History of cma in burkina faso

History of the C&MA

in Burkina Faso

Preface to the 2015 scanned copy This book was originally written in 1997 in an attempt to preserve some of the history of the work of the Christian and Missionary Alliance in West Africa dating from its beginnings in 1923. It was prepared primarily with new missionary orientation in mind but may someday serve a larger purpose. It was never intended or edited to have a larger circulation. In 2007 the book was photo copied with the aid of friends in Ouagadougou and another edition made available. In 2015, thanks to Ron Brown and his Canadian colleagues, it was scanned and put back into a document format. In the process certain errors crept into the text and these were carefully corrected and the document cleaned up as best possible.

The Triumphs, Trials, Tidbits and Trivia of HISTORY Seventy-five years of Alliance Ministry in Burkina Faso)

by Milton and Nancy Pierce

Bobo Dioulasso, Burkina Faso May, 1997/100 copies

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Avant Propos (nlp)

page 2

Introduction (nlp)

page 4

Political Climate (map)

page 11

Once upon a Time (nlp)

page 17

Historical Happenings (map)

page 21

District Distinctives (nlip, map)

page 30

The Way We Were (nlp)

page 40

Revivals (map)

page 48

Missions Means Ministries (map)

page 54

Let's Celebrate! (map)

page 61

Oh, Those Acronyms! (map)

page 66

Teach Them to Observe what I Have Commanded (nlp)

page 75

All about Buildings (nlp)

page 82

Of Conferences and Committees (nlp)

page 87

Language Lessons (nlp)

page 96

Missionary Kids (nlp)

page 100

Of This and That (nlp)

page 105

Those Who Served (nlp)

page 111

Epilogue (map, nlp)

page 119

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AVANT PROPOS Histories are important, but it is in the nature of most of us to only enjoy the history in which we were directly involved - whether it be that our place of birth our family or our mission field! History is seldom written from a strictly objective viewpoint.

We all have our personal perspective of events, transpiring around us, and when remembered from a distance, events are colored through many filters. We are continuing to make history, and someone forty years from now may interpret the, facts of today's missionary, church and social life in a different light from that in which we are actually experiencing them. That is just some of the risk of writing the chapters of history which we have lived.

As milt and I have together researched and written a history of the work of the Gospel in Burkina Faso during these seventy-five years, we have thought of some old sayings, like - Those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it! and - One thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history!

But we have also been overwhelmed again by the fact that our God is a God of history. In a way this is His story! He is the one who controls both the universe and individuals. His is the power by which men and women's lives have been changed in West Africa - both missionary and West African. He has sovereignly controlled what has happened from the day in 1890 when that first small band of Alliance missionaries landed in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and established a base in this English colony, with the intention of reaching the vast unexplored territories of French West Africa. And our God is still active in the history we of the CMA Mission are making with the Eglise de l'Alliance ChrĂŠtienne here today in Burkina Faso.

This historical account is being written as a result of a request of the leadership of the Burkina Faso Mission. We thank them for the privilege it has been for us to go back and research our "roots" and organize the mass of resulting material, and to dredge up from our memory log some almost forgotten blessings of friends and colleagues, of celebrations and revival and of daily drudgery and challenges of our missionary life in Burkina Faso for almost forty years.

History, as we, have said, is always influenced by the perspective of the person writing. My 'personal West African perspective goes back a long ways, to some dim memories from the year 1936, when, as a child of three, I went with my parents to Baramba, Mali, where they began planting the church among the Mianka. An. old man in Mali reminded me recently of how I used to chatter in Mianka to everyone in the, village of Baramba, walking hand in hand with my constant companion, a little Albino boy who had been given to me by the village to protect me! A large reservoir of memories remains from the ensuing years until I was almost sixteen and left to continue my education in the United States. These years cover living in the present countries of Mali, Burkina and Guinea, all of which were French West Africa at that time.

