Into the Jungle!

Bienvenue à l'Hopital de Bongolo! A few day ago, we travelled from Libreville (north), down to the small town of Lebamba, which is about 5 minutes away from the hospital we're visiting. Bongolo was set up by the Christian and Missionary Alliance a long time ago and now it's one of the best hospitals in the country. The really cool thing about it is that they minister to their patients as well as treat their health disorders. There's a training program here for other doctors and nurses from all around Africa to come and get training from America-certified surgeons and nurses. They are also taught how to use ministry in medicine, which is even better. It's absolutely gorgeous too and I think I actually prefer it to Libreville because it's so wild and green out here :) I'm sitting here and I think I hear a monkey outside but I've never really heard one that I can remember, so I'm just going to keep believing that :)

The last couple of days in Libreville have been great too. I met a new girl at church (I now officially have three Gabonese facebook friends!), and she came over the next morning to visit. Her name's Tania, and I have to be honest that I was a little overwhelmed by her at first because she was basically telling me, "okay, I'm going to be in your neighbourhood tomorrow morning, and I'm coming over to visit you at 8am"-- I had known her for five minutes! And plus, I didn't know if that was okay with the missionaries I was living with, especially because it's their home! Anyways, Tania came over and we had a fantastic time together :) She wanted to braid my hair and so she did (she also said it was too "slippery"!) I've since taken it out because it was super super frizzy and it was falling out too.

One of the things that I loved the best about my time with Tania was that we read through part of 1 Corinthians and looked at the spiritual gifts in French together. She read it out to me and I could almost hear all the words in English :) Her Bible is totally falling apart- and there is writing ALL over it... the cover was torn and the binding had threads coming out all over the place. It was very humbling to see how well she knew the word, and yet with so little (i.e., a near- destroyed Bible, no books by Christian authors like Colson, Driscoll, Tozer, Yancy...etc), and here I am waiting to get back to the States to see if I can buy a wide margin ESV where the pages are not so thin that I can still use a pen... sometimes I really love wake up calls like this.