Preaching in chapel

One of the things we get to do here at CBTS is preach in chapel. Chapel here is five mornings a week, Mon-Fri, 7:30-8:00 AM, and is required for all students, faculty, and staff, which means there are usually well over 300 people there. Most days we sing simple worship songs and then hear a short sermon.

On Thursday, I got to preach. I was given the theme of “Self-Examination: Taking the Log Out of Your Own Eye,” and I chose Galatians 6:1-5 as my text (“Brothers and sisters, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you spiritual ones should restore such a person in the Spirit of gentleness, keeping watch on yourselves, lest you also be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens and in this way fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let each one test his own work; then he will keep his boast to himself and not direct it to his neighbor. For each one will have to bear his own load”). At the end of the sermon, I made the following applications to our CBTS community:

1. We should recognize that every member of this community, by virtue of
their faith in Christ, is indwelt by the same Holy Spirit. No one should
feel that they have been catapulted to a higher spiritual plane than anyone else
here at CBTS. The one Spirit has come to each one of us. Let’s
recognize this and celebrate it!
2. With regard to those among us who
fall into some sin and feel their need for God’s grace, we should restore them
through the gentleness that the one Spirit gives us. We should be gentle
in dealing with a struggling brother or sister because we ourselves are open to
the same kinds of temptation. Let’s be humble and gentle in our spiritual
rescue operations.
3. We should look to Christ’s self-giving love—the
love that he demonstrated on the cross (Gal 2:20)—as the pattern of our own
burden-bearing love for one another. We are called to be imitators of the
one who loved beyond all measure. Let’s look to Christ.
4. We
should have the spiritual maturity to realize that we are not “something
special,” that we do not need to promote ourselves and our good works in front
of other people. If we are confident through the Spirit that God will
commend us, we do not need to look for the public praise of others. Let’s
keep quiet about our good deeds in patient expectation of the judgment
day.
5. Finally, we should be confident in the work of the one Spirit
in our lives. We should rejoice and boast to ourselves about the good
fruit the Spirit has enabled us to bear. We should be confident that we
will stand approved before God. Let’s bear the load of our spiritual fruit
joyfully.

In about three weeks from now, Tommy, Charlie, and I will each have a chance to preach in chapel. They’ve given us three days back-to-back, and Tommy has suggested that we all three preach on the same theme. We’ve talked about a couple of themes as possibilities: “The Love of Christ” (my thought) or “Performing the Scriptures” (Tommy’s suggestion). We’re excited about this. Pray for our preparation, and we’ll let you know how it goes.

-Wes, for the team

Our New Neighbors…

So we have had some interesting visits as of late…and they are not by students. Wesley posted a few times back about cows that had been visiting us. Well, they continue to do so to this day, and when I nearly stepped in a “pie” at the bottom of our walkway, I decided that they had worn out their welcome. Yes guys (and gals), it is time to be going. So I walked outside again, mustered all my courage, clapped my hands, and raised my voice somewhat. Nothing happened. One of them (whom I believe is the ringleader) gave me a look of positive defiance, and made clear by his three slow chews that neither he, nor his posse, were going anywhere anytime soon. So I muttered a few threats under my breath, and went back inside. Now you must understand, their horns are excessively large (what on earth do they need them for?!). They are a bit frightening for those of us who have never really stood this close to such creatures. For some of them, think of Pharaoh’s dream in Genesis 41:1-4. For others, think dinosaurs. Or maybe the behemoth in Job. Really. To ensure our safety we have tried to improve some of the relations, but to no avail. The skeletons and the dinosaurs, as of now, are not our friends. So to explain the picture: Pa left us this afternoon (as is his usual practice), but did not leave dinner behind. So what are we to do? Well, what would any reasonable person do whose house was surrounded by Rib-eye, T-Bone and New York Strip? The picture speaks for itself. In case it is unclear, that is our machete in my hand.



-Charlie for the Team

And the Sky, is a Hazy Shade of…Wet Season.

We were hoping to get a picture featuring the beautiful African scenery with the three of us in the foreground and our house in the distant background. However, as is often the case here, the afternoon sky was covered with clouds and filled with rain. There’s no hot water for a shower to provide relief; the water has been out since this morning, and the power’s been out since last night. Candles are a nice effect, though, and I’ve learned that you can live dirty.

