Greetings from Lome, Togo! I can’t believe it’s already been a week since we’ve been on
outreach! Here’s a little recap
from week 1 =)
Things
were pretty busy in our last week in Muizenberg as we were trying to get
everything together for outreach.
Sadly one of our team members transferred to another team making our
already small team of four even smaller with just three: our leader Gerard
Rabo, my friend David Lewis, and myself.
(We miss you Doreen!) But
in the end I think everything worked out
for the best =)
After
a tearful goodbye to Jonah and my other friends, we were off! We were looking forward to all that God
was going to do in and through us this season as we embarked for Togo. We had a bit of an adventure at
the airport in Nigeria with a delayed flight and experiencing some cultural
differences in communication and time management and although it was a bit
frustrating, in the end David and I recognized the blessing that it was in
teaching us to be humble, to surrender our rights of doing things and to
embrace the culture that we were about to enter. We were faced with the challenge to change our way
of thinking in recognizing that the way that they do things here is not wrong, it’s just different, to
not to be so quick to judge but rather to see the beauty in the differences and
to learn from them.
We
were happy to finally arrive in Togo and to find that everyone was so
welcoming. Togo is a beautiful country in both the surroundings and the people
and their culture. As a lover of
nature I was excited to see how lush and green everything was and to see new
plants and animals that I’ve never seen before! As a lover of food, I was excited to try some new things as
well, the food here is a little high in carbs but still delicious—it just means
I’ll really have to practice self control and discipline myself in getting some
exercise too =) As a lover
of people I’ve been so thankful for the relationships that I’ve started
building. It can always be hard to
leave loved ones and friends behind but God
has been so faithful to providing me with family wherever I go and I look
forward to developing meaningful friendships while I’m here as well. I’ve been trying to learn a bit of
French each day too! In the last two
days I learned two sentences!
1. J’aime les chats, mais j’adore les chiens. (I like cats
but I love dogs)
2. Ce matin j’ai vu beaucoup de fourmis; j’avais peur! (I saw many ants this morning, I was
scared!)
Ha, I know these aren’t very useful, but they were fun to
learn nonetheless and the people here appreciate the efforts I’ve made in
learning the language =)
We got to go to a farmer’s market a couple of days ago
too! I’ve been to quite a few
farmers markets in my day but never have I been to one like this before! The streets were lined with people
selling goods filled to the brim and the women were walking around carrying
everything on their heads too! I
was happy to be able to buy some fruit and to find that it was rather cheap
too! We got ten oranges for about
forty cents and a full hand of bananas for about seventy cents! Yay for keeping healthy at an
affordable price =)
So
all in all it’s been a great start to our outreach here in Togo. This week we were able to start
preparing the classroom and do some lesson preparation and we got to meet some
of our students as well! We begin
teaching on Monday, I’m super excited!
That’s all for now, until next time, au revoir!
