Very, Very Rural Mali (by Thom)

Note: I wrote this on Thursday, but was without internet access so it wasn’t posted until Saturday. All time references should be based on Thursday.

Today I made my first trip into the ‘deep bush’. Here we define ‘the bush’ as a place where there isn’t electricity or phone. By this definition, I’ve visited the bush before but even in those places there was a certain degree of comfortable familiarity. Today, however, I saw a lot of things I’ve never seen before.

A little less than ten years ago, the Malian national church sent out 5 missionaries into areas where there hadn’t been churches before. The American church gave the Malian church some start-up money with the intention that after the first year the local church would start supporting, and each year increase the percentage of support. However it didn’t work out that way and the Malian missionaries got mostly forgotten about outside the local mission-sending agency. After all these years now all the money is about gone and the Malian church will need to start fully supporting their own missionaries. In order to raise awareness and support for these missionaries (there are 4 of the original 5 still serving in their villages) the Malian church is having a conference this fall. In order to show the ministries of these missionaries the National church has asked if I would make a video project showing them, including interviews and footage of their ministries. I was excited to be able to be a part of this project! That’s why I made my first trip into the ‘deep bush’ today.

I visited the tiny village of Bledio (pronounced blen-GIO) with Amanda, our houseguest from the US, and two other missionary couples. What a fun time! Life is definitely a lot slower out there. The missionary in Bledio has had exactly two converts there. However, they were both fairly old people and died shortly after becoming Christians. This has scarred off the other villagers from becoming Christian. It’s a bit hard to understand, sitting in America, but the idea of Muslim in Mali and the idea of Muslim in the Mid East are completely different. One major separation is the mixture of animism in the faith here. With these traditional beliefs, people will ‘cast spells and curses’ and credit all bad things to demons at work. Since the two converts both died, the villagers believe that Christianity is ‘cursed’ and are afraid to accept Jesus.

Still, the missionary-pastor is filled with a wonderful joy. He goes into the village and sits and talks. The men on this trip all went through the village greeting people. Despite his faith and despite living a completely different life style, the missionary has become good friends with the villagers. I cannot stress how important this is here in Mali for evangelism. I believe that after a family comes to Christ, a large part of this village will follow suit quickly.

I got to video a lot of the missionary’s stories and some of his area. My next step is to return to Bamako and edit. I have a lot more thoughts and ideas from this trip, and I hope to share them here again real soon.