Anyway, because of the sudden showers, our umbrellas have become indispensable. They go with us nearly everywhere. Charlie’s already broken one, and I’ve nearly lost mine multiple occasions.

Dinner’s on the table—potatoes, rolls, carrots, and cabbage. It’s actually more than I expected. For some reason, whenever we have hamburgers for lunch, our cook makes extra rolls and deems them a sufficient dinner. Having side dishes with the rolls is a bonus. (This is an anomaly—we’ve been eating great.)

If you think to pray, pray for our spirits. We feel plenty busy now, and we’ll be adding more responsibilities soon. The computer technician is leaving next month, and we’ll be assuming responsibilities of keeping up the computer lab. With short nights and sometimes long classes, we’d appreciate your prayers. It’s a blessing and honor to be here, and we want to serve with zeal, setting our mind on things above. Thank you!

--tg

PS. Sorry the picture quality is poor. We hope to put more up soon. We’ll be sure Charlie’s in some authentic Cameroonian garb.

"A day in the life"

For those of you who have been wondering what a “typical day” here at CBTS looks like, here’s one answer (Wesley’s). (Hopefully Tommy and Charlie will follow this up with their own installments soon.)

5:15 AM My alarm goes off, and I hit the snooze button. It's a bad habit, but waking up early, for someone who has never been a morning person, is something you have to ease into, I think. :)

5:50 AM By now, I’ve showered and shaved and am at my desk in my room. It’s still dark outside, and the house is quiet and very cold. I’ve started trying to read 2 Samuel in Hebrew for the past few mornings, partly in order to keep my Hebrew fresh. My Holladay lexicon is out in front of me, and I’m reading by candlelight because I still haven’t gotten used to the harsh fluorescent lamp on my ceiling (fluorescent is the only kind of electric light we have in our house). Today I make it from verse 13 through verse 18. I’ve also been trying to read something theological before breakfast, and today it was a little of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (which I’ve never read till now). Barth writes like a preacher!

6:50 AM I sit down with Charlie and Tommy to a breakfast of French toast. When we say grace this morning, we pray for Bethlehem Baptist and All Nations Christian Fellowship.

7:20 AM We’re turning the keys to lock the metal-barred door to our house (Ndu and CBTS’ campus have been known to have their share of robberies, so better safe than sorry) and hitting the trail to chapel. From where we live at the edge of campus, it’s about a ten-minute slightly-uphill walk to chapel. The dirt path slopes up past other faculty houses and corn fields. We take care to avoid the cow patties---livestock range freely on campus, sometimes a little too freely as when, earlier this week, we faced some longhorns grazing next to the woodshed between the dirt path and our house and staring at us as we walked carefully past them, brandishing long sticks we picked up on the way.
This morning, on our walk, the sun was shining---a welcome change from all the gray weather we’ve been having during this monsoon season (dry season is just around the corner; we’re bracing ourselves for the clouds of red dust!). It slanted through tall trees on the far edge of campus and fell on the hedges of the gardens next to the corn fields where several women were stooped, weeding. We passed goats eating grass and said “Morning” to several students as we walked past the women’s dormitory and into the main part of campus.

7:30 AM Chapel today was a time of testimonies. Divine, one of my students in his second year of the Diploma program, gave one of the most moving. For the past two years, he has battled Hepatitus B and probably needs a liver transplant but that, sadly, isn’t likely to happen. Divine stood on the chapel stage while the VP of CBTS read his testimony. Divine’s voice is still too weak to read---he’s just recovering from a recent severe bout with bad symptoms. But, thankfully, he is feeling better and is back in class. He’s been doing quite well in my Theology class. His testimony this morning was full of God-centered reflections on the meaning of suffering in the lives of Christians.

8:20 AM Between chapel and my first class, I have a small window of time, so I came back to our house to do some last-minute prep and grab a cup of coffee.

9:10 AM My first class of the day starts now. It’s a course on the book of Acts, for students in the second year of the Certificate in Theology program. Today they---all 50 of them---handed in their first paper. I assigned a one-pager that was supposed to be half summary of Acts chapters 1-4, half personal reflections. After collecting the assignments, I lectured on the opening of Acts 8 and how this represents a hinge moment in the book, when Jesus’ promise in 1:8 that his followers would testify to him beyond Jerusalem---in Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth---begins to be fulfilled as the church is scattered through persecution. Students, as always, were full of questions, and it was a good class.