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But Milt and I have an even larger wealth of experiences which date from September 1959 when we landed in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and drove inland to Bobo with my father, Leroy Kennedy, who was then mission chairman. We lived for seventeen years in Santidougou, ten miles from Bobo, one year in Ouagadougou and the rest of our years in Bobo-Dioulasso. We have worked mainly with one people group, the Bobo Madare, but have also been involved in administration, building, Theological Education for the field, and participation in organizations with a wider scope than our own country of Burkina Faso. During our missionary career, we have been involved in evangelism, church planting, teaching at all levels, text writing, language work, translation, administration, hospitality, medical work, literature and radio ministries. So from this experience and these perspectives we share with you our observations and thoughts. This historical account is not intended to be a collection of reminiscences or our personal memoires. But it is probably impossible for some of that not to creep in!

We have not intentionally spoken negatively of anyone in this treatise. In reporting history, some events are by their very nature pejorative. However, we have not mentioned specific names in any of our reporting of negative events. And some significant events of our history have been passed over for fear of unwittingly hurting someone.

Our working procedure has been to: 1. Glean pertinent materials from all possible sources - personal files, mission archives, Alliance Life articles and several historical books and pamphlets.

2. Categorize this mass of material under pertinent headings - historical, political, revivals, administration, theological education, etc.

3. Discuss what to include in the finished account, and divide up the subject matter between us.

4. Browse and read extensively through the available written documents.

5. Each write up our assigned subjects, exchanging manuscripts to edit.

6. Finalize for printing this History of the Burkina Faso field according to us!

We have tried to write in the third person when reporting events, but when we have been personally involved, we have used the personal pronoun "I". We have quoted extensively from other written material, and you will find end notes at the conclusion of this document. When we have copied verbatim from reports, we did not change the vocabulary to update it. Thus you will find "Mohammedans, Mohammedanism, Moslems" (instead of Muslims or Islam) and "natives" referring to the local people, etc. The missionary vocabulary of yesteryear was also full of such expressions as "darkest Africa", "the dark continent", "white man" and other outdated and even pejorative expressions today.

One final word: Some of you reading this manuscript will remember events differently from us. That is only natural. We invite you to write your own chapters of history and add them to ours.

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INTRODUCTION

It was in the month of September, 1959, that we arrived as missionaries in , Bobo Dioulasso. We had come from language study in Paris; driving our VW van to the port of Bordeaux, and bringing it along on the small passenger ship headed for West Africa. We and our seven 'missionary colleagues, also bound for ministry in West Africa, spent about ten days at sea enjoying the first class accommodations, the fellowship together and the many conversations about what our future ministry would be like. Coming to Africa was coming "home" for me, and I had been collecting apples from our stateroom and the dining table to give my mother as a gift when I arrived in Bobo. I remembered how she loved apples and also that we could not buy them in West Africa . We had filled two metal trunks with special foods bought in France - spaghetti, chocolate, dried soups, etc. to help me get started cooking as I learned to use only locally grown products.

Imagine my surprise when I arrived in Bobo-Dioulasso to find a large Monoprix in town as well as several smaller grocery and general stores. You could buy several kinds of apples there, furniture from France, every kind of pasta imaginable, chocolate bars, Coke, a Christmas turkey ordered from Paris-and so on and on. The list was impressive, the choice was great. This was a different Africa from the one I had left!

This was West Africa at the time of the French colonial rule - it was the year before independence from France of the West African colonies. Only Guinea had voted "No" to the referendum proposed by De Gaulle the year before, and opted for immediate independence. Bobo Dioulasso in 1959 was still full of French military personnel and their families. There was a large public swimming pool in BoromokotĂŠ. (The remains of the empty pool and surrounding dressing rooms are partly buried beneath bushes and mud, even now.) The Guinguette (French, meaning a cafĂŠ where you can also dance) was a favorite hunt of the ex-patriots. The tiny cement circle which was the dance floor is still there. There used to be a stall where cold drinks were sold, changing tents were available and water equipment for children and diving boards were installed in the stream. Strings of colored lights decorated the ancient forest trees. You could even pay 100 francs and get swimming insurance! The Caravelle jet flew directly to Bobo twice a week, and the social event of Tuesday and Friday night was to sit at the airport bar sipping a drink and mingling with those leaving for Paris and later welcoming those coming in on the flight, wearing the latest Paris fashions! This was the West Africa of the French colonialists and it was the country to which we came in 1959.

