Vol. 9, No. 4

Hello everyone,

We’re now at the start of a harvest break after 6 weeks of classes at the Dogon Gao Bible School.  Students will take this week off so as to harvest their fields, which are located on the School’s land.  It looks like it will be an excellent harvest for those who had access to fertilizer and we are truly thankful for this good year and the adequate rain that fell.

I’ve certainly needed a break as my days have been constantly programmed.  I teach a class each morning at 7:40 a.m.  Three times a week I meet with the fourth-year students for “Project Management in the Church” and twice a week, I teach the second-year students on “Christian Community Development”.  I prepare my class notes in English, but present to the class in French and my assistant Ayouba translates into Hausa.  It has actually worked pretty well and we’re enjoying the process.  At 12:20 p.m. I teach Introductory English to a combined class of the third-and-fourth year students, but I don’t need Ayouba for them.  In between those two morning classes I try to get everything else done at the school because for four afternoons per week, I supervise groups of students in “practical work”.  Most of our time thus far has been pulling out weeds at the garden site, the school’s soccer field or otherwise trying to improve the school’s grounds.  After that physical work each afternoon, I try to prepare lessons for the next day and attend to my email and correspondence.  It makes for a full day, but one that has a nice balanced routine.

We finally launched the school garden in early September.  The 50 parcels were divided up and students agreed to pay a small fee to rent them.  Then, thanks to a SIM missionary, we obtained improved lettuce, okra, watermelon, green pepper and eggplant seed, which we sold to the students at cost to get things started.  For some, the fact that the lizards and insects ate the emerging seedlings discouraged them and they abandoned gardening (yes, that quickly!), but others asked for more seed and started covering their plots with old mosquito nets and they’re seeing some progress.  In order to deal with the problem, we’re looking at buying some plastic screening and cutting it into sheets attached to sections of re-rod for the students to use whenever they are starting new seeds.  We’ve given our “custom-made” pitchforks a good testing in making garden compost and found them to be quite sturdy with the only problem being the metal handle becomes too slick with sweat after 30 minutes of use on a hot day.  Any ideas for the right product to deal with the problem?  A wood handle isn’t an option at this point !

A church in Bloomington, MN sent some money from their Sunday school classes to be used at Dogon Gao.  It seemed like the right time to finish up our school playground.  The playground started off with a tire swing in 2007and then we added another swing in 2008. Now, in the past 6 weeks, we’ve been able to build a small swing for little kids, a slide and we’re finishing welding a jungle gym.  As we have over 50 kids under the age of 7 years at Dogon Gao (mostly from the students’ families), there’s a big need for this playground.  It really helps keeps the kids occupied and out of trouble when the parents are busy and also gives our pre-school teacher an activity with which to break up her morning classes and to help burn off some kid energy. Of course, our kids benefit too! I’ve attached some photos for you to see.

PRAYER AND PRAISES

1.  Give thanks for a good growing season and a good harvest.  Pray that this year’s harvest, along with the school garden plots will enable our Bible School students to feed their families for this next year.

2. Pray for our family’s well-being, particularly for Aïchatou, who lately hasn’t been very stable.  Pray that she’ll agree to take her medicine again, which helped her last year.

3.  Keep the goat project in your prayers.  We lost 3 little ones in June—two with tetanus.  We’ll soon have some new births again and we pray that the herd’s health and our competence in keeping the kids alive will improve.

4.  Please pray the EERN as a denomination and for its leadership.  Pray that local churches will support the work of the denomination.

In Christ,

Thomas, Aïchatou, Marie, Laurey and Ellie

Hello Everyone,

I’m typing this email on a day when we’ve had almost no electricity for about 15 hours after a big thunderstorm last night.  While it isn’t uncommon for us to lose the lights during storms, we normally don’t go this long without electricity.  On the positive side the rain dumped almost 1 ½ “ on us and though this rainy season is much later than normal, we at the Dogon Gao Bible School have really been blessed with timely and abundant rains.  It appears that we are the exception in Niger this year as grain prices in the markets have gone up as much of Niger’s agricultural lands (only 3.5% is arable) haven’t been so fortunately blessed with rain and the country, as a whole, may have a worse harvest than last year.