10:00 AM I joined the faculty and staff in the faculty lounge for a cup of tea. This daily ritual is a good place to connect and hear the latest campus news. This week, the main conversation topic is that the “Dorcas Sisters”---a group of faculty wives---are selling one of their cows. They’ll take it to a butcher in the village who will slaughter it, and faculty will be able to buy beef at discount prices! As I left teatime, I ran into Ngi David, a graduate of CBTS and new pastor in the village of Kakar. Charlie and I met David last summer, and it was wonderful to see him again today and hear an update on how things are going.

10:25 AM I arrive at the main academic building for my second class of the day, Systematic Theology. Today there’s no lecture. I give them a quiz on the attributes of God and give them a reading assignment in preparation for Monday’s lecture when we’ll start looking at the doctrine of the Trinity.

11:20 AM I walk off campus and into the village to the post office to mail a letter home. (Hope you receive it okay, David and Tamara!) Letters par avion usually take 2-3 weeks to reach the States from here.

11:45 AM I’m back at our house starting to grade the stack of papers I picked up in Acts class today. Some of them are disappointing. It looks like a good number of my students have just collected a lot of verses from Acts and reproduced them verbatim for me. Groan! Some of their personal reflections are good, though. Eventually I’m interrupted by the doorbell. My student Randolph pokes his head in and asks if I’d be willing to look over the outline for an exegesis paper he has to submit for Dr. Yong’s Pauline Theology class. I say yes, and he thanks me and invites me to watch the volleyball match students and faculty will be playing in at 4 o’clock today.

12:35 AM Charlie, Tommy, and I sit down for lunch. It’s a salad made from cabbage, orange slices, and mayo with shepherd’s pie---or as Tommy thinks they call it in England, “mash and bangers”---as the main course. Yum! Our cook is so good.

1:20 PM Back to grading papers. I mark them for a while, and then, since it’s Friday and I’m done with classes for the day, I decide to do some pleasure reading. I’ve just started Philip Hallie’s Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There.

2:30 PM I spend most of the rest of the afternoon writing emails to family and friends. When we were in the town of Bamenda a few weeks back (about a six-hour drive from Ndu), we got a cellphone and a USB cable, and we’re able to get online with it. For now, it’s free(!!!), but we’re told that could change without warning, so we’re keeping our ears to the ground for news.

4:10 PM I leave the house, and it’s still beautiful outside. Dry season must be coming quickly. The sky is blue, the sun is shining, and for once, I don’t take an umbrella with me. I roll up my sleeves and enjoy the warm weather as I walk up to our office. When I get there, I see Charlie who’s been there for a while meeting with his Hebrew students to help them with their assignments. I hear him explaining how you make masculine Hebrew words plural to his student Jonathan. I record some grades in my Systematic Theology grade book, grab some textbooks I’ll need for class prep over the weekend, and head down to the volleyball courts to watch the match.

4:35 PM I talk for a while with Paul, the CBTS student body president, while I watch the game. Paul is 46 years old and has three kids. He’s served as a pastor in the Cameroon Baptist Convention for many years and has come back to school for theological training. He’s a sharp guy, and he tells me he spoke with Charlie earlier this week to invite the three of us over to his house for dinner this coming Tuesday night---a dinner of “country chop” (=Cameroonian food), as they say in pidgin.

5:00 PM I head home and meet up with Charlie back at the house. Tommy is up at the Yongs’ hanging out with Sam.

6:00 PM Our friend Emmanuel the tailor stops by. He has brought the shirts that I asked him to make for me. Last Sunday, Charlie and I went with him to the “big market” in the village where I picked out some very African-looking fabric and asked Emma to make me a long-sleeve and short-sleeve shirt. He gets here on Friday, I try the shirts on, and they look great. “I’ll stop by on Sunday,” Emma says as he leaves. He likes coming over once a week to visit us, and we’re glad to have him.
Soon we’ll make dinner and then maybe watch a movie. Another week---our fourth here at CBTS---has come and gone. The weekend will be a nice break. We’ll probably grade papers, play with the Yong kids, have students over to visit, and go to church on Sunday. Then it will be time to start all over on Monday. It’s a good life here. Thanks for reading this. More from Tommy and Shep soon, I hope!

