Another Day at the Wall

First off you parents of the guys well ........

What gentleman they are. This morning us females were treated by all the young men to a special breakfast of muffins, pinapple and juice ( really gatorade ). They had gotten up early to bake the muffins, decorate the table with palm leaves, make a plate decoration for us and wrote each of us a note of encouragement. It was such a wonderful treat, so be proud of your young men. I have talked a bit about the compound and in the past showed you a look at where we sleep but here is the place we stay. The main floor is where the missionaries and the interns stay plus our big meeting room. Then the upstairs is where we sleep and our 2 bathrooms are. The van is from Bongolo Hospital that they are letting Tim borrow because we are such a big group and we don't really fit in this anyways.

Here is the gate and wall aroubd the compound. Like I said earlier, you need a wall around your property or squaters can build on it too. That's why we are building a wall around CFTAC. There are people already planting gardens on their land.
This is the way we walk to CFTAC. Steve has our 2 first aid kits I made in hand and which have been used daily unfortunately. You can see a group carrying our cooler full of drinking water, which we go through quickly.


After that wonderful breakfast we headed off to CFTAC to continue working on the wall. Totally we have dug, pick axed or machetted a trench that is 500 feet long. Not straight by any means has week have to work around a little creek, trees and of course follow a twisty property line. There was a lot of mixing cement and concrete with a shovel in the dirt. Carry cinder blocks down the hill and placing them along the 500 foot trench. Cutting back more trees. Hauling buckets of concrete to the treeches over trees and around the water. The kids have been amazing . The Nigerian man in charge of the building of the wall is called John and he's a tough man to please. So today as Sam, Kara and I were busy digging a section of the trench he came by and as he approached we all stopped digging, looked at each other and said " he's going to point out something we are doing wrong." There we stood, scared of this Nigerian man who has been calling us to excellence in this wall building, just waiting for the words of do better. BUT to our suprise, no shock, he said " Great job" and passed on by. Sam about fell over and wondered if John had been drinking. No, he hadn't, it was just that we are getting it now. At 12:30 we came back to the compound for a quick lunch and a little rest till we started work again at 2.

This was me relaxing after we ate, reading a section from the book of Luke, next years quiz material. I just happened to read a section where it said " But Jesus OFTEN withdrew to lonely places and prayed" I thought how often do we make time in the day to go to a lonely place and pray. The tree seemed like a nice place to do that.

After lunch we headed back to do a few more hours work on the wall. As we were walking to CFTAC a taxi pulled up and in ot was a young man that we just happened to meet at the beach 2 days ago who is from Kentucky. He was working in Nigeria this summer and decided to vacation here in Gabon and just started talking to us on the beach. Turns out he is a Christian and so he decided to come work with us this afternoon. That what we were doing sounded neat so he came and buiklt the wall with us this afternoon on his vacation. He's spending the evening with us too. His name is Mike and well, I think it is just such an interesting thing he did. Enough about Mike and back to the kids.Many kids are really beginning to drag on day 10 of work, yet they pressed on. They would come up and say to us that they were exhausted but that they could finish up today strong. It was such a blessing to hear that, but then again you had Steve, Big Mike and myself all over 40 ( 2 of us almost 50) hauling, digging and moving stuff with them so they didn't have much room to say anything else.
there was that slight machette in the afternoon with Matt ...... just kidding

Serge showing off his cement work

This is a shot of the end section of the trench we where digging at. We had cleared the brush away. Tyler and Jadrien are working on removing a stump mainly with a machette. Doesn't the tree up top in the center of the pic remind you of Lion King?

This was a man hauling wood on the other side of the wall.

This evening some of our guys went out with Chris the intern to play basketball with some locals. Another opportunity to BE as we say here. Being with the Gabonese is so important. Soon we will have our devotional and worship time, which we do every evening. It has been a great time. Tomorrow we go back for one mare day of wall building. Today we did run out of cinder blocks but they were getting more so we can do the one more day of work. Pray for our strength and for CFTAC to get more money to buy the needed material to complete this job. The total cost for the wall they say will be 17,00. Also pray for Tyler, he seems to be a mosquito magnet or so we think they are mosquito bites. His arms have around 50 bites on them. He uses the strongest deet we have and the rest of us have hardly any bites, so there must be something sweet about that boy. H is getting the royal African treatment tonight as in, we have put up a mosquito net around his air mattress. He's a bit embarrassed about that and I just drugged him with Benadryl so he can sleep without scratching. It's almost over but continue to pray for us. Thanks and good night on our end.