Our other challenge has been a diminished internet service for almost 4 weeks, meaning that it has been impossible to download anything larger than 50 kbs (or so) or to send any big document out.  As a result, I haven’t been able to update my anti-virus programs, nor take care of normal communications in a timely manner, although most emails without attachments have been getting through.  This problem has been due to a damaged underwater fiber-optic cable that handles most of West Africa’s internet traffic.  We’re told that a boat from South Africa was sent to fix it and only in the past day have we noticed some improvement in the connection speeds.  Many of us have wasted a lot of time at our computers waiting and hoping that our emails will arrive or be sent out, as we never knew when the internet might be somewhat functioning.  It also affects us psychologically in that “who wants to start a project and not be able to finish it because the internet’s not working?”, so I’ve put a lot of stuff off, thinking that maybe tomorrow the internet will be back to normal and I’ll get the work done more quickly than trying to do it without having a connection.  Of course, 4 weeks of that kind of day-to-day decision making means that I have a lot of important stuff that needs to be done.

My available work time will now drastically decrease as the Bible School returns to its second session this week.  For the first time I’ll actually teach some classes:  Christian community development, project management and English.  I need to totally prepare materials as I just found out last week that I’ll be teaching them.  Language is still an issue, so my assistant, Ayouba, will help translate.  Additionally, I’ll work with the students for 4 afternoons each week on practical projects for the school.  Since it is still rainy season, brick-making is out of the question for another month or so, but we won’t be short of things to accomplish.  We need to prepare the new school garden, as we still haven’t assigned garden plots (we were waiting for the students to return) and the place is overgrown with weeds.  This also involves hauling a lot of compost from the goats to the garden, using a donkey cart.

Recently, I’ve been keeping busy with the goats, fabricating tools and planting trees for the school.  The rainy season brings some new problems for the little goats as they are more susceptible for scours.  Parasites become more common so we de-parasitized all the animals.  We’re almost finished with our billy pen and we’ve planted shade trees in the larger goat pens, which meant that first we had to make sturdy tree-protectors (out of re-bar and old chain-link fence).  We’re also looking at composting and then transporting all of our goat manure to the new school garden, but I’ve discovered that we don’t really have the proper tools to do the job.  So, we’ve been trying to make a sturdy pitchfork to handle the manure, as it is mixed with sorghum stalks and shovels won’t always work.  While we did (suprisingly) find a sturdy short garden pitchfork in Maradi, there are no long-handled 4-tine (or 3 or 5) pitchforks available in the market.  Our first attempt at a pitchfork with #6 smooth re-rod and a wood handle proved too weak for manure, but works well with loose straw and fresh grass, so we can still use it.  Our second attempt involves #10 smooth rod with a round tube steel handle.  If we like this, we’ll make several for the students to use, so that the job of making compost from manure won’t be so dirty.  Here’s a picture of what we’ve done.  As for the other trees, we planted 160 Moringa tress, which have edible leaves in the garden, giving each plot 3 trees (they don’t grow too large, particularly when their leaves are constantly being harvested).  We also planted 12 hardy local fruit trees called “Sahel apple”, as well as two mangoes and two guava trees in the garden.

In our family life, we can report that our dog Patience had 6 puppies and our girls have been fussing over them constantly. Our rabbits should soon give birth, too, so we hope to have a large litter from them as well.  Aïchatou has started to teach Marie and Laurey in the mornings from the Sonlight home school curriculum, since we won’t have a regular school teacher and the daughter of our guardian watches Ellie during those times.  So far, this seems to be going well (after one week), although Laurey (3 ¾ ) doesn’t care for the structure much.  Here’s a picture of our three girls, two with new straw hats from their Uncle Abari.

If anyone is interested in spending some time here in Niger during the winter, we’d be glad to chat with you about it.  We’ll have our teacher’s apartment available, which sleeps 2 comfortably and has everything that we have (TV, internet, bathroom, kitchen, etc).  There’s plenty to do here, including teaching/playing with our kids, so a couple could stay quite busy and Niger will be warmer than wherever you normally are in January—I’ll guarantee it!

PRAYER AND PRAISES

1.  Niger recently had a referendum to extend the President’s term and to make fundamental changes to their constitution.  While everything went peacefully, there is a greater possibility for political unrest and many Western donors are threatening to pull out of Niger, which could result in the loss of hundreds of million dollars of international aid.  Please pray for the situation.

2.  We give thanks for the timely rains and pray that they will last another 3-4 weeks so that the grain will fill out and mature.

3.  Pray for our technical issues:  poor electricity and internet that often delay our work.

4.  Pray for the Fall term at the Bible School so that it goes well for both teachers and students.  Pray for me as I try to teach my first classes with my poor Hausa.

