Brava Cape Verde, Island of the Brave.

     Brava, Island of the Brave. This quaint little island received its distinguished name from the hardtack sailors/Bravians, who once whaled in its waters. I think Brava has earned its name for another reason, the first evangelical missionary to Cape Verde, Jon Dios, was a Bravian and established the first congregation on the island of Brava. The church Jon established through his dedication to Christ call even in the face of fierce persecution, still stands in Brava’s capital, Nova Sintra. Jon’s bravery has brought hundreds of Cape Verdeans to the truth and cleared the path for future believers. The congregation Jon founded no longer meets in the building built in 1908 which was converted to a museum, now they meet in a newer building at the center of town.

      Brava is out of the way and seldom visited by the tourist that flood the more popular Islands in the summer months. It retains a homey feel mainly due to the small population (8000).  It has another title, “island of flowers.” It is indeed covered in many different varieties of flowers, but especially orange lantana, which means, many butterflies flitted about among the shrubs. There are two Nazarene Churches a few Adventist congregations on the island but there are some villages on the outskirt of the island that have no evangelical witness.

     Cachaco is one of these villages. Transport only goes to Cachaco twice a day, we just happened to catch the only yassi heading out there carrying a single high school student home for midday break. As we walked from courtyard to courtyard, we followed up on a lead that there were some Adventist in the area. “Adventist?” “No, no Catholic, only catholic here.” Finally one person said no but then changed her mind and pointed down a hill. This was a majestic walk down through fields of corn lined with lantana by the road sides. At the start of our walk we passed two very old women puttering about their porch they smiled and greeted “Bom Tarde” we smiled and waved back. At the end of the road we asked again, “Adventist?” “No, No there are only Catholic.”  We leisurely made are way back towards where the yassi was parked; he would not be going back to town for another hour. As we passed back by the old ladies they invited us to come up on their porch out of the sun… this is what I love about Cape Verde and West Africa, you don’t have to know them, you don’t have to have a purpose, you don’t even have to speak the same language, you can just come into their courtyard, sit and enjoy the shade with them. As we sat Rita commented on the heat of the day, and fumbled through a few sentence in Spanish maybe. The women laugh and their wrinkled tan faces beamed at us. Rita asked if they knew of any Adventist in the area and one of the ladies smiled broadly and motioned to herself and made some joke about her old catholic friend beside her not knowing the way. The two women laughed at her joke, you could plainly see decades of friendship were shared between them. We found her, the one old woman brave enough to embrace a religion other than her neighbors. That village was so full of beauty and peace, I pray the Adventist and Nazarene established on the island do not forget little Cachaco. I pray they continue to bring the truth to these furthest villages until they have their own congregation to stand as a witness to G0ds kingdom.

Fogo Cape Verde. Island of fire!

     Fogo means fire. Why name an island fire? Because it’s an active volcano! It last erupted in 1995 and the hardened lava flows are present all over the island. Before heading to the island we were told that some time the island rumbles and shakes because of the still active volcano, “but of course not when there are visiting Americans,” laughed our friend in jest. There is a saying among the islands, if someone is acting strange they will say, “are you from Fogo?” basically “are you crazy?” I don’t know why the saying originated, some say it is because the people on Fogo are eccentric, I think it is because the Island is an active volcano, why are there 40,000+ people living there! Rumbling and dooms day aside, Fogo is beautiful and quaint. There are sweet little houses all around the almost perfect circle of the island. Every house seemed covered in some sort of flowering something; all had potted plants on the patios. Rita and I viewed the coffee plants with the green berries not ripe yet, and we sampled some Fogo coffee in one of the diners. Rita became an instant attic and began demanding coffee almost before we could seat ourselves at every restaurant (exaggeration). Having heard early on that you can hike to the volcano mouth, Rita and I began to train for the excursion. As we visited the other islands, whenever we happened to be taking the stairs or walking up a bit of an incline, we’d turn to each other and shout Fogo! Despite our elaborate training we did not end up hiking to the mouth, it was just too much to be done in our limited schedule. We did however hike the little peak beside the volcano that gave a pretty decent view of the 1995 lava flows. This venture was enough to prove our inadequacy for the actual peak. Walking up a volcano is like trying to hike up a pile of black sand. We were both wearing inappropriate hiking shoes as well, my Chaco’s helped zero in keeping the little pebbles and sand from creeping between the sole and my foot. They did a pretty darn good job at holding the pebbles in place once they crept in there. It was worth it though and fun to watch Rita try to bare foot it before realizing the ground was to hot and putting her flip-flops back on. 

