Kabiye Team News
November 11, 2001

Dear Family and Friends,

Greetings from Kara, Togo! We're happy to be writing a letter to all of you and we want to apologize for the long stretch between this review and the previous one written back in July. We have been keeping very busy since the departure of our Harding interns, Hayden and Barbara Smith (elder and representatives of our sponsoring congregation), and my parents, who were all our anticipated guests, arriving and departing in succession, throughout the months of June, July, and August. Around the middle of July we began to feel our work and motivation heighten because of many factors, but are enjoying our work and our lives here in ways we could have only dreamed of at this point last year. Praise God for all that He is doing! Thank you so much, all of you who have been praying for us.

We are so grateful to have Bryan, Tracey, Isaac, and Graham Ries back with us in Kara. Graham, age 1 1/2, has a seizure condition and the Rieses have spent the last four months in the states visiting different specialists and praying about whether or not they should return to Togo. God answered them with a "Yes." and we are overwhelmed with joy at the way God is working through them and through our team. Please continue to pray for Graham. Although the seizures are fully controlled by medication there is still a very small chance that he could have a break-through seizure. Please pray for God to guard his little body and the minds and hearts of Bryan and Tracey. Much has happened in the way of health problems on our team in the last few weeks. Praises be to God that He has heard our prayers and delivered all of our children, and us, from sickness. Many of you may have heard that Hannah suffered a small fracture in her skull while we were in Lome, waiting to welcome the Rieses on their arrival back to Togo. David was walking out of an artisan market, holding Hannah, and lost his footing on a very slick, and rather steep, concrete ramp exiting onto the street. He dropped Hannah as he fell and she hit near the base of her skull on the corner of a cement ledge. We used an emergency ice pack on her head and after she vomited, we drove straight to the pediatrician we use in town. He examined her and said that she just needed rest and that she would be better soon. After a day and a half of her continuing to vomit every few hours, and being lethargic, we went back to our pediatrician and said we wanted to get a cat scan done, which revealed that Hannah had a small fracture in her skull. Not wanting to relay the horrors to you of this experience in detail, I will simply say without exaggeration that it was the worst experience of my life. There was a two minute period when I thought Hannah was dead and the lack of competence of the doctors who performed the procedure is still staggering to me. Hannah and I stayed in the hospital for two and a half days and, as she improved rapidly after the first day, we felt confident to take her back home to Kara. Praise God that she did so well with the IV tying her to her hospital bed and that at the end of our stay she was actually more comfortable around the hospital personnel, especially our pediatrician, than I have ever seen her around doctors, even in the states. She gave her doctor a hug and said, "Thank you for helping me," as we left. My dear, precious child revealed to me beyond a doubt the source of her complete recovery as we were driving towards a friend's house in Lome' to spend the night before we returned to Kara a few days later. "Mommy, he healed me," she said with a smile. "Who did, Sweetie?" I asked, expecting her to give credit to our pediatrician whom she had been talking about the moment before. "God healed me." "You're right, Baby, He did." As the tears began to flow I thanked God for the blessing of knowing beyond a doubt that it was He who did the healing of my sick child, in this place of low health care standards. As we returned home to Kara, we heard God praised again and again for the healing of Hannah by our teammates and our workers, language teachers, and the groups that meet from their church to intercede in prayer far into the early hours of the morning on a bi-monthly basis. God has been given glory from this yucky event and for this I am thankful.

Over this past week, Graham, Mary Claire, Peter, and Aidan have all had malaria. All of our children, with the exception of Maddie and Michal Kennell, who are in the states on vacation, have had a cold-like bug to different degrees, but all are doing much better as of yesterday. I have had a lot of breathing problems and fatigue over the past couple of months and was concerned at one point that it might be tuberculosis. Our family visited the American Baptist Hospital, 4 hours south of here, for me to be tested and the doctor determined that I have asthma, probably as a result of ongoing allergies over the last 6 months. We were all relieved to know that it was nothing as serious as TB, especially with the implications for our whole family and teammates. Satan has been attacking us through our childrens' health recently, and he is right in knowing that this is one of the softest spots in our hearts, but praise be to God that He has the victory both over sin and death. He is being given glory because we are putting our trust in Him, although Satan's given many of us good reasons in the mind of the world to run both from this place and from God. Please keep praying for us to stand firm in this spiritual battle for the hearts of the Kabiye.