5.  Pray for Aïchatou and the girls as they spend their mornings in school, particularly that Laurey will become an enthusiastic student.

In Christ,

Tom, Aïchatou, Marie-Florence, Laurey and Ellie

Hello Everyone,

We’re in the middle of a very variable rainy season.  We’ve had periods of three or four days with rain and then we’ve had long stretches where it looks like rain, but nothing falls.  Here at the Dogon Gao Bible School we’ve received rain at critical moments, but that certainly isn’t the case for many areas of Niger, where plantings have already failed in some places.  Right now we’ve just received 1 ½” of rain after a week without any, so we’re feeling a bit better.

Our program has been varied too this month. We’re finishing up with the garden and we created 50 6m x 8x plots for students and faculty, plus a larger school plot for teaching and drip irrigation.  We still haven’t assigned the plots yet to the students and staff, but should do so soon, as most people are still working their fields right now and don’t have time for gardening.  Also, we are drawing up some simple rules for the gardens’ operations to ensure that we manage the available water resources correctly.  We also want to guarantee the gardens’ sustainability by charging rents so that we can have available funds for repairs and improvements.  An easy mistake to make in development is to heavily invest in putting in the infrastructure, but assume that the beneficiaries “will figure it out for themselves” how to operate the new system.  If a framework for managing the innovation isn’t undertaken, the project collapses the first time something goes wrong.  My concern is always “will this project sustain itself if the missionary isn’t around?”  To be honest, I never really know the answer, but at least the question is getting raised and we’re thinking about the possibility of a problem.

The rainy season is the time to plant trees in Niger and we’ve placed 160 Moringa trees around the school, but mostly in the fenced-in garden.  Moringa trees aren’t very large, but they produce edible leaves which are great for both people and livestock, among their other attributes.  In fact, I’ve eaten them for years without knowing it as Aïchatou has long prepared a “kopto” salad that our family enjoys.  We’ve tried to plant these trees before at Dogon Gao, but unless they are heavily protected against livestock, they are eaten by the dozens of wandering sheep and goats we have here.  Now that we have our garden fence, we decided to place three trees in each plot (they won’t compete with the vegetables and they won’t grow too tall because of the constant pruning of their leaves).  Thus, every plot renter will easily recoup his rent just in the value of the edible Moringa leaves in his plot.

Since we’ve gotten most aspects of the garden in place, we’re turning our attention back to the goats and the construction of a billy pen.  Since their arrival at the Bible School, the nannies and the billies have been together.  While that’s been OK up to now, we need to separate the billies so that we can control the timing of the births and avoid births in the hot season as well as having too many occur at the same time and running out of pens.  Also, by separating the billies, we’ll be able to permit the Dogon Gao students to bring their female goats into the billies’ pens for breeding.  Right now we’re installed 30 meters of new fence and we’re building three gates:  an interior and an exterior entrance, as well as a door for the goat shelter.  No more kids have been born for a month and it is now time to see if we need to cull some of the females for sterility.  It still will be a few months before we can distribute the first offspring to the students for them to raise.

The next project we’re going to be looking at is helping the Bible School students with small poultry and rabbit production. Our family bought a breeding pair of rabbits and we built a hutch for them and are now awaiting the babies.  As you know rabbits are quite prolific with litters of 10 being very common.  For a Nigerien, that could mean $30 of income in two months time with minimal input costs (assuming the grass/feed they eat is free!)    Poultry have long been present in Niger, but these are almost all free-range animals.  That poses a problem because there are predators about:  from snakes and chicken hawks for the little ones to dogs and thieves for the adults.  Ayouba, my assistant and I are looking at if we can build simple hutches and coops using widely-available re-rod and light angle iron to encourage the students to adopt these small animal husbandry techniques (termites eat anything made of wood, so we won’t use it).   While we have a welder, we want to see if a simple hatchling coop can be built rapidly and cheaply (for less than $5) using a jig for bending the re-rod and then attaching it with fencing wire, plus adding chicken wire, thus allowing these coops to be built where there is no electricity.  These are just ideas and prototypes, but we’ll see what works.  I’ve attached a picture of a traditional chicken coop and the one that we’re basing our “improved design” on, as well as our two rabbits in their new hutch. (Note: the hutch has two levels, so that we can separate the male from the babies and then when the babies are weaned, we can put the breeding pain together again).

I have to laugh at how at this stage in our ministry, it is my years growing up on an Iowa farm that seem to be the most relevant experience I bring to the Bible School.  To be accurate, that’s not entirely true, as my courses in ag econ and development studies reinforce the strategies we are taking now to help lift the students out of a mentality that they are too poor to make simple investments that can improve their lives and therefore strengthen their capacity to support their family and to do ministry.

