going to church in the morning, and then on Monday we'll be taking some time to pray over the many experiences and impressions we've had in our travels of the past few days. It has all been incredibly encouraging, and we need God's wisdom to discern which of these many openings and opportunities are the right ones to pursue at first.

On the road again

There has been no electricity here for most of the week, so there hasn't been much opportunity to send emails or do any blogging. But here are some photos of our trip yesterday to visit missionaries in Sangalkam - an hour or so from Dakar.  When we talked about the vision that God had given us to investigate the possibility of outreaches including tree-planting projects, they got very excited and said that some of the things we shared were a confirmation of things that God had also spoken to them about a new wave of people coming to bless Senegal in the years ahead. We enjoyed our visit with them, and we were also able to join their African students in eating the Senegalese national dish, Tiébou Dienn (pronounced cheebo-jen) which is a rice dish with fish and vegetables. Most Senegalese will serve the rice in a large dish, with the vegetables and fish in the centre. Half a dozen people will sit around and all eat from the same dish - either with their hands or with spoons. Today we'll be driving a couple of hundred kilometres further south and inland  to visit more tree-planting initiatives, and will be spending the night in the town of Kaolack, only returning to Dakar on Saturday evening. If we have electricity and internet again by then, I'll try to post some more news on Saturday or Sunday.

Images of Dakar

Today we remained in the city of Dakar and took some time to connect with local Christians - a pastor and some missionaries - to share the vision God has given us and to draw on their wisdom and experience concerning the customs and culture of this nation. This helps us to pray more intelligently for Senegal and also opens up possible partnerships for future outreach involvement together. Our videographer went out in the afternoon to snap some of the sights and sounds of this African city: the ladies carrying heavy loads on their heads, the donkeys and goats that wander in the sandy streets, the brightly coloured and overcrowded buses. One of our team members is in Africa for the first time in his life, and he confessed to being "shocked" at the sense of chaos and at the incredible amount of litter you see dumped everywhere: along the roadsides of the city, and piled up on Hann beach (near where we are staying.) It's true that if you've not been in Africa before, all the sights and sounds and smells can be rather overwhelming at first.
Some of the YWAM missionaries here are involved in medical ministry - at a clinic which they started many years ago when the mercy ship Anastasis came to Dakar. Today, a doctor came to treat some of the children that other Dakar YWAMers work with in a daily kids' club here in Hann Plage. Tomorrow we'll also visit another clinic, a little further inland, when we travel to meet people in another town.

Day one in Dakar

Yesterday was a day of travelling from Europe to Africa. From our departure airports of Malaga, Barcelona and Marseille, the five of us met up in Madrid and travelled together on the five-hour flight down to Senegal. It was almost midnight when we finally arrived at our destination. This morning after breakfast, we and our hosts met to pray for the day. I had to smile when I realised that the seven of us were from seven different nations: France, Switzerland, Spain, Scotland, USA, New Zealand and Holland. We stayed within the city of Dakar today, meeting with government officials and representatives from forestation initiatives. One of the these was the project known as the "Great Green Wall," which is a vision to build a wall of trees, 15 kilometres wide, across the breadth of the African continent, starting in Senegal, reaching to Djibouti, and passing through eleven nations on the way. There are opportunities for teams of volunteers to be involved in the tree planting season, while at the same time reaching out to local villagers with other help such as language lessons, computer classes, primary health care, sports, and so on. Later in the week, we'll be travelling to visit similar projects that are based in other parts of the country. Our goal is to identify possible partners who would be able and willing to host teams of young people among their seasonal volunteers. Thanks for your prayers as we continue to visit places and make contact with people. Electricity is a bit erratic (we had no electricity for eight or nine hours today) and when there's no electricity there's no internet. But I'll post some more news here on the blog whenever I can.

Off to Africa

Nearly fourteen years ago, when I was teaching on a child and youth ministry training course in Dakar, Senegal, the students and staff gave me this picture as a thank you gift. A picture of village life in West Africa, it's made of different colours of sand glued onto a canvas. Tomorrow I'll be heading back to Dakar for the first time since that previous trip, and I'd value your prayers as we visit various tree-planting initiatives and investigate future outreach possibilities. Perhaps you could pray for me whenever you clean your teeth. (See post for 21st January.)