Tailoring & Youthful Strength

We’re often asked about what is happening in the Sahel right now. Our partner church is working on two more good initiatives right now. One is a program of teaching tailoring to the spouses of future pastors at the Bible school. It’s an effort to better prepare pastors and their families for living in a new place that usually has no support structure or sufficient salary. A partner organization helped the school build a room, provide three foot-pedal sewing machines, and bring in experienced tailors to lead classes. We hope the students will be able to pick up enough experience to make this into a business in the villages that they will serve in when they graduate. It can also provide good connections with the surrounding community to have a skill people are seeking out.

The church is also finding important ways to extend its student hosting center program. In one small town where the church has had a presence for a long time, there was a huge need for a place to stay for Christian students from surrounding villages. In fact there were 51 students who showed up looking for a place to stay at the beginning of this school year.  The church recently moved a small Bible school from this location because the family dormitory was falling down and there were no fields for the students to farm. But there is room here to build some hosting rooms that middle school and high school students can live in during the school year. These cement block houses make a big statement for the care the church has for students (Christian or Muslim who come in need of lodging). And it’s beginning to revive the old compound where the well-worn structures built some 50 years ago by the first missionaries have been slowly fading, giving a more hopeful outlook for the center of the church in this corner of the country.

-- El Padre