Diohine

Diohine is the name of the village where a group of over 100 people from the Dakar Academy community will be spending the weekend. We are going with the purpose of sharing God's love with the people we meet. This will be done in a variety of ways as we all have our own strengths.

Brick team: There is a brick building team that will create bricks to be later used in building the church building.

Drama team: The drama team will go out to various villages during the day and present the gospel through skits and puppet songs.

Mural team: This team will be painting a mural on an existing church. The mural depicts Jesus in a village setting with children around him.

Medical team: The medical team will go out to villages and do first aid for people. People will come with boils, wounded limbs, fevers, etc and the medical team will do what they can to help. They bring along bandages and medication and malaria test kits.

Painting team: The painting team will be painting a school - inside and out.

Bench team: The bench team will build benches that will replace old ones and eventually go in the new church.

Camp team: This team is responsible for preparing food and pumping and filtering water - a necessity!!

VBS team: This team will go out and play games with children in villages and teach them stories and songs about God's love for them.

Foundation: This is a unique team because they are not quite yet sure what they will be doing. Diohine is a village with an ever expanding population of Christians. There are three cell groups that meet in little shelters - 200 people meet in an 8 by 15 area! Our hope is to build a church for them. Unfortunately, we have not yet gotten the building permit. We are going out in faith. We know that God has a plan for this weekend. So we will create the bricks (what the foundation team will be helping with) trusting that they will be one day used to build a church.

Permission is something that you can pray about. We will go forth no matter what. Pray that the people who have not yet given permission will see what we are doing and will be touched by it.

Pray that no one gets hurt and that we have safe travels.

Pray that we will have good attitudes. We will be living in tents, sleeping on the ground, drinking not that cold water by the third day, taking too cold showers, wearing the same clothes multiple times, and getting eaten by mosquitoes for the next three days. But we do it because we think God is more important than our comfort. Pray that we remember that. When we are tired, when we have sweat dripping down our backs, when things don't go the way we expect... we need to remember who is in control. And if we have bad attitudes, it will be seen. The eyes of the 6,000 people of the village will be watching us.

We leave early Friday morning and start work as soon as we can. We work all day Friday and Saturday and in the evenings we go and have a campaign. This means we sing songs in the local languages, do skits, and the preacher preaches. In addition to the main campaign are satellite campaigns where they show the Jesus film. For the campaigns, pray for the tech guys as they run lights and projectors and sound. On Sunday, we go to church, pack up, and head home. That evening there is a service where we will share with those who stayed behind and prayed for us about how God worked.

As you think of Africa, or of me, this weekend, remember us and take a quick moment to pray for us. Diohine was not where we were originally going to go for this outreach. We were going to go somewhere else, but then that fell through when the missionary who was going to be our contact person had to have major heart surgery and thus stay in the States longer than expected. Then we were going to another village, but the contact for that village also had family health issues. And now, we don't have permission to build the building. With so much opposition we have to wonder why Satan is trying so hard to stop us?! We believe this is where God wants us to spend this weekend, serving him.

“Look at the nations and watch—
    and be utterly amazed.
For I am going to do something in your days
    that you would not believe,
    even if you were told."

Habakkuk 1:5