Featured Story

New Home Opening In Senegal
Arms of Love Set To Open First Christian Children's Home In Senegal
January - February 2004

In January 2004, a ministry team visited Dakar, the capital of Senegal, that consisted of Robert Benson from Arms of Love International; Pastor Robert Clark from the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Bournemouth, England, and his assistant, Mark Ruddy; and Joseph Evans, worship leader for the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Salisbury, England. Over the past several years, the Bournemouth Vineyard and Arms of Love have partnered with Pastor Raymond Njoku and his wife, Sylveria, to establish the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of Dakar, Senegal, which began holding services in September 2002. We are now within a month or two of opening the Arms of Love Children's Home in Dakar, after many years of preparation and planning. Robert Benson shares his experiences from the trip in the article below.

After arriving in Senegal late on a Friday night, I was awakened early Saturday morning for what would prove to be my busiest day in the country. That day our team accompanied Pastor Raymond Njoku and his wife Sylveria to a village called Therio, which is about a 3-5 hour drive from Dakar (depending on traffic).

Therio is home to more than 50 families who, like most of the Wolof people, belong to a sect of Islam called Sufism. Out of approximately 3 million Wolof people, less than one hundred are known to be Christian according to published estimates. Each village family lives in a modest, one room hut, and several related families will typically group their huts together within a surrounding fence. All of the huts and fences are made of indigenous materials that can be found in the desert.

Every Saturday, Raymond and Sylvi have an "outreach" in one of eight different "regions" around Dakar where the Wolof people live. Therio is one of those regions; other outreaches are conducted in villages including Boukhou, Bandia, Nyahar, Thies, Jas, Togluwolof, and Servikotane. At least one person who regularly attends the church in Dakar lives in each of these villages. As further explained in a separate article inside this newsletter, Arms of Love will soon be receiving orphaned Wolof children from these villages and will begin raising them in a Christian family environment in Dakar.

Unfortunately, because the villages are a significant distance from Dakar, most of the people who attend the outreaches are unable to attend services in Dakar. However, each Sunday the Dakar Vineyard helps a few people from one of the villages with their transportation, so they can travel to Dakar for Sunday worship.

Outreach in Therio
I initially expected our visit to Therio to only last a couple of hours, but it turned into an all-day affair. The people came from the surrounding areas and gathered at a government-built elementary school, a group of four small buildings each of which held one classroom. At the time of our anticipated arrival, about a half dozen villagers began playing their djembes, a type of drum native to the area, and over the next hour more than 60 men, women and children came to the school for our visit, including the chief of the village and other respected members of the community.

Water in Therio is extremely scarce, as it is in most of the villages around Dakar. The water in this part of the desert is so heavily contaminated with salt and other minerals that it causes the whites of the villagers' eyes to turn yellow. One of the villagers, speaking through an interpreter, expressed to me the village's need for a fresh water well (a widespread need in the desert), and I made a mental note to follow-up with a couple of other ministries that specialize in such work.

The outreaches in Therio started with outreaches in another village closer to Dakar called Boukhou. One of the first members of the Dakar church, Aliou Dione, lived in Boukhou and invited the Njokus to hold outreaches there. After a period of time building relationships in Boukhou, the Njokus were invited to Therio, and a new outreach began.

Over time, a growing number of the villagers in Therio have come to faith in Christ. While most of the villagers might not yet identify themselves as "Christian," due to the significant ramifications that such an identification might carry in their community and in their culture, a large number of them have professed their faith in Christ. While our team was there, at east nine adults who came forward for prayer expressed to us their commitment to follow Christ as their Savior.

Interestingly, the men, women and children segregated themselves throughout the day: the men always sat in small groups with each other, the women associated with one another in other areas, and the children remained by themselves in still other areas. We began the main meeting with Pastor Robert Clark and Joseph Evans leading the gathering in a couple of worship songs, although opportunities for participation were limited because the team had prepared its worship in the national language of French; very few songs have been translated into Wolof, which is very difficult given the different dialects that are spoken in different villages.

After worship, Robert shared a short message, which focused on our inability to achieve perfection in life and our resulting need to place our faith in Christ in order to have a relationship with God. Everyone present, including those who remain staunchly Muslim, listened intently to the message, which was translated first into French, and then into the local dialect of Wolof.

