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Mali Trip: Brothers

After lunch, a bunch of us younger people piled onto the back of the motocart and headed out to a local Senoufo village to do an evangelistic meeting. To get an idea of what a motocart looks like, picture the outcome if a Chevy S-10 truck mated with a Honda Shadow motorcycle. It is the bed of a truck attached to the front of a motorcycle creating a dangerous, top heavy (especially with 7ish people and sound equipment crammed in the back), machine that Mamado is driving. Plus, Mamado has only ridden his one speed moped which has two speeds, full out and stopped, so Do tried to drive this large motocart full out or stopped and saw gears as an inconvenience to get it to break neck speeds. The sides of the beds are clamped on, except the side I was leaning against didn’t clamp right, so I had to hold the clamp the whole time to keep it from falling and people careening into the African bush as Do tried to avoid the holes in the dirt roads that had turned into lakes since it was rainy season and me dodging the thorns, briars, and thistles reaching to draw blood from my exposed arm. All in all, it was heaps of fun and a great adventure with only a little blood.

We arrived at the village and set up under the blazing sun with an on looking crowd. They started off with singing and dancing, about 2 hours of it, a message, and then more singing and dancing. Laura told me that a typical evangelistic outreach goes all night long; literally all night long accompanied sometimes with a rice feast. So I was thrilled when she said this outreach will only be about 6 hours long. During the message, Mamado gave the sermon in the local Senoufo dialect and Douda translated it into Bambara, Mali’s trade language. When the dancing started up again after the message, I dutifully and joyfully participated in the dancing circle that was slowly shadowed by the dust cloud the dancer’s feet stirred up. A few laughs echoed from the on looking villagers pointing at the lancky white guy stirring up his own dust, but then I really got into it, although the steps were easy. But my participation encouraged locals to join in.

After I had my fill of dancing and couldn’t keep the sweat from pouring into my eyes, Mamado walked over with two local young men and introduced them to me as two new brothers in the faith! Laura asked each of them what they wanted to do in their own words and each of them stated,

“I want to follow Jesus.”

We all shook hands then Mamado told them that “like a new baby needs food,” pointing to the chubby baby in Laura’s lap sporting an used plastic grocery bag for a diaper, “so does the new Christian.” He continued by telling them, “they need to talk with God through prayer, let God talk to them through His Word (which the Bible is only translated to Genesis 25, so this for right now means Mamado’s preaching that Tom helps him with), and they need to talk with other Christians.” We all shook hands again and they went back to their group of friends smiling. Some more dancing took place and then we packed everything up and headed home. Praise God for these two new brothers!!