I am so excited to share with you what God is doing here. David and I are progressing in language and are excited about different villages we have been visiting where we have targeted to begin evangelistic lessons in January. All of the men are working to be ready at a point in language where they will be able to begin with these lessons in January. The first five lessons have already been written by Matt and lessons two and three are in the editing process, with lesson one ready. Dave is working on church organization and leadership training lesson series that will begin after the first Kabiye have come to Christ. Don is working on a church maturation series that will also begin after the first churches have been planted. The area that I've been visiting most frequently is called Kumeya (k00-may-ee-yah). Dave has also begun visiting this area with Bryan and there are so many smaller villages up in the mountains with no churches of any denomination. The eagerness in peoples' eyes pulls at me, both in longing for them to hear the good news, and in confirming that God has been preparing their hearts because of so many prayers so many of you have offered up for them. Because we haven't visited this area as much yet, it is not one of our two initial evangelism targets, but it will follow soon. Our team is feeling lead, at this point, to begin preaching in January in two villages where team members have spent extended periods of time building relationships, and people are eagerly anticipating for us to begin bringing them the good news. Neither of these villages have churches from any denomination. They are N'Djei (End-jay) and Lege-Lege (Leg-ay Leg-ay). Please be praying for these villages as possible beginnings of a movement of the Kabiye people to Christ. David, Hannah, and I are going out to Kumeya tomorrow morning to spend some time there continuing to build relationships. Elijah will stay with Andrea, as he hasn't had his meningococcal vaccine yet, and the meningitis season is starting. Please keep praying for the people in this village and all the others where we are making contacts as a team. Please pray for our language learning, too, as this will continue in a formal way for some time and we want so much to deliver the message of Christ in the heart language of the Kabiye.

Before I close, I want you to know that Hannah and Elijah are doing very well. Hannah is building a relationship with my language teacher's daughter, who's name is also Hannah. She is 6 months older than our Hannah, but when they are together they mimic each others' language sounds much better than I can. Hannah and I went out to my language teacher's fields to help her harvest beans last week and Hannah and Hannah had a wonderful time playing together and helping pick beans and carrying the baskets on their heads. At the end of the morning we drove my teacher, her sister-in-law and their children back to their house here in Kara and they gave me a full tour. Their "house" is a household compound with innumerable rooms, huts, small buildings arranged in a maze-like fashion. Hannah ran off with Hannah just as we arrived and it took us some searching to find them a few minutes later when it was time to leave. We might have searched longer if it wasn't for a boy who had transplanted with his family from Nigeria who ran out of his courtyard yelling, "She is speaking English! The white girl is speaking English!" He was so excited he could hardly stand it. My language teacher and I smiled at each other, knowing that the chances of another white girl, other than Hannah, speaking English in this household compound were quite slim. We walked into his courtyard to find Hannah chasing a duck she wanted to pet with 30 children running after her laughing at her excitement over such an ordinary thing as a duck. Hannah, sometimes the actor, turned around after giving up her quest and began dancing for them. I had to drag her away to the car. She hadn't had this kind of center-of-attention fun since before Elijah had been born! Elijah, my ever-smiling, laid back son, is still the same bright spot of joy in my life that he has been from the beginning. He is pushing 10 months old, pulling up on furniture, scooting from the couch, to tables, to chairs, and crawling with greater speed than I can keep up with. I confess that I have grabbed an ant or two and even a roach out of his pudgy little hands at times, but am hoping that he hasn't gotten any type of insect into his mouth without me knowing it. He is so dirty that I have to give him a spit bath every few hours. The dust from the Harmatton is settling in and we are beginning the longer, hot, dry, dusty season here in sub-saharan Africa that will last through the end of May/beginning of June when we will see the first rains again up here in Kara. Please continue to pray for our children's health and well-being as I have full confidence that your prayers intercede many times over for us before the Father. We love you all and are praying for you. Please keep writing us and be patient if it takes us awhile to return an email. Our server is down on a regular basis for 3 or 4 days at a time and with our office outside our house in a building in the back yard, we aren't able to check and write email as often as we otherwise could. Thank you for your prayers, again. They encourage us more than you can know. We love you!

In His Love,

Becky for the Reeves family