The speed of the progress has been truly amazing to me. There has been a large team of people building the walls and working on this phase of the project. This is about where things are at right now. There will be a little break until after the new year and then it will resume again. We still do not have a water line at the site, so one of my activities was filling up barrels of water using the neighbors well. It has been interesting. It looks like it will be pretty expensive to get a water line to the site, due to the remote location. The village will officially expand and include our neighborhood as part of its master plan. This would be when they would extend the main water line. Unfortunately this could be a couple of years away. I got an estimate for the work and the piping and it is around $3000. Much more than we planned in our budget. No worries though I know it will all come into place. In the pictures here you can see the concrete frame I was talking about in my last posting. They will still put more blocks on top of what you see here. Next also is the columns for the veranda. I will need to travel to the capitol city, Dakar next week to buy the rest of the materials. This will include the roofing, electrical, plumbing, tile, and all the finishes. Pray this goes well. Dakar is not a fun place.

Some cool stuff

Well its been a little while, so for a brief update: I got to speak at the Oussouye church this past Sunday. It was a little strange to speak before Christmas but I had a good time with it and felt God gave me something to say. Christmas here was very different for me. I have been busy with the project and with the weather in the high 80s and no sign of Santa I almost forgot about it. They do not give each other gifts, and there are no elves or reindeer or even decorated trees! It was nice. I had dinner and lunch with Marcel and his family, it was really good. I forgot to mention that I have started doing a bible study here at my house. It is every Thursday night, and I run it the same as the kinship meetings we have at UCF. So far we have had two meeting and it has been really encouraging. I am trying to lead worship in French, but there is translation for the teaching. Everyone there is pretty much a new believer too. They two young guys I shared about, Ishmael and Damien are coming out. I wanted to also share that my last outing for evangelism was really cool. I went with Gerard again and Ishmael wanted to come. We prayed with one of Gerards friends; he has been sharing about Christ with this guy for a long time but has been hitting a wall. God gave me a word of knowlege which spoke about something that was keeping him from God. This guy shared that it was true and wanted us to pray God would continue to speak with him and he would have a personal friendship with Jesus. We also got to revisit with a family we prayed with a month ago. The last time we were there God also gave a word that a little girl there was having terrible nightmares. She confirmed it was true and we prayed for her. Well this time she shared how the bad dreams stopped and she was healed of the sickness she had for a long time! God is continually amazing with all He does.

Much Progress

There has been so much progress in the last few days, and it will continue at a rapid pace. Right now the foundation work is complete and the walls start going up tomorrow. The building process is very different here, but simpler. The weather is always warm here so there are no worries about freezing and thawing. The foundation is only a few feet deep. Reinforcing the walls in also different. The structure is basically made as a concrete frame, and the bricks fill in the frame. Pictured here you can see foundation wall which is 2 courses of brick. Next on top, there is a poured, reinforced concrete beam, pictured here with the form in place. The reinforcing sticking up is for the concrete columns of the frame. Also pictured is what it looks like now, with the earth filled in. Walls and more coming soon.

Reinforcing

Well, things seem to continue to go smoothly. Pictured here is the mason from Dakar on the left. He is working on getting the reinforcing bars prepared for the footers. They will be finishing up with the bricks tomorrow as well. I uploaded a video of the brickmaking process to my myspace page. If you are interested in seeing it just click on the link to the right of this page it should be easy to find. I have also had the opportunity to share my faith with some of the brick makers. I got to pray with one and God healed him when he was sick! God is cool. He wants a bible as well. It is cool because these guys dont speak English, so it was a trial for my French. I am still terrible, but I fell like I am getting a little better. They are helping me work on it.

God is cool

I went to a small coastal village on Sunday called Jemboran. I went with a kid who lives there, but is going to school in Oussouye right now. I had a chance to preach at the church there. It was really super cool. God gave me a specific message before I left from Acts 19, and I felt inspired to pray that they would receive the baptism in the Holy Spirit and power. Then He confirmed it. In the scripture passage it says how Paul went to a village and met with some believers and prayed they would get filled with the Spirit; it says there were 12 men. At this church I went to there were exactly12 adults, which God brought to my attention. Also during worship they began to sing and I felt the presence of God strongly; then they all started singing this chorus of a song in English! Very few people in this country even speak English, so it was a big surprise to me. They were the only words I understood, and they were "Come Holy Spirit fill us with your power" It was awesome. I shared the message, and took some questions and got to pray for each person one at a time. God showed me specific prophetic words for each person, and His presence was strong. One woman at the front began to weep and I was not sure what was happening. After we finished praying they had a time for people to share what God did. Many of the people confirmed the prophetic words were from God and specific to what they were going through. The coolest thing though was the womam who was weeping. It turns out, when she was on the ground weeping, she had a vision and Jesus appeared to her and told her not to worry or doubt; and he was healing her! How cool is God? He really impresses me. I hope I get to see more of His stuff. I also hope I do not get in the way of what He wants to do. Please pray for this church. Thank you GOD!

Good momentum

We have over 2500 bricks now. Pictured here is one of three piles of bricks on the site. The pace is good and we should have most of the bricks done by next week. We need 4000 for the building itself, plus a few hundred more for the septic. We are acquiring an excellent mason from Dakar in the north and he should be here soon. We still need a water line to the site, so we can make concrete for the footers. Pray for this to happen soon. I have to add that I was not aware of the magnitude of the miracle God did in securing us the permit. After talking to Marcel again he told me that the paperwork and getting the right people to sign off can take two or more years! He has seen this in the past and had other bad experiences. And here I was impatient when it took longer than a week! Before I didnt understand why he was so excited when we got the paper work done.

The guys from Harlem

I wanted to include a photo of some of the guys who live in Harlem. The training center is in the same neighborhood, only a couple minutes walk from where they live. A couple of them have seen the site and one kid comes there to hang out during the day. The kid in the middle on the bottom is Moussa. I am closest with him and we spend a lot of time talking. He is pretty funny and his English is really quite good. Pray he has an encounter with God.