"It’s amazing what we can do with God on our side."
A few weeks ago, eleven students and three staff members headed out to a village called Ayorou, about 3 1/2 hours northeast of Niamey. That night we set up camp; the guys stayed at Mark’s and Parker’s house and the girls at Emily Elliot’s house. Once the tents were all set up, the food was kindly prepared by a couple of the girls and we sat down to a hardy meal of ‘tigea duga hoy’ (peanut sauce and rice). Once we were all moaning because we were so full, we went into a time of all out worship. It was truly powerful. God did a lot of things during that weekend, but the hardest and most rewarding part of the trip was the dispensary.
Our main reason in going to Ayorou was to serve the people there by extensively cleaning and then painting the town’s dispensary- the only means of healthcare for the people in Ayorou and the surrounding villages. I don’t know if you have ever been to a dispensary out in the bush, but to give you the basic gist, it was absolutely DISGUSTING. All of the beds, walls and floors were covered in medicine, blood, bat feces and years and years worth of dirt–not a healthy combination!
We began early in the morning scrubbing everything with a very large amount of soap and bleach. Although this may sound like the easy part of the job, it was incredibly trying for all of us. We were forced to not only go outside of our comfort zones, but we were thrown into work that many people would never want to do. We first swept the ceilings of dust and spiders along with all of their webs. Next we scrubbed the walls with soap and then did a rinse down. After about 2 1/2 hours, many people moved onto painting the walls. We painted the rooms with a boarder of a bright blue (like Smurfs) while the bottom part was painted grey. The waiting room was painted dark brown after the rest of the rooms were done.
While the rest of the group was painting, Jessica and I (Tam) noticed that the diagnosis room where all of the patients were waited on had been neglected. Seeing as no one was planning on doing anything about that room and there weren’t enough paint brushes for everyone to paint, we decided to take on the job of cleaning the blood stained beds and mop the floors. This was the hardest part of the trip for me. Bending over, scrubbing ‘past pain’ off of these beds and clearing the floor of the old needles that had offered a reprieve to some of the anguish that some of these people had felt. I must honestly say, that none of this working was of me or of anyone else on the trip. I had to constantly stop and just lay all of my own inhibitions before God and allow him to work through me because I did not want to go through with what I had come to do; I felt it too hard. Again, I was reminded of God’s great power and how He so much desires for us to call out to Him when we cannot do it on our own.
We really couldn’t have done it on our own, but because of God’s help the transformation was amazing. After our long day of work, we all headed back to the Phillip’s house where a group of us got dinner together and the rest of us were finally able to sit down and relax. It felt absolutely wonderful to take a load off. That night, at dinner we were all a bit hyper from the joy of knowing what we had done. (Paint fumes might have been part of this too, but we won’t worry about that.) That evening we spent some more time singing and thanking God for the night and then we split into groups of guys and girls, Quaker-style, and talked about the different kinds of love-brotherly, romantic and agape love-and how we should apply love to all relationships and more specifically in dating relationships. This time was a good way to end the day, but I think by this time we were all ready to go to sleep.
The next day we walked to a building that is used for Bible study every Sunday. There we worshipped in Zarma and Hausa, and while some of us stayed in for the Bible study, Suzanne and a group of us went out and helped lead a small Sunday school for the kids. They read the story of David and Goliath and colored a picture. This was really neat because we were able to connect with the kids that we otherwise wouldn’t have.
After Bible study we ate lunch, packed up, and headed back to Niamey. Our weekend in Ayorou was a long and trying one, but God truly made it a wonderful one. He gave us the opportunity to reach out and be reminded of how amazing His love–working in and through us– truly is. ~Tamarah