The Sahelian

At Sahel Academy, assembly period on Wednesday afternoon is never boring. Sometimes students are in charge of the assembly, sometimes parents talk about their ministry, and every once in a while we play games.

Yesterday in Assembly we played one of Pastor Dave’s extremely wild and wacky games, like Djiboutian Baseball which we played last year at the plateau. This time we played Blind Flamingo Kickball which was completely different, but involved some ridiculous and challenging rules nonetheless and really mixed up traditional kickball.

Rule one: The fielding team has to stand on one leg, hold the other leg with their strong hand, and pickup and throw the ball with their weak hand.

Rule two: The kicking team has to kick and run the bases blindfolded.

As the rules would indicate this game held great potential for embarrassment as standing on one leg the whole time actually proved quite challenging. We divided up into our Field Day teams and played two games at once out on the field: Green vs. Yellow, and Gray vs. Blue. Yellow and Gray were the winners. Both the Secondary and Elementary students got a chance to play. It was a lot of fun for everyone who participated.

Besides having fun during our usual assembly period Pastor Dave actually used these games to teach important life lessons. To help the runner run the bases, the kicking team was allowed to put coaches at each base. The runner needed to know the voice of their coach and listen very carefully to it. Many times the fielding team tried to yell at the runner and confuse them. Pastor Dave talked about how we need to be firmly grounded in the Bible so that we would be able to recognize voices that are trying to lead us astray. When it was my turn to kick I made sure I knew who my coaches were so that I could know whose voice to listen for. In the same way I think it is very important to read the Bible daily and be strongly grounded in God’s Word. Pastor Dave talked about how we need to set our hearts and minds on things above not on earthly things.

Yesterday’s assembly was a good example of how fun and games can be used to teach spiritual truth. Sahel’s integration of spiritual values into every aspect of school is something that I think many students may take for granted but will ultimately be very thankful for.  ~Matt

 The masquerade was a wonderful evening of elegance and relaxation. Considering that it was placed right before a couple of very busy weeks, Student Council did an amazing job. They worked incredibly hard to bring together a wonderful banquet. There was good food, an amusing raffle and hard to beat dancing. The grassy area was decorated with Christmas lights, glittering masks and purple, black and blue sashes. The atmosphere was comfortable, yet very sophisticated with the aroma of pasta primavera, lasagna and spaghetti with meat sauce floating in the air. Everyone started out by socializing and checking out each other’s creative masks. We all then sat down for a delicious Italian buffet. As we were eating, a raffle was held that required the ‘winner’ to do something crazy to get the prize. After supper was over, you could either watch Beauty and The Beast or learn the Waltz and Two-step. The evening ended with laughter and I would say it was a completely successful evening! ~Jessica

Eagle’s Nest dorm went camping on Saturday to the river with the Winsors who were there to replace the Smiths while they were on their weekend off. Mr. Winsor worked on setting up the campsite for so long just to make it fun for us. I personally found it interesting because I’ve never camped before or slept in a tent. When we got there Mr. Winsor gave us some rules and then we started unloading the supplies from the cars. We girls slept in the biggest tent. After setting up, Tam and John got out their guitars and played some songs while the rest of us sang along. Soon after that, we ate hot dogs and pasta salad for supper and Mi-Yeon’s birthday cake for dessert. When we were all done filling our empty stomachs we had devotions and more singing.

Mr. Winsor, who is a great planner, had a game for us to play. The game went like this. The person on the front line was allowed to have their eyes open and hold a flashlight. All the other people had to have their eyes closed and follow the lead of the person with the flashlight. It was terrifying for all of us with our eyes closed, but we had to trust the lead. Sadly, I got a thorn on the back of my heel, so I couldn’t go on. It was good because we learned to trust each other and work together to reach our finish point.

At night we had the camp fire set up and the secondary students got to stay up chatting for a long time. The next day we had a simple Sunday devotional in the morning and then we went on the pirogue to experience the river. Before lunch we also went hiking. Looking down from the cliff onto the river was such a beautiful sight, and once again I saw the amazing creation of God in a little country called Niger that not many people know about. ~Esther

Adam’s perspective:

This Saturday, November 3rd, was a busy day for many people. While several missionaries and a few national artisans tried to sell things outside, the student council ran a 50’s style diner in the dining hall with hot pancakes and coffee.

Inside 1000 cfa could buy you all the pancakes you could eat and coffee or hot chocolate to wash it all down. Meanwhile, oldies music played in the background creating a fun atmosphere. Another attraction was the Lego building competition where people of all ages had a chance to compete in constructing first a space ship then a land vehicle much fun was had.

Outside a horde of potential buyers swarmed around the tables rented out by the senior class which also had a table of its own where they sold donated. Many other people came hoping to empty their cluttered closets and earn a little money in the process.