From the time we were assigned to the Mali-Upper Volta mission we began to receive letters' from various missionaries on the field asking us to consider working with them. One suggested that we could evangelize on horseback in their area knowing that Milt loved horses! and another tempted us with the abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables available in that region. But we decided to leave the decision with the mission executive committee rather than make a decision ourselves.

When we finally arrived in West Africa as missionaries, we were assigned to Santidougou, the station where I had lived as a teenager with my parents. I was prepared for the old outhouse we had always used and never dreamed of having indoor plumbing. Again imagine my surprise to find that our house now contained 4

an actual modern toilet! In 1950 ( the year after I had left for the States) Dr. R.R. Brown of the Omaha Gospel Tabernacle, had made a West African tour and hadn't found a single missionary home with a flush toilet. He went back and raised money to buy a carload of toilets and sent them over to the French West Africa field! One of these found its way to the Santidougou mission house, and the old outhouse of my childhood became a pigeon loft!

Many people ask us about the changes we have seen during a lifetime of living in Burkina Faso (a country which, by the way, has changed its name three times during that period: from Ivory Coast to Upper Volta to Burkina Faso). There have been changes:...physical ones, such as the forced abandonment by the Bobo women of their customary dress of bunches of - leaves fore and aft... and the seeming abolishment of the long skirt rule for women...and the obligatory top or shirt which must be worn by everyone in the city; 1 technical changes, like the multiplication of small businesses and factories which manufacture all kinds of consumer goods...the myriad motor vehicles (two wheels and four) which abound on our roads... the roads which are now paved and facilitate travel in many areas; and the religious changes, such as the increase of Islam and the lessening of the percentage of pure animists (although all religion - including Christianity - in Burkina is overlaid with certain traits of animism)...the tremendous growth of the Egilse de l’Alliance ChrÊtienne in recent years...and the proliferation of other denominations and independent African churches.

Some of the biggest changes have been in the area of communications. Today we chafe if the e-mail is out of whack for an hour or two! But in my childhood most missionaries got their mail once a week (or even every two weeks), carried the last leg of the journey by a mail carrier, going on foot to the post office in the nearest town! My mother's parents both died during her first term, and she never heard about either death until two months later when the news came in the carrier's mailbag. There were no telephones. When we arrived on the field there were cables.

And sometimes the cable messages got mixed up. One such cable was sent to the field announcing the death of. Harry Wright, one of the first missionaries in Mali.

The message went through as Larry Wright, and Grace - whose husband was very much alive! - received some beautiful letters of condolence, telling her what a wonderful husband she had! Larry said it was like reading your own epitaph!

Another funny cable was one sent from our parents to Dave and Margot on their wedding day and which was read at their reception. They intended the reference sent to be Proverbs 3:5 and 6 (Trust in the Lord....) but the message arrived and was read as Proverbs 6:6 (Go to the ant, thou sluggard – consider his ways and be wise.) wise!) These are all part of the many changes we have seen.

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In the 60's a prominent woman physician in Bobo was pulled out of a grandstand and fined for wearing a dress with the hem above the knee! In 1959 it was not uncommon to see bare-breasted women walking along the road and even in the city of Bobo.

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But a walk through a Bobo village recently made me think that nothing has changed. Many women still fear getting vaccinations for their children and thus certain contagious diseases persist. There remain people groups who are resistant to the gospel. Farming methods have changed little in most of Burkina, and people still hold fast to their "chieftain" mentality, both in society and the church. Who you know is usually more important than what you know in many areas of modern life, as it has always been in the Burkina culture. Because of their ethnic strife and war e have often found people in the United States impatient with the African nations. We remind them that when the United States was about one hundred years old we had a shameful civil war in our country, where members of the same family fought against each other! None of these West African nations in which we work are anywhere near one hundred years old. The strides they have made towards nationhood are noteworthy and against tremendous odds! Burkina still battles ignorance, poverty, lack of natural resources, and the wiles of natural disasters.

A church always reflects in some ways the country in which it is planted.