      Our last night in Fogo, I awoke with a start, a loud noise, and did the building just rumble? “Rita did you hear that?!” Rita rolled over and sleepily responded, “Someone slammed a door, that’s all.” I was very awake and sitting up in my bed I was incredulous, “that was a loud door.” As I snuggled back into my sheets, two more very loud explosions shook the building. “That was not a door!” Soon Rita and I were hanging over our balcony listening to the Creole chattering of the neighbor’s and watching men running down the streets. I peeked at the clock, 4 am. We eventually decided to go find out what’s up and we followed the crowed and the smell of smoke two blocks down the road. Apparently a propane tank had exploded in a house (one of those small tanks used for cooking). There was smoke billowing out of the windows. The next morning we could see two explosion marks outside the building on the concrete. We never could get the whole story but the important thing is Rita and I did not get consumed by a lava flow.

     Probably my favorite interview was the one we conducted with a Brazilian ministry called Kyros on our way out of Sao Filipe, the capital of Fogo. It was my favorite because not a single sentence was completed in any one language. After greeting, “Bom Tarde!” we quickly run out of our Portuguese vocab. Then we are left with the French and Spanish words that they might know or that might sound similar enough to Portuguese to pass. Last we try English and charades. It sounds something like this, “Mon Ami, (person’s name) told (gesturing towards mouth), us (Gesturing toward each other) about Kyros.” Everyone around the table shakes head in understanding.  Though I don’t know what we communicated verbally it was like one Nazarene pastor said, “culture can separate us but God can unite us.” I felt close to those Brazilian believers who had also left home and normalcy to seek out God’s plan. I don’t always know what is going on around me, or why things happen the way they do, but God does and He orchestrates things for His own purpose.  And He unites His people across culture, denomination and language in beautiful ways.

Santo Antao Cape Verde

“They may have our lady of light but they live in darkness.” –Nazarene Pastor in Sao Vicente.

     In Santo Antao, the landscape is too stunning for words. Around each turn on this mountainous Island is a new demonstration of God’s incomparable beauty.  Catholicism has a long heritage on the Island as the huge statue of Saint Paul towering over the city of Paul (pronounced Pah-ul) attest too. There is a new movement gaining ground in Paul called Rationalism. Don’t be fooled by the name it is new sort of spiritualism a new way to worship spirits.  A Nazarene Pastor in Santo Antao said about Cape Verdeans,“ They are very religious but not followers of Christ.” This Pastor strives to make a distinction between himself and the hundreds of the traditional Cape Verdean “Christians” who follow a nominal Catholic faith or who use the name “Christian” to veil what is really idol and demonic worship,  “I call myself a disciple of Christ.”

     While in Paul we set off to try and discover a small Baptist Congregation we had learned about through our travel. We had been told that the leader of this church spoke English but soon learned from the lack communication that was occurring over the phone that he did not. Never the less, after a few calls back in forth we were met by two young men outside our hotel and invited up into the mountain to visit their church. The mode of transportation was a bush yassi or what we would call, a pickup truck with wood benches in the back. I clutched the wooded bench, digging my fingernail in, as we bumped along  the winding roads of Santo Antao. We thought the church was in Paul where are hotel was located, but minutes ticked by and we were still swerving and climbing high and high into the mountains. When our friend finally stopped there indeed was a small building tucked under a steep cliff with the words “Igreja Baptista” painted across it in a pine green. We stood about a bit trying to communicate with our new friends through the limited English they knew and the limited French and Spanish that we knew. We asked to meet the leader wife (we had heard a false rumor that she spoke English), at their house we met her and their little baby girl. Their house was situated on the edge of a cliff, a little hovel really but it over looked a vast valley and to the left a water fall was flowing from the even steeper cliffs above, gorgeous. How could anyone live here? How does a place like this actually exist? Throughout our travels around Santo Antao, I would periodically exclaim, “Nope! Rita, it’s just too beautiful, it can’t be real.” Despite their unreal surrounding there was a very real since of hopelessness in this small gathering. As we talked with the church leader and his wife (mainly through charades) we learned that the missionary that had founded the church had left a few years earlier and the church was now struggling to survive. Though they continue to meet on Sundays they have no pastor. In the Catholic and Nazarene churches that surround them, there is a strict protocol to follow in order to be ordained as a pastor. The term “lay pastor” is not something understood in Cape Verde, everything is very conventional. It made my heart sad to see two young men very capable of (and actually already) leading their congregation yet feeling helpless and abandoned. As we found in Liberia, Cape Verde already has the godly men and women who have the vision to reach their nations but many simply do not know how to start or that they can do it themselves. Pray that G0d will send vision to the believers in Cape Verde to go out into their own communities and to lead their own mission movement. Ask God to send them teachers and mentors.