Following the message and a few additional worship songs, the gathering transitioned into a time of local celebration. With the djembes beating quickly, the rhythms of the desert seemed to overwhelm the senses as villagers entered a clear area in the center of the gathering. Groups of one, two or three would alternate moving into the center area and dancing vigorously to the music. In one particular type of dance, a man would dance with his arms extended in a form of "challenge" to his enemy, and the women dancers would approach him but then back away. Mentally, I found myself often concentrating on my own feet, as I could feel the vibrations in the ground stemming from the rhythm of the drums and the stomping of the dancers' feet in the sand.

Perhaps it was his blondish-red hair, or maybe his good looks, but Joseph seemed especially popular with the village women, and was adventurous enough to join in some of the dances. We often joked that he was probably receiving proposals of marriage without realizing it, which was only further encouraged when of the women led him in a dance whereby they both wound up on their knees. Surely, we thought, we might be witnessing a marriage ceremony by the end of the day! It was never my intent to join them, but then one of the women dancers came over to me (fears of dread rising up within me), took both of my hands, led me into the center of the gathering, and … well, when in Africa …

After a couple of hours of rhythms and dancing, the villagers escorted us into one of the school buildings where some of the villagers joined us in a feast of a lunch. The women had prepared a local dish called yassa that consisted of a bed of spiced rise mixed with cabbage and carrots and artistically decorated with tomatoes, eggs, and some meat in the center. The yassa was presented on several huge plates, each one more than two feet in diameter, and up to 4 or 5 people would sit around the perimeter of each plate and share in the dish - without any hope of being able to finish it.

The New Church in Dakar
The Vineyard church in Dakar had grown considerably since our last visit a year ago. The Sunday morning service lasted nearly four hours (including worship, teaching and ministry) - Pastor Njoku had warned us ahead of time that these people were coming for "church"! The service was attended by about forty people, mostly men and mostly indigenous Senegalese, and we were immensely encouraged to see that the new church has gotten such a strong start in a country so unreached and hardened to the gospel.

The church itself is not limited to those who attend on Sunday mornings. In each of the eight villages (or "regions") where the church conducts its Saturday outreaches, there are additional people who are regularly coming to faith in Christ and who are connected with the fellowship in Dakar through these outreaches. Many of them attend the church in Dakar from time to time, but are unable to do so regularly due to the substantial distances involved and significant costs of transportation.

On Monday night, our team hosted a special worship celebration at the church, during which Robert Clark and Joseph Evans joined with local members of the church's worship team for an evening of incredible worship, interspersed with testimonies from various members of the congregation. One of the members shared how, just that day, God had answered two of his prayers - opening the door for his daughter to attend a local Christian school after being expelled from another school, and leading his son to rededicate his life to Christ - both things which that Mark Ruddy and I had prayed with him about the morning before!

On Tuesday morning, members of the church were invited to come to the church for a time of personal ministry. The team met with various people on a one-on-one basis to listen to their stories, offer advice, and lift up their needs in prayer.

The Children's Home
On Monday, we had the opportunity to visit the house that has been prepared for use as the Arms of Love Children's Home. A single family home in a neighborhood about 20 minutes' drive from the church, the house has four bedrooms upstairs, three of which can accommodate four children each. The houseparent couple will reside in the master bedroom. Downstairs there is a kitchen, dining area, living room, garage, small backyard and a one-room cottage that can be used as living quarters for house help.

Our current target date for receiving children into the children's home is March 1. Most of the furnishings for the children's home have now been purchased, with the exception of a few items that still need to acquired locally, such as some desks for the children's bedrooms and an electric generator to provide power during the frequent "brownouts" in Dakar. The remaining items that are needed will be purchased or donated through the Bournemouth Vineyard and other churches in England (e.g., children's clothes, linens, dishes, housewares, small appliances, and so forth), and will then be shipped to Senegal in an ocean shipping container.

The only significant challenge that remains is finding the right houseparents. In Senegal, the difficulty is not a shortage of Christian couples willing to serve in this capacity - there are at least two such couples currently in the church - the difficulty is the high birth rate in Senegal, which exceeds six children per woman. Nearly every couple that has been considered as to be a strong candidate, thus far, has 4-6 children of their own. Hiring such a couple would have the effect of diminishing the number of orphaned or abandoned children who could be received into the children's home, considering its limited space and the limited capabilities of the couple.

Accordingly, we are planning to hire a single "housemother" to staff the children's home initially. This individual will care for the first group of children until a houseparent couple can be found. This should enable us to begin receiving children by the projected date of March 1. When the couple is found, the initial "housemother" will become a staff assistant to the couple as the number of children in the home increases.