Here in Burkina the church , too has made tremendous progress against such things as illiteracy, lack of the Scriptures in their own language, disease, low economic level, lack of a corps of highly educated leaders and ethnic prejudices. But the Church of Jesus Christ is being built here. We as missionaries have the privilege of being par t of that building process, and in the building have also been woven into the structure.

In the chapters ahead we will look at the history of this developing church and the journey of the mission through these same years. We will catch some glimpses of the lives of both missionaries and Burkinabe. We will touch on administration in both mission and church, medical ministries, theological education, missionary children and their schooling, celebrations of important events, sister organizations with whom we are and have been involved, special people who have made contributions to who we are as church and mission today, etc. There will be a mixture of historical reporting and interesting trivia, and we trust through the maze of all these facts, figures, events, tears and joy, you, the reader, will begin to better understand wh at the God of history is accomplishing in our lives as missionaries and the life of His church in Burkina Faso. *

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Sometimes as "modern" missionaries, we tend to look at some of th ose early pioneers of the work as "old fogies" without any real missiological or sociological training or outlook. But then, even as today, there were those who had a real cross cultural gift, and were perceptive about what was needed to develop both the society and the church in West Africa. Richard Johanson was one of those men. He came to the Bobo Dioulasso region in 1927 and worked among the Bobo Madar e people until 1942. Until the time of his death in the late eighties, we maint ained a correspondence with him, enjoying his keen mind and penetrating questions.

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Here is a list of questions he asked one time, entitled....

SOME THINGS I WONDER ABOUT AT TIMES 1. Has the hierarchical system of governing been continued? (Cantons, villages with the chief responsible for taxes) 2. Has former prohibition against moving residence from one village to another been done away with?

3. Does anyone have a choice as to whether he can handle his tax-paying directly or must he still go through the village elder?

4. Since forced-labor gangs have been eliminated, is the "road tax" on individuals very high?

5. Does republican form of government seem to be workable, or have "strong men" had to take over to keep order?

6. Do elections for "délégués" seem to be fairly honest, and do the rank and file take to them eagerly?

7. In education, have any of the vernaculars been used in the lower grades of public schools?

S. When we left the country in 1942 the country was almost de-forested, becoming semi-desert, millions of trees cut for firewood, charcoal, building; any real reforestation? I mean like tens of millions of trees planted, not small plots like they had.

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Have locusts done much damage the past few years? Have ways been found to check their range, or destroy them as "hoppers" before they can fly?

10. Any real forest reserves? There was a big one very strictly patrolled, thousands of hectares around the "Mare aux hippos" through which one could drive at night (no hunting) and see the eyes of hundreds of hippos .reflected in the car lights.

11. Has the system of conserving seed of grain been continued? People used to consider it .a great imposition to have to deposit their grain in the public "prévoyance" granary, then in planting time they were glad to have it.

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Is there any industrial-scale raising of fruit, such as mangoes and citrus?

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I heard the road towards San has been blacktopped - any others?

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14. Is the country still dependent on subsistence fanning? Have any outside industries brought capital to establish businesses, factories and employ natives?

15. Does the relationship between mission and emerging church seem to be developing in a fairly constructive pattern?

16. Dr. Simpson, when organizing the Alliance, wisely took away from the congregation the privilege of voting on calling a Pastor, as the Presbyterians do.

BUT he was not able to protect pastors as Presbyterians do by having them NOT accountable to church members but to the higher court, the presbytery. I presume the missionaries may still be appealed to by your ordained men, or are they like the Baptists, at the mercy of their congregations (the most fickle unit of society)?

17. Are ordained men perhaps APPOINTED rather than called by those to whom they minister?

18. Has a systematic catechism been adopted for instruction of beginner believers, young or older, or it is more or less "by gosh or by golly" like we used to do it?

19. Has the Church been able to formulate and adopt a written constitution stating its doctrines, standards and procedures?

20. Has it been deemed advisable to draw up a “book of discipline” sort of thing, so that in the event of any accusation, rumor, scandal, complain, etc., the church “court” which tries and decides the case can have something orderly to follow?

21. Have church leaders advanced far enough to record minutes of meetings and make reports (including financial) in writing?