-Wes

Rooster--it's what's for dinner

On Saturday, we bid adieu to our chicken. The event was a bit anti-climactic; no wild squawking or headless running. As you can see, Charlie did a great job of holding the talons down while Pa, our cook, delivered the coup de grace. Living with a rooster for a week was worth it: his room smells awful, but the meal was delicious (as I hope you can tell from the picture). (We discovered that natural, non-genetically enhanced chickens have far less meat on their bones than what you find in the States.)

--tg

A really good night!

Well, the best night of my time here in Cameroon so far is coming to an end, so I thought I should blog about it. Let me start at about 3:30 in the afternoon…

After a nice lunch at the Yongs’ house (Linda wants to have each of us over for a meal to get to know us individually, to prove to us, she said, that she doesn’t think we’re triplets!), I decided to go up to the office the three of us share at the campus’s main academic building. I needed to prepare for tomorrow’s (Friday’s) classes, Acts and Systematic Theology, and also for tonight’s class. Yep, I now have a night class. Because my New Testament Introduction students are in two separate programs---the Diploma program and the Bachelor of Theology degree program---their schedules are difficult to coordinate. We talked again about it earlier this week and decided the only times we could all be together are Tuesdays at 1:30 pm and Thursday evenings from 5 to 7 pm. So tonight was our first night class.

I got to the office around 3:45, and at 4:00 there was a soft knock on my door. It was my student Patrick (not his real name). He had come not to talk about assignments but instead just to share more about his life with me, which made me happy. I started asking about his family and found out he’s married and has eight kids. I wanted to laugh and cry all at once when he said, “I haven’t talked to my wife in a long time. She lives just past the village of Ndop [about two and a half to three hours from Ndu and CBTS], and I haven’t called her in a while because, honestly, I know that when I talk to her, she will start complaining. She always complains. She’ll start telling me about all the problems at home with our compound [that’s what Cameroonians call the multiple houses that are near each other and belong to the extended family].” I asked him if his wife is a believer, and he replied, “Yes, she was in Christ before me.” And that started his testimony…

Now you need to know that Patrick is one of my best students. He sits in the back of the classroom for both of my classes that he’s in (Missions and NT Intro). His brow is always furrowed in intense concentration. He’s always jotting notes. And he usually asks perceptive, interesting questions. He’s also very gentle; in the few one on one interactions I’ve had with him, he’s never failed to be kind, gracious, deferential.

So I was surprised when he told me about how bad of a husband he was for years and years. It turns out that he was baptized in 1969, but he now knows he was not genuinely converted at the time. He told me today that from 1969 to 2000, he lived like a pagan. His wife, he said, used to sleep with her back facing towards him because he would come into their house at all hours of the night smelling like wine and cigarette smoke. He was a chain smoker and an alcoholic. Serially unfaithful to his wife, he loved all the sex, booze, and cigarettes he could get his hands on, he told me… until one day when a Christian (now pursuing a Masters degree in Nigeria) shared the gospel with him. It was at that point that his life started to change.

Patrick vividly remembers waking up early one morning and sitting in a chair next to the front door of his house preparing to go to the bar he always frequented early in the morning. “I would go there without taking food [Cameroonians refer to ‘taking’ food or drink, instead of ‘eating,’ a lot of the time], and I knew a secret way to unlock the front door without the owner knowing about it so I could drink all the wine I wanted before the day even started.” But Patrick said this particular morning, he felt glued to his chair. He kept thinking about what that Christian had shared with him. “I feel now,” he said to me, “that it was the power of the Holy Spirit that kept me in that chair and didn’t let me go out that morning to the bar. Instead, I just picked up a Bible that that Christian had given me, and I started reading. I don’t remember what I read, but it changed my life. I became a believer, and I haven’t committed adultery or gone back to the bottle since that time.” Praise the Lord! His wife, he said, noticed the change and asked him what had happened. Their marriage hasn’t been perfect since then (obviously!), but he said they are both so glad that they share the same faith now. (Patrick did admit to me, though, that it took some arguing with his wife for her to finally, begrudgingly let him go to seminary. He felt God calling him to CBTS when he took a summer course in 2001 with Tom Steller and Travis and Susan Myers from Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis.)

