Fun Time in Madagascar

Back in May I made a trip to the island of Madagascar to visit AIM people doing children's ministry. It was my first time to Mada, home of lemurs, fossa, and other weird animals. There are a lot of differences between Madagascar and the rest of Africa, like the architcture, which is more European, the rice paddies, which are more like Southeast Asia, and the people, who are Malagasy from Southeast Asia mixed with African. But as far as attitudes and worldview, it was a lot like Africa.

I visited an AIM couple who live in Mahajanga on the west coast of Mada. Their ministry is in a village 3 hours from town where they rent a room and live for the week, then retreat to the town for the weekend. They are building relationships in the village with a view to starting a church. Besides visiting people, they have a children's club once a week at the local school. I went with them and had a great time singing, telling a story and playing a game with the kids. There were about 80 of them, which made things a little wild, but fun. The club has only just started so the children are very excitable and hard to control. I'm sure over time they will settle down so real relationships and discipling can take place.

That evening I settled into my cot in the corner of the room with a mosquito net around me to protect me mainly from the flying cockroaches. One night the husband had awoken to a back covered with roaches, not an experience I wished to have. I fell asleep, but was awoken by a nip on my big toe. I would have thought it a dream if the rotten creature, a rat, hadn't then run up the edge of the bed towards my head! I had to bat it off with my hand, which upset me more than my bit toe because it meant I had rat cooties on me. Of course I yelped (screamed my head off actually), which woke everyone up. After I got completely tucked back in (moquito net and sheet tight around me, despite the heat) I did eventually fall asleep and made it through the night.

My other animal experience in the village, much more fun, was to pet a tame lemur that belonged to a neighbor. It was really friendly, really cute and very soft. Back in Mahajanga I had another animal experience, of a very different kind. We ate frogs legs in a seaside restaurant. They were really good, although anything breaded and deep fried is going to taste good. The scary part is that they were massively big legs and I was not at all anxious to meet up with a live counterpart to these legs. Yuck.

Other adventures in Madagascar included being schlepped around the town of Antsirabe in a 'pousse pousse', which is French for rickshaw. It's a fun way to see a town and I only felt slightly bad for the poor guy pulling us when we went uphill. He was very, very strong.

It was great to see our people in action with the children... loving them, teaching them, helping to know our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

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I have just returned from a 4 day meeting with AIM people who are working either with children or in AIDS ministries. We do these meetings together because there is so much overlap between the two ministries. There were 26 of us and we met in Nakuru, Kenya, because there is a good partnership there between local Africa Inland Churches and Wheaton Bible Church. I wanted to highlight for people the positives and negatives of working with Western churches. It was inspiring to see the local church leadership really working hard to help children and adults affected by AIDS. We highlighted the issue by visiting a project called "Hope for Life'' where children and fed and sent to school, youth are trained in various skills, caregivers are encouraged and helped with microfinance schemes, and people affected by AIDS are given counseling and helped through home-based care groups. It was great to see the things like clothes and jewelry that the people are making and to see the children sing and recited poems for us.



To help us understand more about AIDS, one of our doctors from Kijabe gave a great presentation about how ARVs work, how mother-to-child transmission can be reduced, and how children infected with AIDS can be cared for. It was some amazing information.



We also had sessions on writing Vision and Strategy Papers and Memoranda of Understanding, two things the mission is wanting from every ministry. We also delved into the issues of short-term liability and child safety policies... topics that aren't much fun but very important. I was exhausted after the meetings were over, but very glad to get everyone together. It seemed people enjoyed the time together and got a lot out of the sessions.