Another important step is the hiring of an "administrative assistant" who can keep the financial records for the children's home, verifying receipts and providing the required monthly financial reports to Arms of Love. It is our anticipation that this person will also devote much of his or her time to procuring groceries and other goods on behalf of the children's home.

This is another substantial challenge in Dakar: virtually nothing is produced or manufactured locally, but is imported from abroad. As a result, the cost of living can be very high, and the projected cost of running the program in Dakar well exceeds that in other countries where we are working. The standard of care that we desire for the children - while basic by our standards - is still much greater than the survival-oriented diet of most children in this very poor Sub-Saharan country. We hope to address this issue by trying to purchase goods directly from wholesalers and other non-retail sources and by relying on short-term teams to bring donations of clothing and other items during ministry trips.

Once the houseparent and administrative assistant are hired, the next step will be identifying the first children to move into the children's home. In each the eight village regions where the Dakar Vineyard has outreaches, a list has been made of orphaned and abandoned children who need a permanent home and who satisfy the Arms of Love criteria. More than 20 children are on the list of candidates in every region (more than 160 total)!

Without our intervention, many of these children are likely to become "talibes," street children who are literally owned or enslaved to Muslim leaders known as "maribouts." Throughout Dakar, tens of thousands of talibes roam the streets in rags, with trademark tomato paste cans slung across their shoulders, begging for money or a bite to eat. Their survival literally depends upon it, and in some cases, they are physically abused by the marabouts if they do not satisfy a certain quota. Their future is equally dim, as they receive no education apart from the Koran. The Arms of Love program will offer a life-saving alternative for children who might otherwise become talibes and then become legally untouchable as the property of the marabouts.

The fact that we only have the economic means to care for a limited number of children, when so many children need our help, can be overwhelming or heartbreaking. But we must be faithful to the vision God has given to us. There are large humanitarian organizations, both Christian and secular, which are working in this country, seeking to address human needs on a broader scale. But no one else is doing what we are planning to do: to provide full-time residential care for a group of orphaned children in a Christian home.

By raising groups of children in a Christian environment, who come from unreached people groups, and then reintegrating them into their native society as grown adults, we believe that our program will have a substantial long-term impact in advancing the kingdom of God in this Muslim nation. Moreover, by taking children from the desert villages and giving them a strong education and a moderate standard of living in Dakar, we hope to raise up future leaders of the church and of the local community.

Our initial goal, therefore, will be to target three of the eight villages and identify the most desperate children in each village who are about 3-6 years old (so our program can have a maximum impact on their lives, educationally and spiritually). The children can be brought to the children's home immediately, and in the ensuing months, we will utilize a social worker to process their cases through the government system and obtain long-term legal custody of the children.

Our hope is that by early 2005, the initial children's home will be filled with a group of 12 children who come from these three villages. This will have the further impact of strengthening the relationship between the Dakar church and the villages in which they are ministering. As an added "bonus," short term ministry teams will have the opportunity to both minister with the children in the children's home and conduct outreaches in the villages where their tribes and extended relatives continue to live.

After the first group of children have been received into the children's home and have made the significant adaptation from subsistence-level desert living to residing in a moderately nice house in Dakar with a different standard of living, new children will be received in the church facility, part of which will serve as a "transition home." There are four bedrooms on the second floor of the church, two of which are very large and can easily accommodate six children, the other two of which can accommodate staff.

By helping new children adapt first in this "transition home" before moving to the "children's home," we can avoid the situation where new children come into the program and detract from the progress of the already-adapted children in the children's home. Moreover, the "transition home" will give us the capacity for receiving a second group of 12 children in 2005-06, after the first children's home has been filled to capacity.

This Little Piggy …
[Warning: vegetarians may want to skip over this section.]
At the end of the day, as we were about to leave, we encountered one more surprise. Deche, one of the villagers who attends the Dakar Vineyard, decided to give our team a live pig. A substantial gift for someone of such limited means, it was a significant (and very humbling) honor that was bestowed upon us. Many questions immediately came to mind, and after a lively discussion of who he would be sitting next to Wilbur the pig (or who would be holding him), the first question was answered when they tied his legs and stuffed him under the back seat of the minivan for the drive back to Dakar.