Sao Vicente Cape Verde and Jon Dias

Over a three week period, Rita and I took 11 plane rides and 5 ferries to visit 8 of the 9 inhabited islands of Cape Verde. This gave us about two days on each island to conduct interviews and explore the communities of Cape Verde. After our arrival in the capital of Praia Santiago we were soon off to visit the second most inhabited Island Sao Vicente. Compared to Santiago’s rich green appearance and rolling hills, Sao Vicente was rather flat. Mindelo, the capital of Sao Vicente is another picture of little Europe, cobblestones and quaint pubs around every corner. In the center square, (where free wi-fi could be found, crazy), I began to notice the extreme diversity and acceptance among ethnics .There seemed to be no aversion to inner-racial marriage. Throughout the park I noticed many multi ethnic couples. Among the children there seemed to be no cultural clicks either. Perhaps these couples and mixing of ethnics seem particularly striking to me now only because I have been living these 6 months in a rather confined atmosphere. Driving in West Africa we make a game of calling out the white person or Asian person if we happen to see one.

In Sao Vicente, we stayed at the Nazarene Seminary located in Mindelo.  It was at this seminary that we were honored to meet with Steve and Trina SIL translators who are working on Luke-Acts in the Northern Cape Verdean Creole. In Trina and Steve roof top apartment they have many visitors. Trina has been feeding some Spanish Finches since they were little fledglings and now they firmly believe they have a right to their office area. They fly in threw the open window and door steal whatever seeds or crumbs they want, fuss about and chatter at anyone invading their office.  Trina says if she is slow in getting up they will impatiently knock on the window in the mornings.  Trina and Steve have been working with SIL for many years in various West African countries.  They are now working furiously on Luke-Acts trying to complete it before their deadline. Steve and Trina were a wealth of information on Cape Verdean culture. Steve said though Cape Verdeans are very literate the oral traditions are still highly cherished. To begin a Storying session women will stretch a plastic bag between their legs and beat it like a drum. Many of their stories concern moral issues or lessons on adulthood.  

At the seminary we also met the first of many Nazarene pastors in Cape Verde and learned the history of the Nazarene’s on the Islands. Catholicism was brought to the islands with the Portugal settlement in the 1500’s, no evangelical presence could be found on the Island until 1901. In the late 1800’s a young man name Jon Dias traveled from him home island Brava Cape Verde aboard his father’s sailing vessel to Massachusetts USA. In America he learned began to attended a protestant church, accepted the Lord and had a deep desire to return to his home country and share his new faith. In 1901 Jon, still a young man, returned to Brava and began a small mission. Jon mission face fierce persecution from the zealous Catholic community. Multiple times Jon and his new converts were beaten and mobs shouted and tried to disturb the protestant congregation when they met. Still the church grew and by 1916 there were 87 members in the Brava congregation. This church became one of the first organized Nazarene Congregations in 1908. Because of Jon commitment the Nazarene’s today hold a respected place in Cape Verdean society. “If you are Cape Verdean you are either Catholic or a Nazarene” is a statement we heard from more than one Cape Verdean. Though the Nazarene are recognized and are no longer physically persecuted like Dias, they still struggle against the Catholic bias. Today there are more evangelical missions, without the 100 year history that the Nazarene’s have on their side, they are finding it difficult to push through cultural traditions and find the heart of the Cape Verdean. Pray that G0d will not forget the faithfulness of the Nazarene believers and that they will reach into every community in Cape Verde. Pray that G0d will break down the cultural barriers keeping Cape Verdeans from seeing the truth. Pray that other evangelical denominations will be able to push through and make an impact for the Kingdom in Cape Verde. And pray for unity among the believers from each denomination in Cape Verde.

