I’m glad that every day isn’t like the days in the picture above – getting a flat tire in the middle of nowhere (literally hours from the closest electric pole or running water down a very bad road); having the car you’re in start on fire; having to wade through the water up to your knees because that’s where the road is and you can’t ride on a motorcycle through it); amd finding these bugs (of which the centipede is the only highly poisonous one) in your room at 1am when you were really wanting to finally hit the sack.
These were just a few of the adventures that met us on my recent PGA trip to Guinea. I could go on and on, talking about how all vehicles were stopped for people to wash their hands in the attempt to finally rid the country of ebola; about being one of the leaders, planners, and organizers of 3 teams visiting 4 people groups in the course of a week and the headaches that that entailed; about being the trainer of 11 people from 7 countries for 2 days; about lacks of running water and electricity; about falling off motorcycles because of the mud; etc., etc., etc.
But no matter what we may have suffered, it’s nothing compared with the sufferings of the people we met . . . people who are very cut off from the outside world, having no running water, electricity, schools, education, health services, medicine. These are people whose sick lay on mats outside the house until they are close to the point of death, at which time they may be taken on the back of a motorcycle over rough roads to the nearest health center, often finding that it’s too late and there’s nothing that can be done anymore. These are people of whom only a very few can read and write in any language. But even worse than that, these are people who have no access to the truth – there is no church in the whole area, no Christian among them, and they have never heard Bible teaching in a language that they can understand.
Was the week among them hard? Yes, but not as hard as their day-to-day existence, nor as hard as life will be for the person who will go, live among them, and tell them the good news for the first time in the history of forever. Could that someone be you?