A few minutes after hearing this testimony, I walked into my first NT Intro night class. There seemed to be some excitement in the air, probably because this was new and fresh---getting to have a two-hour class at night. I started lecturing on the Gospel of Mark (we spent Tuesday talking about Mark, and we’ll wrap up our discussion of it next Tuesday), and I’m not sure what happened, but everyone, including me, just got really, really excited about it. I told them about how Jesus’ partial healing of the blind man from Bethsaida (Mark 8:22-26) was a picture of the disciples’ lack of understanding---their partial seeing (8:27-30; cf. 6:51-52; 8:14-21)---and then from there we talked about Jesus’ threefold prediction of his suffering (8:31; 9:30-32; 10:32-34) and about how we, all of us in the classroom tonight, seriously misunderstand Jesus’ call to discipleship, as the twelve did, if we treat it as anything less than a call to suffer with Jesus on the road that leads to the cross. I can’t explain it, but as I was lecturing, I felt an unusual joy and spiritual energy and passion and anointing from God. At one point, my class started roaring with laughter, and I shouted at them, smiling, pretending to be annoyed, “What??!!!” They responded, also smiling, “We need to have an altar call!!”

All night long their questions were penetrating, theologically profound, exegetically sensitive, and spiritually rigorous. I loved every minute of it. By the time 7:00 rolled around, we were all ready to keep going. As soon as I dismissed them, one student who’s become a close friend and is near the top of the class jumped up and grabbed my hand. “This is the best class I’ve had in my seminary experience so far,” he said gratefully, beaming at me.

Now, I know that not every class can be this way. I’m sure that by next week, I could be posting a much more somber report. But I am grateful for how God worked tonight and how he used this large group of eager, inquisitive, thoughtful students to increase my passion for teaching the Word and to assure me that, yes, this decision to be involved with Third World theological education this year is one that is bearing fruit. I’m glad God doesn’t hide all the fruit of our ministries from us. It is good when he lets us taste some of it.

-Wes

A Saturday in Cameroon

Contrary to the suspicions of some, I am here at CBTS, teaching with Wes and Shep. There’s much to write about my past month in Cameroon (a month already—incredibly), but I’m hoping a glimpse into a day here will be more enjoyable.

Usually, I wake up between four and five, but being Saturday, I slept in until six. After finally resolving to leave the warmth of my bed, I slipped on my iPod, made my usual morning cup of tea, and returned to my room to read. A bit later, I slipped on my tennis shoes and crept out the door for a run. It was drizzling outside—almost an enveloping mist—and the sky was gray. I’ve found that the farther I run from the campus, the wider the eyes of the village’s children as I run through. Some smile and return my wave, some stare blankly, and some laugh while running away, as if from a foreign monster.

On my way back home, I stopped to help three young boys, around ten years old. They were pushing a cart loaded with sacks of beans to the weekly “big market.” The path was muddy, rocky, and at a significant decline, and the cart probably weighed more than the three of them combined. I helped them down the hill and helped them the rest of the way to market. I had no idea it would become the town’s morning spectacle. I might as well have been nude: when we dropped a couple bags off with one of the boy’s aunt, the porch was immediately filled with the woman’s family and friends, watching the white man lug the fifty-pound sacks in and out of the house. As they joked and laughed at me while I hauled the cart away with the boys, I tried to join the comedic circle by saying, “I’m Cameroonian with white skin!” They laughed, but who knows if it’s because they understood. (The language difficulties have been all too apparent in the classroom.) Then, when we entered the market, the embankment above the path filled with people hooting and hollering. I was a little embarrassed but also enjoyed stepping out of the American stereotype. Maybe it was culturally inappropriate…I saw one of my students on the way to the market, and he seemed to appreciate it!

As I walked back to campus, I passed by the village health center and saw one of my students. He was there with his cousin, also a student of mine. I entered the ward, which well-deserved the cold, sterile title "ward." It was a small, depressing room that looked of the 1950's. Ten beds altogether, I think, each separated by only a couple feet. When I entered, there was an old, fragile looking man on my left being fed by a sister, daughter, or friend. The student was lying in bed, suffering from gastro-intestinal problems. He had been there since Thursday, and may be able to leave on Monday. I spoke briefly with him and his supporters (the other student, his cousin, and his sister, another student of mine). As I left, a classmate of his was entering to encourage him. It all was sobering yet encouraging--the conditions were bleak, but the body of Christ was bearing and supporting a weaker member. A room of sickness, an ambience of hopelessness, yet a remnant filled with hope that reaches beyond death.

I better shorten this post: it’s 9:30pm, past my bedtime.