Santiago Cape Verde

     There was a faint rainbow visible from the airplane as we approached the Island of Santiago Cape Verde. Rainbow have become a bit of a theme in our travels, one greeted us as we crossed for the first time into Liberia (our future home, God willing), one made a stunning appearance through the clouds as we hunted for the East Limba deep in the Wala Wala mountains of Sierra Leone, we’ve seen one gracing the sky above the drab Conakry skyline. They always seem to be something of a G0d wink, a reminder of His grace and salvation to every nation. Stepping out of the Praia airport into the capital city of Cape Verde, Rita and I were both clothed in our traditional West African garb, complete with Ponya and head wrap. I have not stepped out of the compound gates in the last 6 months without my legs sufficiently covered, usually by a Ponya, and my head cloaked in a head wrap. Pastor Emanuel smiling was waiting for us at baggage claim. Soon we were catching our first glimpses of Praia; I sat in the back of Emanuel’s car with our backpacks beside me staring out into this new world. Cobble Stone streets and gleaming yellow taxis. Where were the goats crossing the road? Where were the overloaded taxis with junk piled three times taller than the actual car on the roof? And are we the only ones in the city wearing a Ponya? I had a sinking feeling that our plane must have gotten confused and landed in Europe or maybe Brazil; we’re not in West Africa any more Todo.

     Cape Verde has its history in the Portuguese slave trade. Before the Portuguese came to Cape Verde in 1500’s the ten islands had been uninhabited, when the Portugal ceded control of Cape Verde in 1975, the Islands were home to a new and diverse people group the Cape Verdeans. It’s hard to describe what a typical Cape Verdean looks like, many are black owing their ancestry to the Africans who were brought to Cape Verde during the slave trade years but many are lighter skinned resembling more of a Brazilian than a West African. Often people claim an ancestry of both Portuguese and African descent, the Portuguese slave traders often took second African wives on the Islands while they were away from Portugal, so they had two families, one in Portugal and one in Cape Verde.

     Excerpt from Wikipedia: “The majority of the population is creole (mixed African and European descent). A genetic study revealed that the ancestry of the population in Cape Verde is 15.9% African and 84.1% European-Middle Eastern in the male line and more than 90% West African in the female line; counted together the percentage is 57% African and 43% European.”

     This mixing of different ethnic groups created the need for a central language to communicate and thus the development of Kabuverdianu, a Portuguese based creole found on all the Islands. Each Island has a slightly different dialect of the Creole, some having an English, French or Italian influence on the dialect but all are mutually understandable.
So here we are having just left our base country which only has electricity on good days for about 6 hours and we arrive in another West African country that doesn’t look a bit like the West Africa we just left.
We immediately fall in love with our host, Brazilian Baptist Missionaries Elton and Karan and their two kids and Cape Verdean Baptist Pastor Emanuel, his wife Diva and their three kids Bethel, Rachael, and Jael. Emanuel took us to their mission house, a two bedroom apartment that looked straight out of Ikea. Over the next three weeks this apartment became our base and Emanuel and his family our lifeline. You couldn’t imagine a sweeter family.

     It just so happened (*cough* G0d) that Emanuel and an AOG pastor were touring all the Evangelical churches in Santiago the day after our arrival to promote a day or prayer…. Would we like to come with them? YES! So the day after our arrival, we were escorted to many of the established churches in Santiago which was just what we came to do.
The first Pastor we met was a man named Christian; he was leading a Brazilian Baptist church plant just on the out skirts of Praia. Christian’s congregation is the only Evangelical church in his prefect of ten villages. There are 8000 people living in his prefect but sadly there are only 7 believers attending his church right now. He explained how hard it is for a Cape Verdean to leave the traditional faith of Catholicism and accept Christ grace. In Cape Verde 95% of people claim to be Catholic, many are not practicing catholic but most still attended the monthly Icon celebrations. We were told more than once that partying is definitely part of the Cape Verdean culture, all Cape Verdeans love to party. Each month there is a party that really amounts to idol worship of a different catholic icon. Even new evangelical converts find the draw of these parties hard to resist.