In family news, all is going pretty well.  We’re still on summer vacation for another month, so Aïchatou stays busy with the girls and doing “mom” things.  Ellie is now 16 months and has an impressive vocabulary and can even string together three- and four- word sentences (really!).  She is likely to be the clown of the family, as she loves to make people smile and has the sunniest disposition amongst us all.  The girls’ school textbooks arrived by Fed Ex and Aïchatou has been reading the Teacher’s Guide in preparation for the fall term.

PRAYER AND PRAISES

1.  Continue to keep the rains in your prayers.  Pray that they will last until September and that they will be adequate for the crops.

2.  Pray for the success of our projects at Dogon Gao:  the gardens, the goats and the moringa trees.  Also pray that God will give us wisdom as we look at making it easier for students to raise rabbits and chickens.

3.  We give thanks for the general health of our family here at Dogon Gao.  We do seem to escape some of the illnesses that befall other missionary families.  Accidents can still happen, though, and Laurey needed 4 stitches in early July after she fell from a hand railing (trying to slide down it) and gashed her head on a step in Zinder at her grandparents’ house.  She’s fine now, but needs to be a bit more cautious in her play.

4.  The Dogon Gao Director’s wife has had to be hospitalized twice this month as she suffers from hypertension and ulcers.  Pray for her recovery and that she can find a place to rest from her illnesses. 

5. Pray for reform at Dogon Gao according to Biblical principles.  Much has to change at this school before our improvements will last.

6.  Keep Niger’s political situation in your prayers as the President has annulled the constitution and will go before voters on August 4 for an unconstitutional third term.  We pray for peace in the country.

In Christ,

Tom, Aïchatou, Marie, Laurey and Ellie

Hello Everyone,

Our goats are finally at Dogon Gao!  Wow, with all of the work involved in getting them here, it seems so anti-climatic now since they came on January 19.  Here’s their picture on the day they arrived, attacking the peanut-hay we placed in their shelter.  We have 25 nannies, 25 young females and three billies. Many of the animals have already been bred, so we can expect some kids to come in the next 3-4 weeks (goats have a 5 month gestational period).

We’ll still need to prepare some birthing pens, but otherwise we seem to have their basic needs met, as we have built their shelter, stocked lots of hay and have engaged a goatherd to taking them grazing each day.  That doesn’t mean we still don’t have a lot of work to do.  We’re finding that 53 goats eat a LOT and we want to correctly feed them with the resources we have available.  A technician from the Maradi Red Goat Center (a project run by the national Ministry of Animal Production) will come once a week to help us with nutrition, health and related management issues.  Also, at our level, our next challenge will be to work out exactly how we’ll distribute the goat offspring to the students and how they’ll “earn” these goats by helping with the project.  Once these goats are given to the students, we need to decide if they will stay with our herd (which means we feed them from our pasture and feedstocks) or if the students must find their own sources of food.  I’m confident we’ll figure this all out, but the decisions to be made are no longer theoretical but real!!

About 10 days ago my new computer finally arrived with our colleague’s parents, who visited them (the Beebouts) in Niamey.  I have a Panasonic Toughbook CF-52, so it looks like it should be able to withstand a lot of abuse.  We don’t want to put it to the test though, so I’m building a small mud-brick office adjacent to our house, where I’ll keep the computer and do all of my work.  This way, I’ll have a bit more peace and there shouldn’t be much risk of the kids getting into my stuff. I’m looking forward to finally having some space where I can work alone and I hope it will help me to be productive.  In the meantime, I was able to recover the majority of my files and programs from the old computer and am pretty close to being back in business.

On the family front, the two older girls are back in school with their teacher, Elizabeth.  Marie has been ill for the past week, but is doing better now.  Ellie currently has a bad cold and is getting her first two teeth in at the same time—here’s her picture.  She’s still crawling, but should soon be trying to walk.  Aïchatou stays busy in the home, taking care of Ellie and trying to sew and bake when she finds the time.