Overall it was a fun-filled morning where almost everybody found something to do. Both student council and the senior class made a decent profit to help fund more fun events later on in the year.

Jonathan’s perspective:

It’s Saturday morning. The seniors have all helped set up the scene for their first annual garage sale. It is almost 8:30. Miss Carriger, Jonathan, Adam and Matt are frantically pricing last minute items, setting up the items and making their senior table ready with all the stuff on it. Thirty minutes later, the stuff is ready to be sold. All four of these hard-working people are finally done and are eagerly waiting for the series of fortunate events to begin. Meanwhile, Student Council is preparing for a pancake breakfast at which they hope to make some profit too.

 It is finally 8:30!! The distant car sounds can be heard over the horizon. Customers are arriving. The seniors and StuCo are going to make some profit today. Artisans are coming down the dirt sodden road to sell their jewelry and weaponry in hope to gain something out of what they have skillfully made.

The dining hall is decorated with records hanging on the wall. You could hear the 70’s-music, the noise and activity from outside as people gathered around tables, chatting and getting caught up with each other. The music and the atmosphere were now becoming one harmony, both inside and out. It is a great gathering as many people from outside the community have come to join in the fun and interact. People from different cultures and ethnic backgrounds are interacting; exotic clothes and flamboyant dresses are clashing and blending together as we speak-literally!! The many voices that are heard sound like one piece of music blending together, each piece a part of the grand design that God has created.

The goodies were numerous. Ranging from freebies to Christmas ornaments, to artisan stuff to clothes-you name it- we probably had it! Many people came by to every stand and found a thing or two that they wanted. Some of the more African people bartered and we reduced the cost to make their day.

Chantelle’s perspective:

On Saturday the senior class and Student Council held a ‘double-whammy’ fundraiser. The seniors had a garage sale, where they sold donated items and rented tables for other people to sell stuff. They had creatively named it ‘A Saturday of Fortunate Events’. Student Council had a pancake breakfast with a 60’s twist. They decorated the inside of the Dining Hall as a 60’s diner called the Bee-Bop Pancake Shop. The StuCo members dressed like they were from the 60’s era with poodle skirts for the girls, and slicked-back hair for the guys!

I saw the from a very different perspective than most Sahel students. With my mom helping StuCo and my dad doing other stuff, I was the one responsible for our 6 garage sale tables. We were finally selling TONS of our old junk! When the sale started, there were very few people wandering around. Things were fairly easy, and I sold some things. As the hours passed however, I began to feel like I was running the Grande Marche single-handedly. There were so many people coming to buy our stuff, and I was feeling very overwhelmed! One small problem was change. There never seemed to be enough change around, and at least twice someone had to get change from elsewhere. There was also some confusion over purchased items. Some people bought things and thought that I would remember what they had purchased, and they could leave them sitting nearby. With so many people, and so much to sell, I didn’t remember for a few people. I accidentally sold something that someone else had reserved (but thankfully hadn’t paid for). I almost did this twice, but someone corrected me before I made the same mistake. It was very embarrassing.

I hadn’t eaten breakfast and as all this was going on, I was getting hungrier and hungrier. It was past 10 am before I was able to eat any of the pancakes that were being sold. Mr. Gillespie brought me something to eat when the crowed had thinned a bit. When you’ve waited that long for breakfast, it really tastes GOOD! By noon people were leaving, and we began to clear up and consolidate all the items that we hadn’t sold. It was incredible how much we had gotten rid of and along with that, the amount of money we made! Although parts of the morning were stressful for me, it was a very productive morning.

On October 29, 2007, six people were baptized before the missionary community. Everyone looked a little nervous, maybe a little cautious, All I can do is to tell my side of the story. Every since I was in pre-school (and before), I have been raised in a Christian home. I was expected to love Jesus and follow Him. I had no problem with that. In fact, I liked it a lot. As I matured in my Christianity, conviction and realization surrounded me as I dug deeper into how to really live my normal day-to-day life for Him. I knew I needed to be baptized - it’s commanded - and the longer I put it off, the more convicted I felt. As I was being dunked under that cleansing water, I was more convinced that I was saved through God’s grace. I now feel like I don’t have to worry about my relationship with God. I believe that before I was baptized, I had already given my life to God, and I was His. But now, after being baptized, everyone knows it - and that brings glory to God. ~Jessica

God’s Girls is a club for girls in 3^rd- 6^th grade. Every Thursday we meet after school. We usually start with a snack, say a prayer, and then study the Bible. Right now we are studying about Heaven. We also memorize verses, and sometimes play games to help us know them even better. Our time ends with a craft or game with Rianna or Miss Tiffany. I’m looking forward to God’s Girls this year. ~Moriah and Alicia

5^th and 6^th graders had a chameleon - for a day. When we went to P.E., Aunt Cathy, who is our teacher in P.E., had found it. Cody Bliss was the one who took it back to our class. We put it in a small cage until Mrs. B. gave us a better and bigger one that was made of mosquito netting. In the afternoon we gave it a lot of grasshoppers to eat and put them in its cage. When we got to it next morning though, it was laying in its cage dead. Right before recess we took it out and buried it in a grave behind the new elementary building. It lies there now.