-After the health center visit, I returned home for breakfast. Hardboiled eggs, bananas, and cinnamon toast. It was our third or fourth breakfast with hardboiled eggs, and today was the first in which I ate the yolks. They were gross, but I was hungry.

-The shower water was lukewarm. I’m not sure why. It wasn’t bad—better than cold.

-For lunch, we went to a “restaurant” at the health center. By “restaurant,” I mean a small room with one table, a stove two-feet beside the table where the food is cooked, and a maternity ward located next door. We ate with two children of a professor (Sam and Anna Yong) and our American friend who works for the peace corps, Ally. Rice with stew over it and fish. Charlie gave me a fish head that found its best use at the end of the meal when it, Fred the fish, had a conversation with the fish head found on Charlie’s plate. There’s just not much meat in the fish head, and, as Anna said, it’s gross to push on the eyeball.

-Charlie and I went to big market in the afternoon. We bought a radio and clock for our cook in the kitchen; 30-40 guavas, later discovered to be far from ripe; fabric for pants (here called trousers) for Wes and two shirts for Charlie; some mambo chocolate bars; and kerosene for our fireplace. Our Cameroonian friend who accompanies us to the market informed me at one point that some people were gleefully identifying me as the white man they saw earlier. It’s nice to have a reputation.

-Late evening, Charlie, Wes, and Ally watched the movie Garden State while I read in my room. For dinner, we had a pasta dish similar to ziti. Wes did the dishes while Charlie and I worked on the fire. To conclude the night, Charlie and Wes read by the fire while I worked on this post.

Saturdays are a warmly welcomed relief from the busy week of school. Much of tomorrow will be spent in preparation for the week’s classes. Thank you all for your prayers—hearing that you are interceding for us is noticeable encouragement and comfort. I’ll try to write again in the next couple days about how teaching has been. Post any questions you have for us. Oh, and we have a rooster living with us. He’s staying in a back room for a week until he’s slaughtered by our cook, an event for which we’ve already made reservations.

What do we do in our free time?

We've been on several walks and jogs. There's a loop of trails that goes through a couple of neighboring villages, though they're pretty steep in places and very muddy and slippery. Tommy played volleyball at 7:30 on Saturday morning with students and faculty. A couple of nights ago we had a candlelight dinner (because the power was out) at a faculty member's house. His name is Joke (pronounced "JOE-kay") Robert, and he's single and 26 years old. A couple of our students, Ephraim and Greg, showed up too, and we talked for a long time about their wanting to get married, about university life in Cameroon, about Christian culture in the U.S. and how it does and does not compare to Cameroon's.

We've also been doing some pleasure reading in our free time. In addition to studying German, Charlie has started Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and the (difficult!) intro to Gadamer's Truth and Method. Wes finished The Drama of Doctrine by Kevin Vanhoozer that he had started over the summer, read his friend Todd Wilson's doctoral dissertation, and has now been going through The End of Poverty by Jeff Sachs. Tommy brought a book of "personal essays" by everyone from Montaigne to Annie Dillard; he's been reading that before bed, along with Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul by Richard Hays and a book the BGC field coordinator gave us to read called African Friends and Money Matters by David Maranz.

We also pop in on the Yongs every few days, or they come down to our place with some friendly advice. Their two kids who are still in Ndu (their oldest, Benjamin, is at boarding school in Yaounde), Sam and Anna, enjoy coming over. They took Wes exploring in the woods a few days ago to show him the tree forts they've built, and we all three played Uno with them last weekend. One of the nice things about going up the Yongs is that we can watch the news or sports (Philemon had basketball on the other night, U.S. vs. Greece) or movies on their TV, which can be a nice way to unwind sometimes.

Thanks for keeping up with the blog.

If any of you feel a burning desire to encourage us, one great way would be to snail mail some pictures to us so we can decorate the bare walls of our house and keep up with what's happening at home.

We are praying and thinking of you; please keep praying for us.

Charlie, Tommy, and Wesley---the "Ndu Crew," as our field coordinator calls us

What is our living situation on campus like?

