Things You Have

El Padre and Hamidou together in the
CHE graduation pic.

At our recent CHE training, it was encouraging to see a young evangelist taking to heart the idea we hit hard in CHE, use local available resources. Try to work on the problems in front of you with the things you have on hand. “Use the things you have,” has become a bit of a catch phrase for our group of trainees because we’ve highlighted the concept so much. It’s a favorite of Hamidou, who has just graduated from the local Bible school about a year and a half ago. Freshly married, he was sent by the regional church to a village not very far away, but across a seasonal river and down a not so frequently traveled road. The church wasn’t able to secure any land in the large village, and the house they arranged for him to rent fell through. He ended up getting a room in someone else’s compound that was literally the size of a half-bath in the US, at a bottom-of-the-barrel price that he could afford. 

But this brought many problems of having to accommodate all the wishes and traditions of the Muslim family in whose compound they lived. After suffering a lot for the first year there, Hamidou went around to established churches in the region asking for help to buy property. He raised enough to buy a small plot on the edge of the town, and then ended up selling the motorcycle his family had gifted him for his new work, in order to get the supplies to build a mud-brick exterior wall and temporary hut. “Use what you have,” he said with a grimace! Now, he sells cell phone credit and specializes in covering phones with clear plastic to provide protection in order to make ends meet for his family. While he didn’t have the freedom to implement as many health practices in his household in the first year, Hamidou did give us this larger-scale life example of how he is using what he learned in the CHE training. 

Please pray for Hamidou as his wife has been dealing with severe problems with possible stomach ulcers for the past six months. This means that he has been doing a lot more care for their new baby than normal in this culture, but it has also been frightening. A month ago, they had to carry her out of the house limp like a dead person, but got her help at a nearby clinic, and think that they’re finally on the right track for treatment.

-- El Padre