Monday, December 31, 2018

Children's Church

Lilian is very passionate about teaching kids. They also seem to enjoy her very much when she spends time with them. During the last Sunday of December, she invited me to teach the kids with her. We use to do this together a couple of years back at our formal Church Redeemer Baptist Church. I did enjoy my time there and could also appreciate the patience needed to take care of children.
One thing about children is that they play and learn at the same time. Some are quite distracted, some are very serious. You need to care for them all at the same time. You also need a couple of guides or assistant teachers to be successful in a typical children's church. Teaching is truly a very noble job and education is our best friend.




Zion Baptist Church Mbessi - New Church Plot

For seven years, our Church has been meeting in the Mbessi sub chief palace. We have been very thankful that God provided this place. It has been a wonderful place whereby many stop and say wait a minute is this a Church? The reason is that there are a couple of masquerade drawings on the front outside wall of the Church. For many Christians, they do not in anyway want to associate with anything of that sort.  However, it is no longer comfortable because the population has grown and the space is no longer enough. God has blessed us to purchase our own piece of land just nearby. It has a very nice view and we are beginning to excavate it and get it ready to build a temporary church house. When we must have had enough money in future, we will then build an appropriate church house on this land. Praise the Lord for providing this Zion hill for us. The men, women and youths came out in their numbers to appreciate God for this land and to begin work on it immediately. Not very long, we discovered that we the humans cannot do the work that machines can do despite the desire. So we had to get a caterpillar to level the land for us.












Monday, December 10, 2018

8th Convocation of the University of Bamenda

8th December 2018 was a wonderful day with mixed feelings for graduates the University of Bamenda. Despite the University organizing the event, students kept getting threats so with the insecurity, this becomes a challenge. However, we were able to brave it and travel to the University that Saturday morning. On the way, the streets were nearly empty but for the several soldiers who were on guard. Early, that morning, the major road leading to the University was blocked but the military came around and opened it. As we drove by to the University, we could see two casualties.
The convocation ceremony didn't begin as early as planned due to such challenges. Not all the graduates showed up for obvious reasons. 
It was a great event and students were encouraged to be ready to face the world and be proactive with solutions to the problems that will demand their expertise. For me in particular it was a good time to celebrate the faithfulness of God over the past few years for leading me successfully through this Postgraduate studies. It has not been very easy taking these courses but it has been very rewarding to see how I can come in to be prepared and go out to serve better. 













Thursday, November 29, 2018

FLEx workshop in Yaounde

During the second week of November, we had a Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx) workshop in the center region bringing together six participants from 3 communities. It was a great time to work with these great guys training them to use FLEx - A dictionary making software that linguist use for their work. Pray for these teams as they will be putting into practice all what they have learned from during this workshop.







ParaTExt workshop

In October, I had the privilege to work with Bible Translators training them on a software application called ParaTExt, this involved setting up their computer and getting the resources that they need to do Bible Translation work. These translators came with various translation drafts and as they learned how to use the software, they were so excited to use it that one participant could hardly go on break. It was so good to see the joy that filled their hearts as they begin to use computers to do their work.










App Builder Workshop

During the week of August 26, I spend time with my colleagues in Yaounde training them on how to build Android Apps. This was very exciting to see the smiles on their faces as little by little, they could build apps on their computers and transfer unto their phones, install and use them. The beautiful part was for those who could understand the language as they really enjoyed especially seeing that they can have the gospel right there on their Android device. These people have some great ideas and questions as to how to go about distributing these apps to those who need them. It was also a time to share from the word of God every morning. We enjoyed sharing the La Red - GEI principles for our morning devotions.