We told a lot of you before that we have our own house: three bedrooms, a decent-sized kitchen, a fireplace, one bathroom, a screened-in back porch that has a clothesline. Our floors are brown-colored concrete that get really cold in the mornings. We have a lot of windows, though all them--and the front porch--have bars over them because a couple of years ago our house was broken into. We're careful to always keep our doors and windows locked. The hot water heater for our shower is pretty small, so we all take "army showers" to conserve hot water for the next guy. Sometimes we won't have running water for a couple of days at a time, and we're not quite sure why. The power goes off occasionally. In order to run our laptops and laser printer, we plug a voltage regulator into the outlet in the wall, to try to keep the voltage at a stable 220. There are electrical spikes that the regulator sometimes doesn't catch, though, so we plug a surge suppressor into the regulator and then our laptops into the surge suppressor.

We just found out that a pregnant cat is living in our attic. Tommy has no affinity for felines, which made last night's near-breach of last line of defense (a bolted back door) especially traumatic. She woke us up purring, asking us to feed her. It sounded like she was in our bedrooms, and we're guessing that's because she was prowling around between our ceilings and our sloped roof.

We have a cook who makes three meals a day for us, six days a week. His name is Zacchieus, and we call him "Pa." Charlie and Wes ate his cooking last summer at Travis and Susan Myers' house on campus, so we knew a little about him before we came. There were many legends that had grown up around him: we thought he traveled with the Peace Corps, lived in Germany for several years, and learned to cook there. We've gradually demythologized Pa! Actually, he's lived here in Ndu all his life and worked some with the Peace Corps here. He is a father of seven, and although we don't think he's a believer, he is extremely kind and very proud of his work. Whenever we thank him for his delicious meals, he flashes us a big grin and gives us two thumbs up. He's an amazing cook. Sometimes he makes Cameroonian food for us, but mainly he cooks more American-style foods. He even made burgers one day, with home-made, from-scratch buns and cheese, lettuce, tomato, mayo, and ketchup.

What's it like living in Cameroon?

We'll be talking about this on the blog all year, but for now just a few highlights. We live with:
- a slower pace of life--"African time"!
- a very hospitable culture, where formal greetings and house visits are really important
- dirt roads (the few paved ones are in terrible shape)
- three hour church services (with lots of dancing)
- a daily awareness of poverty

The poverty in Cameroon is not technically "extreme" (which is when households are unable to meet basic survival needs---when people are living with $1 per day per person or less). But it is definitely all around us. Malaria---the result of as well as a contributing factor towards poverty---is all too common. Most of our students have had it or will have it at some point. Cameroon is much better off than many other African countries, but this week when Wes read the following in Jeff Sachs' The End of Poverty, it hit close to home: "The unsolved challenge for development economists is to understand why economic development in Africa has been so hard to achieve, not just in modern times but for centuries, and not in some places but in virtually all of tropical Africa (not including the five countries of North Africa or South Africa)" (194).

So how did the first week of teaching go?

Overall, really well. We started last Tuesday, and for the first class period we had our students introduce themselves to us. They told us their names--which of course we had trouble pronouncing, which they thought was hilarious. We heard the stories of which tribes and villages they come from and how they got to CBTS, and we heard where they want to end up in ministry--the pastorate, the chaplaincy, the mission field, the classroom. It feels so thrilling and absolutely nerve-wracking at the same time to stand at the front of a room, with a chalkboard behind you, some notes scribbled or typed on a page in your hand, and 30 or more hungry faces in front of you, anticipating that they will learn something significant in the next 50 minutes.

Here are a few of things that happened:
- Tommy shared John Piper's article "Bitzer was a Banker" (the story of how a banker decided he needed to know the biblical languages and taught himself how to read them--it's probably available online, if you want to read it, at www.desiringgod.org) in his Greek class, and they loved it.
- Wes started trying to explain the various quests for the "historical Jesus" in his NT class and was shocked when his students started asking about The Da Vinci Code. In response, he asked them to raise their hands if they had heard of the Gospel of Thomas. Nearly every hand in the classroom went up. Welcome to the world of globalization.
- Charlie's Hebrew class erupted in protest when he told them they had to know the Hebrew alphabet by the third class period. As he's met various students walking around campus, though, he's seen them carrying slips of paper with the alphabet. They always laugh and tell him they're trying.
- One of Wes and Charlie's students came to our office (yep, we have one now---we all three share it, on the second floor of the newer academic building) on Thursday, and as we talked, we realized he had eaten little if anything since Monday. Getting enough food to eat for themselves and their families is a constant issue for our students.

Tommy will post more about classes later this week, hopefully. He'll talk more about some of the hard things. It's definitely been hard.