There is a strong bias against evangelicals in Cape Verde, a Presbyterian Pastor on Santiago said, “The Catholics say (about our church), ‘it is the devils church if you go I am going to hit you.’ But we don’t give up, we continue to pray and talk about Jesus. We don’t give up, we don’t give up.”
While there is rarely physical persecution in Cape Verde there is a good deal of social persecution coming from devout Catholics and occasionally from the pro-catholic government. Often parents refuse to let their children attend evangelical churches or there is a break in the family over it. Please pray that this ethnically diverse country which seems so peaceful and tolerant in every other way will be more open to the truth of the good news.

Rat Attack! And My Where Abouts.

It’s 5am on a Friday morning, my teammate and I have woken up early to wish a farewell to our teammate and supervisor Rita as she heads off to facilitate medical team in Mali. I can still hear the engine of 4x4 backing out of our gate, but I also hear another rumbling coming from in the kitchen or perhaps a rustling. I slowly swing the door open and flip on the light, yes there is a good bit of noise coming from above our food cabinet. This cabinet is high with about a foot of space between the top and our drop down ceiling. I stare at the top waiting… at this point I am more curious than anything… “How could a little mouse be making such a big racket?” Cue Jaws music. The scratching seems to be getting louder (as well as the Jaw’s theme playing in my head), that’s when I notice the hole in the ceiling just above the cabinet. “Maybe the mouse is still in the attic and the empty space is magnifying the sound.” Jaw’s music starts to recede a little as I comfort myself with this conclusion… but not for long, the music reaches it crescendo as the largest rat I have ever seen in person makes his debut by jumping on to the wall above the cabinet, apparently in an attempt to run back into the ceiling but he failed and hid behind the cabinet. I may have screamed like a little girl, I don’t really have much memory of the horror of those few moments but I do know in short time my teammate, Alex, and I were banging things around the kitchen listening to the monster “scurry” (if that adjective can be used to describes the movements of a 6 inch behemoth) behind all our dish cabinets, around the room. I could tell by Alex’s nonchalant attitude that she believed I was exaggerating the size of the creature, at one point we could hear the thing inside our stove (a favorite hiding place for our little mice friends), Alex suggested we light the stove and sweat it out. Lighting the stove requires reaching all the way inside the stove to light the starter at the back; clearly she was not understanding the vastness of the critter. I persuaded her not to do that and soon we could hear him making his way back towards the food cabinet. Alex froze in fear and exclaimed, “O my Gosh!” as she got her first glimpse of the monster squeezing back through the hole in the ceiling. “I told you! I knew you didn’t believe me!” “No I didn’t,” was her only reply. We stuffed a metal sponge in the hole in the ceiling and went back to bed to stare at the ceiling and imagine the rat laughing in delight at our faces when he made his escape.

The next night was a repeat of the first; somehow the rat was back, sponge still in place, and was having a party behind our cabinets. I grabbed a broom and Alex and I began to bang each cabinet and listen to the beast lumber around the kitchen. This went on for 45 minutes or more, things started getting hot when Alex did succeed in lighting the stove to sweat him out and the rat realized our malicious intent. Finally we got him out of the kitchen and into the more open corridors of our hallway. He made a mad dash for Rita’s Foot Lockers stacked almost to the ceiling. The Rat climbed the tower and began flinging himself towards the ceiling about a foot and half in the air, like a flipping Kangaroo! This was too much to even be horrifying anymore, Alex and I looked at each other in bewilderment and started to chuckle. We eventually got him cornered in the garage hallway and realized neither of us was man enough to do the job. So I ran out to find a real man, our night guard Dawda, I tried to mime that there was a grotesquely large rodents in our house but apparently my charade skills are not up to pare. I don’t think he had a clue what he was in for until we were all screaming as he was bludgeoning the rodents. As the thing lay there twitching around and doing a pretty dramatic job of dying, I could see Dawda trying not to laugh at Alex and my reaction.

As I wiped up the puddle of rat blood with a Clorox wipe, I couldn’t help but contrast this experience with my experience of the last three weeks. Less than a week ago I was walking on white sand beaches, taking pristine taxis around and chatting with P@stors about their work in the beautiful Island country of Cape Verde. This life is crazy. Since I moved to Africa in April of this year, I have been through 8 different countries and used 9 separate currencies.