PRAYERS AND PRAISES

1. We give thanks for the arrival of the goats!  We pray that the animals will stay healthy and be quite prolific for the School.  We pray for Pastor Abdou Garba who is in charge of managing the herd for the EERN.
2. We’re getting ready to start the new academic year.  Some of our former students haven’t yet registered because they still haven’t found enough funds to pay for their school fees ($30/year + $20 for books). Pleas pray for them.  Pray that this will be a good year for the Bible School.  Pray that a new teacher will soon be hired to replace one that was dismissed last fall.
3. Give thanks for my new computer and for those who contributed to its purchase.   Pray that it will last a long time and serve my work needs.
4. The Bible School’s advisory committee has put together a very solid budget that reduces the School’s need for support from the EERN denomination. This will allow church funds to be used for other pressing needs, such as hiring evangelists.  In general the EERN and the Bible School are in the best financial shape I’ve seen in my seven years in Niger (January 27, 2002 was the first day I spent in Niger) and we give praise for this.

In Christ,

Tom, Aïchatou, Marie, Laurey and Ellie

December 2008
Vol. 8. No. 7

Hello everyone,

Our family would like to wish you all a Happy New Year 2009! We pray that it will be a year of blessings for you and your family. We're currently in Zinder because ALL (seven) of Aichatou's brothers and sisters are home with all the spouses and children present, too (except one). This is the first time everyone's been together in years, so it is a special time for her family.

We hope that you had a merry Christmas. We spent this Christmas at the Dogon Gao Bible School. Classes have been out since the end of November, but there was still about 40 people (or so) who stayed at the school. We decided to roast two goats and Aichatou fixed a rice and sauce dish and we treated everyone who was there to a nice meal. Several local villagers also came by and they shared in the festivities after our Christmas morning service. Aichatou and I translated the words from 'Go Tell It on the Mountain" in Hausa and we presented the song to the church.

Our family and the volunteer teacher opened presents on Christmas eve and I had fun telling the girls that Santa wouldn't come unless they were good. With Laurey, I had to repeat that message about every 30 minutes and I seriously wondered if Santa shouldn't be informed of her behavior so that he could take the appropriate actions. In the end, Laurey's stocking was as full as everyone else's. Besides the usual toys that the girls received, I and Ayouba built a two-swing swingset for the girls and we placed it so that the other Nigerien kids could use it to.

My work at Dogon Gao has been advancing well. Everything is ready for the goats and we really, really believe that we'll have them in early January. We are expecting to purchase 25 young females and 25 nannies that have already given birth once or twice. This is good as that means we'll have revenue even earlier than we planned since some of the nannies will actually come with their kids and some of the young females may already be pregnant.

January looks to be busy as we get the goats settled in and then we work at getting a garden space fenced in at the Bible School as well as figure out a system of irrigation for the students to use.

PRAYERS AND PRAISES
1. Aichatou's mental health is doing better. We know your prayers have been an important part of her improvement. Please don't forget her in the months to come.

2. We are thankful that we have a new advisory committee for the Bible School that is dong some excellent work and may finally be able to take the school to a higher level of quality. Please pray for a new teacher that the committee will hire to replace a teacher that was dismissed for his un-Biblical behavior.

3. Pray that my new computer will arrive in January with some visitors from the U.S. Pray that I'll be able to get all my data back and that I'll be able to get back in the swing of communications and work as quickly as possible. I'll be upgrading from Windows XP to Vista, so I hope not to have too many problems. I also plan on building a small mud-brick office outside of the home to work from so as to minimize any interference from the family. Thanks to those who contributed to my new computer, which will be very similar to my old one.

4. We received word from the RCA Global Missions that we will not have a home assignment in 2009 because of budget cuts. With the worldwide economy in crisis right now, churches and individuals are cutting their contributions to missions. Pray that the mission will not need to make further cuts in their budget and that we will be able to manage our available resources well.

In Christ,

Tom, Aichatou and the girls

1. We’re thankful for a good rainy and growing season.  Crops will soon be harvested and many Nigerien homes will soon have adequate food supplies.
2. We’re thankful for the arrival of Elizabeth, the girls’ teacher.  Pray that she will be able to adjust to her new life in Niger and that God will use her for the education and ministry of our older girls.  Pray also for her career as she puts her Teaching English as a Foreign Language certification into practice for the first time by teaching the Dogon Gao students.
3. Pray for Aïchatou, as she visits her brother’s family in Lagos, Nigeria for 10 days with her sister Absatou (and baby Ellie). This is her first trip away from the older girls.  Pray for me as I juggle my work responsibilities and care of Marie and Laruey during this time.
4. Pray for the development of practical instruction at Dogon Gao, so that the students will be given life skills in addition to their biblical teachings.
5. Pray for our family and for our home that we will rest secure in God’s purpose for our lives.