Bumping along the highway back to Dakar, we heard Wilbur snorting occasionally, and while part of our hearts went out to him, there was nothing we could do for him. Deche, the giver of our gift, had decided to make the trip into town with us so he could personally butcher the pig and cook him for us. All the way back to Dakar, Deche sat on the seat above the pig beaming proudly. So, as it turned out, this little piggy missed the market and went straight to church.

After spending a night in the backyard of the church - during which time some discussion was had over whether the snoring sounds during the night had emanated from Wilbur or Pastor Clark - the pig met his final demise the next morning when he was decapitated, gutted, shaved, and otherwise prepared prior to being cooked over a bonfire in front of the church. And so it was, later that afternoon, that "lunch was served." Or, in the immortal words of Pastor Clark, "Even Jesus doesn't save little piggies."

God Turns Disappointment Into Praise
While receiving the pig was perhaps the most unusual experience of our trip, the most profound experience evolved out of an incident that happened on Saturday night. While we were at the village, we left most of our personal belongings back at the church where we were staying. That evening, after returning to Dakar, Mark Ruddy (from the Bournemouth Vineyard) discovered that $500 was missing from his wallet - an amount equal to about six months' wages for an average resident of the city. Unfortunately, we had not remembered to secure our belongings before leaving for the village. It was an occurrence not at all uncommon in less developed countries - in every country where we work, similar incidents have occurred - but it is nevertheless painful when it happens.

After we told Raymond and Sylvi about the theft, they proceeded to speak with the security guard and determined who had been present in the church that day. They spoke with several such individuals, all of whom had the opportunity to steal the money, but none of them would confess to the theft.

The next morning, toward the end of the Sunday service, Pastor Robert Clark shared that God had given him a word for a man sitting in the front row. More specifically, God had shown him a picture of the man dancing with joy before the Lord, dancing with abandon, dancing as David danced.

Before Rob spoke, I had also sensed God giving me a word for the same man, and when Rob was finished, I shared with the man what I felt God had been showing to me: "I believe that this is a word being spoken by the Lord to you this morning: Lift up your head. Lift up your eyes to me. Look to me. Know how special you are to me, and how much I love you. Look to me, and I will give you strength and courage."

While I was speaking to him, the man - previously downcast - looked up into my eyes. His gaze never left mine during the entire time I was sharing with him. It was, I will say, a very unusual experience for me, because I am generally reluctant to utilize spiritual gifts - and especially before a church full of people.

After the service, that young man went up to Pastor Robert Clark and confessed that he was the one who had stolen the money the day before, thinking that he must have been the one he had stolen from. The man then asked if there was any way that Pastor Clark could forgive him.

Prior to this, neither Robert Clark nor I had any clue that this man might have stolen the money, or that he had even been at the church the day before. Needless to say, we were stunned. Pastor Clark suggested that the man share what had happened with his own pastor, Raymond Njoku, and he did so. Later that afternoon Raymond accompanied the man back to his house, and when they returned, the man returned all of the money - every dollar - and again requested our forgiveness.

We learned later that last year, the church had ministered to this young man while he was in prison. When he was released last October, he began attending church and was baptized. This was the first time that he had given in to his prior habits and temptations - and God was there to immediately correct him and redeem him. What an incredible work God did in his life that Sunday morning!

And so it was that the situation that had been the low point of our trip became the high point, and a situation that had angered and upset us, God turned completely around for His glory.

On Monday night, the man was back in church giving a testimony before everyone as to what God was accomplishing in his life. He shared that he had felt far from God and unworthy of His love, but that God had spoken to his heart and he had confidence that this upcoming year would be one of real spiritual growth. There also seemed to be an unspoken subtext, by which he was thanking our team for restoring him after what had happened the day before.

Since that time, we have learned that the man is an artist, but that he needed some initial "capital" to purchase a booth at the artisans' market and some initial supplies (e.g., to create wood carvings). This was the reason that he had stolen the money from us. Our team is now investigating how much it will cost to help him start his new business, so we can bless him by helping him get a new start in life and become self-sufficient.

Help Needed
This is a tremendously exciting endeavor, but one which is also quite substantial in scope. We do not currently have the committed financial support needed to operate this program, but we are trusting God to be faithful in providing what is needed when it is needed, just as He has in the past. As the year progresses, assuming that our financial support continues to grow, we will continue to receive new children and expand the program.

If you might be able to help us in any way in this incredible endeavor, especially financially, please consider doing so. Any help you can offer will be hugely significant in helping us reach the precious children of Senegal.