Please allow me to vent a little before going on with the Notes today. I am very happy the streets in Yendi are being renovated but there is no method to the madness of how the contractors are blocking the streets to get the work done. Our destination this morning was Bakpaba which is located south of Yendi on the road to Bimbila. One must drive around Robin Hood’s barn to get from the north end of town where we live to the south end. They have diverted two lanes of traffic into a single lane while they are putting up the street lamps and barriers. The center of town is completely blocked off. Ok, I have gotten that out of my system.
After getting out of town it doesn’t take but 15-20 minutes to get to Bakpaba. Everyone was happy when we arrived. The total attendance was 186 today. This is one of the bigger congregations that we work with. The new bench that we took to them came in handy. The children were numerous: 120. Shortly after we arrived we were told that a baby naming ceremony would take place after the close of services; the parents are members at Bakpaba. Kandie leaned over to me saying she wished we had known so she could have brought some baby clothes to give the baby. The church leadership had decided to combine the bible class and sermon time together due to the naming ceremony which worked out just fine. I preached a lesson about looking around the congregation and the community to see what kinds of work needed to be done to bring recognition to Christ and the Church. Several of the men verbalized their appreciation for the lesson at the end of services. They also thanked us for the gifts we brought to the congregation.
The naming ceremony went off very well. Timothy Niligrini was asked to give a short word of exhortation to the parents and audience. I was given the opportunity to give the 2 month old baby boy his English name of Maxwell and pray for him and his family. It is tradition to hold the baby as you pray. Well, Maxwell was what I call a little lug nut; a heavy bodied child. He weighed at least 6 kgs.plus. This is unusual for most of the babies we see at his age. I love holding these little ones! His mom had just fed him so I knew there was a good chance he wouldn’t be upset if I held him. At the end of the ceremony a bowl was passed amongst the audience to collect money and small gifts for the baby. A naming ceremony is the American equivalent to a baby shower.
We were given a large number of yams before we left. They were really nice yams. Later, back at Yendi, we kept 2 of the yams and gave Timothy the rest of them.
Zack, one of the church leaders, had informed Timothy that he had a hog we might be interested in purchasing for the annual seminar that we sponsor in November. Pork is the favorite meat of the Konkomba Tribe and the churches we work with are Konkombas. We went over to Zack’s house to take a look at this hog. I have to say Zack had a good setup for his pigs. Unlike most of the farmers he keeps his hogs penned up and on concrete floors. He had at least 10 pigs in individual pens. The hog he wants to sell is a big 2 year old white boar hog. It will have a lot of meat and it comes with a hefty price tag too but everything has skyrocketed. After talking with Kandie I contracted with Zack to buy the hog in November. Doing it this way if the hog dies we are not out the money but we did give Zack money to buy the rice chaff and flour to feed the hog until the seminar in November. We have learned not to purchase animals up front, then to have them die, which means we eat the loss; no pun intended.
This will wrap up another Lord’s Day. We still have no electricity from the electric company but we thank the Lord for our generator.
Thanks for your prayers and support. We really appreciate it!
In His service,
Stephen and Kandie Taylor
Skeeter says HI too!