Richard Johanson was a man who lived "before his time". He was often impatient with mission leadership and finally left the field, ostensibly because of his wife's health. His questions give us some insights into life in the '20's and '30's. What would he say if it were possible for him to visit the Burkina of the '90's?

And now some important dates ..................  1890: The first Alliance missionaries were sent to West Africa, landing at Freetown, Sierra Leone, where they established a beach head. Their efforts to enter French speaking territories were refused.

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- 1918: The French colonies were finally opened to the Protestants. The Alliance opened their station in Kankan, Guinea, and used this as a base for reaching the rest of French West Africa.

- 1919: The first Alliance missionaries arrived in Bamako, where the GMU had also established a base, and a decision was made to divide the country and assign different areas to different missions.

(This sharing of areas was called Mission Comity and remained a fact of life in West Africa up until the mid-seventies when churches began to "invade" the territory assigned to others.)

- 1923: Entry by the Alliance into the region which was French Sudan and is now Mali, and the present Burkina Faso, which was then Ivory Coast.

- 1942: The departure of most Alliance missionaries due to the Second World War and the Vichy French government who occupied West Africa and were anti-American.

- 1945: The return of Alliance missionaries to West Africa, after the War. - 1957: The first Malian and Burkinabe pastors were ordained.

- 1958: The reorganization of the West African Alliance mission. From the first field conference in 1926 all the missionaries of West Africa used Kankan, Guinea, as their headquarters. The Mali and the Upper Volta became one field and the administrative office was in Koutiala, Mali.

- 1959: The administrative office of the Mali-Upper Volta Mission was transferred to Bobo Dioulasso, Upper Volta.

- 1960: The national church of Mali-Upper Volta was organized in San. Mali.

- 1961: A revival took place among the Dogon in Mali.

- 1965: Beginning of Yamoussoukro Bible Institute, at first an inter-church intermission effort later turned over to the Alliance in 1994.

- 1966: The first camp in French took place in Santidougou, Upper Volta.

- 1966: The first Alliance primary school was established in Doumbala, Upper Volta.

- 1967: Another Alliance primary school was established in Santidougou, Upper Volta.

- 1968: The first national youth camp of the Alliance Church.

- 1971: The Youth Centre was built in Bobo Dioulasso.

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- 1972: There was revival in the Mali-tipper Volta Alliance churches and mission.

- 1973: The Mali and Upper Volta churches separated to form their own autonomous churches in each country. Pastor Thomas Diarra was the first president.

- 1975: Pastor Daniel Bonzi was voted as president of the Eglise Chrétienne Evangélique of Upper Volta. The name was later changed to the E.A.C. - 1976: Beginning of the Ecole Biblique de Bobo Dioulasso, whose name was later changed to Institut Maranatha.

- 1977: Beginning of Ecole Biblique de Poundou.

- 1986: Missionaries (Comans) weres sent to Ouagadougou to plant an Alliance church in the capital city.

- 1991: Opening of the Lycée Maranatha in the city of Bobo-Dioulasso.

- 1991: The first UJAC conference, held in Bobo-Dioulasso.

- 1994: The creation of .A.C.C.E.D.E.S. by the E.A.C., with .the help of CAMA Services, as a development arm of the church.

- 1995: Construction of the Alliance Lycée Technique in Dédougou

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POLITICAL CLIMATE The Upper Volta to which we came in 1959 impressed us as a placid little agrarian country, peaceful and content to move from cultivating season to cultivating season with little concern for the world outside. We were, of course, oblivious to the reality of what was taking place in a nation just coining to grips with its independence.

I feel very inadequate to comment on the political climate in the Upper Volta of yesterday or the Burkina Faso of today. I am, after all, but an outsider and even though we have witnessed dramatic changes and events over the past thirty-seven years, including five coup d'ĂŠtats, how can we make an intelligent commentary on any of it? It has been a rare privilege to have lived much of a lifetime among so noble a people as the Voltaics of yesterday and the Burkinabe of today. They have been patient and gentle with us and we are grateful. Such a testimony is, of course, not unusual as most Europeans and others who come to Burkina Faso experience much the same reaction to its people.