This is what my schedule has looked like over the past 6 months:

April 17th – South Africa, Jo-burg. Layover.
April 18th-May 18th – Zambia, Lusaka & Base Camp. 40/40/
May 19th - South Africa, Jo-burg. Layover.
May 20th-23rd – Dakar, Senegal. Getting Visa.
May 24th-June 5th- Guinea, Conakry & Kankan. Volunteer team to Kankan.
June 6th-17th – Sierra Leone, Freetown, Bafodia, & Koidu. Research trip.
June 18th-28th, Guinea, Conakry & Forecariah.
July 1st-17th Liberia, Monrovia, Ganta, Voinjama, & Robertsport. Research Trip.
July 18th-19th Guinea, Forecariah & Conakry
July 19th-21st Senegal, Salle. Cluster Meeting.
July 22nd-29th Mali, Bamako. Packing Alex house.
August 1st-12th Guinea, Forecariah & Conakry. VBS with PBT.
August 13th-15th Sierra Leone, Freetown & Bo. Research Trip.
August 16th-31st Guinea, Forecariah.
September 1st-17th Mali, Bamako & Lakamane . Food Distribution.
September 18thh-29th Guinea, Conakry & Forecariah.
September 30th- October 22nd Cape Verde, Santiago, Sao Vicente, Santo Antao, Fogo, Brava, Sal, Boa Vista and Maio. Research Trip.
October 23rd Back in Forecariah with the mice!


If you have had trouble keeping up with where I am in my blogs, I have had trouble keeping up with where I am too. A majority of this travel, except when we went to Cape Verde and Senegal has been done in our 4 x 4 trucks. Our theme song has been, “On the Road again!” for a while now, and I can’t help but belt is out whenever we crank up the engine to the truck. When I took the position with the company I thought I would be helping to facilitate volunteer teams in Mali West Africa but the coup threw a kink in that plan and left my team starting over from the ground up. Some volunteer teams are continuing to come to Mali despite the risk of the ongoing unrest in the area and we are overjoyed by their commitment and courage to bring good news even in adversity. My team will continue to be involved in facilitating teams coming through Mali (thus Rita’s recent trip) but we have been give the amazing opportunity to research and begin new work in three countries that presently have no representatives from our company. It has been some adventure traipsing through each of these countries, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cape Verde trying to assess the “lostness” of each of the people groups. We still have a bit of a road ahead of us before we can settle in (hopefully to Liberia in January) and begin putting ideas, dreams and plans into action in these locations but I can feel the end of this constant motion in the near future. Please Pr@y for my team’s future in West Africa and for G0d’s vision for these nations to become apparent to us.

Over the next few days, I will be updating the blog on mine and Rita’s adventure in Cape Verde as we visited 8 of the 9 inhabited Islands of this beautiful country

Food Distribution in Mali

We are met with shouts and singing. The Greer towered above the rest beating the drum he had slung around his shoulder methodically. They are celebrating because they are hungry and they are about to be fed. Famine was already sweeping across Central Sahel before the coup d’état hit Mali in early March. Last year’s crop failure mixed with the constant political unrest has left many villages in Mali on the brink. Earlier in the year GBR responded with a food ration for the village of Lakemane. This year the rains have been good and there is a promising crop coming in a few weeks but GBR did not forget Lakemane and again offered corn, millet, beans and peanuts to hold them over until the harvest. An older Fulani woman smiled as she thanked us, “We just used the last of the millet from your last visit, we were going to be hungry but God knew.” All over the village people of Lakemane want to show their gratitude to us but we reminded them again and again that we were not bringing them the food it was JC who had remembered them. Lakamane is a blessed village because JC has brought them more than just food to stave their physical hunger. Two women visit Lakamane every week and are working to translate the Good stories into Kassonke so that they might fill their spiritual hunger as well. For the four days of the food distribution we were able to go out with translators and tell them a few stories in the trade language of Bambara. Many people listened to the stories and thanked us for telling them. Many of the older people said it was good that the younger people learn about JC. I pr@y that our Father opens the eyes of the elder in Lakamane to see that this Good New is for them too.