Faithful Prayer Supporters, I’m sending you this special update which includes a letter from a missionary family here in Niger. It mentions a major concern of ours that we ask you to pray about tonight as you meet together and then this week as you think about us. Thank you.

 "Whenever you create a file or install a new program on the computer you want to make a backup copy of whatever it is.  Then in case the original copy gets corrupted or deleted,  you haven’t lost all your work.  In a war, the troops on the front line need plenty of support and backup to maintain their momentum.  Without adequate transportation facilities, doctors, air support, food, water, and ammunition, the army cannot do its job. Planning ahead and working together as a team are essential if the war effort is to succeed. Likewise,  any country needs a good infrastructure to maintain a certain standard of living.  Roads, airports, electric grids, water and telephone lines, sewers, schools, postal systems, offices, churches, and manufacturing plants are all essential to our way of life.  But what if all these backup systems were pulled out from under us and we had little support to continue living our lives the way we always have?" (Written in 2002)

 

We have often said that if it were not for the support of Sahel Academy, we would not be able to continue our work in Tera.  That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but we certainly would not be able to continue with the same amount of effectiveness.  We also look at how well Daniel and Suzanne are doing and know it is in part because of the partnership we have enjoyed with Sahel Academy.

Because we are 100% behind Sahel Academy and their mission, we come to you with two very urgent prayer requests.  By mid-January (or before!) we need to have a high school math teacher (or two) and a principal (grades K-12).  It would be ideal if the principal were also familiar with the accreditation process for ACSI and MSA, but we won’t be too picky at this point!  We need somebody to fill each of these positions until early June. 

Our high school math teacher came to do a year and will be finishing 3 1/2 years in December!  So, a warning comes attached to this plea: You may like it well enough to stay!  He extended another 1/2 year this year because no math teacher was in the pipeline for the fall, but he needs to be back in England in December.  Our principal has finished a four-year term and is on a much-deserved home assignment in Australia.  She will be back for the beginning of the school year in August 2008.

Please pray for these positions to be filled.  Our teaching staff is already over-extended and cannot take on any more classes.  Our director is trying to do his job, the principal’s job, and keep the school moving forward in the accreditation process and has more to do than one man can possibly ever get done.  Some of the teachers have taken on extra responsibilities to try to lighten his load.

Please think about filling one of these positions.  If you are interested, contact SIM directly through their website (www.sim.org), write to them at  Box 7900, Charlotte, NC  28241, or call them at 1-800-521-6449 or 1-704-588-4300.  We’d love it if you were able to partner with us in reaching the Songhai.

It is also possible to come to Sahel Academy under EBM (www.ebm.org) or SIL (www.sil.org).  If that were to be your preference, contact them through their websites.

Thanks so much for your prayers for these urgent needs.

Love,

Nancy and John DeValve (and Suzanne who needs a math teacher!)

Maybe you are God’s answer to this prayer. If you need more information, please visit the school website at www.sahelacademy.com.

The Ayorou trip was a very interesting outreach trip where a group of us went to a small town to clean up a clinic for the people living in that town. When we got to Ayorou, we went to Marc’s house where the guys were staying. Then we got out of the school van and went to visit the clinic that we were going to clean, and paint.

Arriving at the clinic we got a warm welcome from the people who ran it. We went inside the clinic and looked at what we were going to be dealing with. What I observed was a shock. It was not a place I would want to go to if there was something wrong with me. The place smelled, it was dirty, there was bat manure on the wall, and spider webs everywhere. We had a lot of work to do.

The next day we started our work. We thoroughly cleared the inside of the clinic. We swept the floor, and then washed everything in all the rooms. We were in different groups, some washing one room that wasn’t going to be painted, some cleaning the waiting rooms and some cleaning other rooms.

After cleaning everything, we painted the rooms of the clinic. When we were finished, the place was clean. We all had fun, we enjoyed helping people have a good clean clinic to go to. I was very happy that I could go and serve the people of Ayorou, and also that the Lord had given me this opportunity to go and serve. I have come to realize that there are a lot of people that don’t have as much as I do. I have come to realize more that it’s not about doing what I want, but about how I can help.  ~Antony

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