Before France was ready to turn over its former territory to the care of its own independent government, they evidently had groomed certain people in the political process who were ready to assume the leadership. When you sit with a group of Bwa people talking about such things, you understand that through such illustrious figures as Ouezzin Coulibaly and Nazi Boni they thought that they, the Bwa, were destined to rule. Both of these men died untimely deaths, the first by poisoning and the second in an auto accident. The widow of Ouezzin Coulibaly died recently while living in Abidjan. Her funeral held at the Cathedral in Bobo in early 1997 was an international event and many dignitaries attended from both Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso. Ouezzin Coulibaly was a man of great influence in his time just before independence. ii Nazi Boni was a Protestant and when he died in the early 60's his funeral was held in the Alliance Chapel.'" Delmer Smith was on hand at the time and conducted the funeral. Another member of the Boni family was stabbed to death in a brawl at the 422 Club in Bobo during the 1980's.

There was no other pastor in Bobo at the time and the family came knocking at my door. That was an experience!! The new downtown church was packed out with as many people standing outside as were on the inside. Here was a Protestant family that seldom darkened the church door and I had both the privilege and responsibility of preaching the funeral sermon. All of this to show the importance of these two political families.

The Bwas were not, however, destined to rise to national leadership. The theory of some is that the French deliberately tried to prevent this. Thus you find the national boundaries drawn right through the heart of the Bwa people with about one half equally located in Mali and in Burkina Faso. During the early days of French colonialism, and before that in the Samory wars, it is said that the conquerors met resistance from the Bwas.

It was rather for the Mossis to rise to national leadership in the person of Maurice Yameogo who became the first president after the actual independence took place. I attended a Fourth of July celebration at the

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American embassy in Ouagadougou, in the early 60's and had the opportunity to shake the hand of the new president. I was there with Mrs. Harold Jones, Assembly of God missionary well known for her outspoken ways. I will never forget her scolding President Yameogo for not bringing his wife to the celebration. She ordered him to send his chauffeur immediately and fetch her!

Our second opportunity to "get close" to the political power in old Upper Volta was upon our return to the field after our first furlough in February of 1964. In those days we had the luxury of traveling by freighter from New York. That allowed about three weeks at sea with a few port calls, total relaxation; as much hand luggage as you wanted free, very reasonable rates on other accompanied baggage and no expenses en route. Those were, "the good ole days!"

We boarded ship with a distinguished gentleman who turned out to be the Upper Volta Ambassador to the, United Nations, FrĂŠderic Guirma. He was a delightful fellow and we enjoyed sitting on the deck and talking. He had with him a new Chevrolet Pick-up and a Hammond Organ. A student of Bach, he often sat on deck musing over musical scores. FrĂŠderic as a young man had been active in politics long before independence. After his time as ambassador he became a business man in Ouaga. His political activist involvement was such that he also became an exile in France during the years of the Revolution. In 1989 he returned to his homeland and published a booklet entitled Towards a Regeneration in Reconciliation which is interesting reading, addressed to the people of a nation grappling with the confused political situation in their country. vi Our paths have never crossed again over these many years. One day, however, when our daughter, Deborah Clouser, was buying vegetables in the Ouaga market and discussing prices with the sellers, this same Frederic Guirma walked up to her and asked, "Madame, where did you learn to speak French like a Mossi?" When she explained that she had grown up in the country, he was reminded of the American family that he had traveled with back in 1964 and they put the pieces of the story together.

As outsiders and from our rural perspective, what had appeared to us as a placid little country, was not as we thought. In 1966 Maurice fell victim to strikes and then came the Lamizana coup. General Lamizana was to hold power for a number of years. Toward the end of his time in 1979 the country staged a daring attempt at democracy. Political parties were allowed to form, political rallies were held all over the country and there was a general air of actual democratic rivalry. Lamizana was sponsored by one of the parties and easily won the election to go on in power as an elected president. It didn't last for long. In November of 198.0 his Samo "brother" from Tougan, Saye Zerbo, deposed him in a third coup. I had a great opportunity to meet President Lamizana. Herb Nehlsen had purchased property for the church in Tougan just before leaving for furlough in 1976. There were some problems with the paper work and the president was the person who had signed for a friend with a bank loan. So it was off to Ouaga that I as mission chairman had to go to settle this matter for the Tougan district church. I was eventually ushered into the President's office and found him a very friendly fellow. I felt free to ask for his picture and he quickly got me one and autographed it. I took the paper that he had signed concerning the bank loan down to the front desk to where his chargĂŠ d'affairs was.

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He looked at the paper and laughingly said, "Oh, the old man doesn't know how to do this. Give it to me and I'll take care of it for you."

The story of Saye Zerbo is a history in itself. He became a very popular president and did some unusual things. Things like driving across the country is a convoy of military Jeeps - his whole government in tow! They came to Bobo and set up the government for a few days. This was something unheard of. The city did a very African thing and would not "give him the road" when he asked for it. Thus he slept an extra night in Upper Volta's economic capital. The road back to Ouaga was not the usual one. He headed northeast toward Dédougou stopping all along the way at villages for greetings and turning east via Houndé to regain their route. Saye was a real man of the people and they adored him.

The story of Saye Zerbo's visit to Bobo would not be complete without telling of his entry into the city. It was a "Triumphal Entry!" He had been out to the Vallée du Kou with his entourage and was due back in the city for a mass meeting at the railroad square. I was in the crowd that lined the street a short way from the meeting place. As mission chairman I had an assured place in the grandstand so didn't need to hurry to my seat. I stood with the crowd watching in amazement as the President arrived, standing up in an open Jeep waving his baton to the mass of cheering people. Suddenly at that moment of glory the heavens opened and it started to pour down rain. This is, of course, an important omen of good things to come in Burkina Faso. It was after the rainy season and such a shower was not at all expected!

When Saye Zerbo fell in a coup a short time later in November, 1982, what had happened to the "good omen"? The story was not over! Saye Zerbo would one day publicly give thanks to God for his fall from power which led to his conversion from Islam to Christ.vii Years later, as a brother in Christ, I reminded Saye of that day. He looked upon it as a part of many wonderful memories. I also had the fun of joking with the ex-president about how the coup that felled him spoiled our big evangelism crusade in Bobo!

But now let me finish the story of his arrival in Bobo. Seated in the grandstand, I was right behind the president. The place was absolutely packed with people as far as the eye could see in all directions. Bobo had really turned out to acclaim their president. During the ceremonies the different ethnic groups paraded and danced before him. At one point the Togolese group came by and among them were two beautifully dressed little twin girls. The president leaped from his plush armchair and jumping down to the ground swept the two very surprised little girls into his arms and gave each one a kiss. The crowds went wild with approval. What an event!

As stated above, the coup that brought Saye Zerbo to power also ruined our plans for a big evangelism campaign in the city of Bobo. Jim Sawatski and the Zaire Trio, Nasango Malamu, were on hand. They had with them a Swiss brother, loaded with the best of equipment, who was an expert sound man. Pastor Isaac Kéita was there as evangelist. I wrote in a report to the missionaries on the field that someone had said that we seemed ready "to ride a whirlwind" there in Bobo that week. On Sunday morning as we were gearing up for a big opening, it was reported that the radio had been playing military music since 2 AM. We all knew what that meant: another coup d'état!

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Isaac KĂŠita preached a powerful sermon that morning to an overflowing church.

Before the end of the service I had been officially informed of the coup. By noon a dusk to dawn curfew was announced. All communications were cut for two days to the outside world. What to do? We had to keep that team of seven occupied and entertained for the whole week. Daytime meetings were held at the mission, some recording was done, but otherwise it was a frustrating time. To further complicate things, the FEME-ODE had planned a celebration in Ouaga marking 10 years of ministry in relief and development Dave Shady, living in Ouarkoye, was to represent the C&MA but the DĂŠdougou military were implicated in the coup and security was tight there. It was decided that the C&MA not attend. Samuel Yamedgo was not happy with us but what else could we do? The FEME seminar went ahead anyhow and, strangely enough, commanded almost equal time on the news media as did the coup.

Our daughter Elin was living in Ouaga at that time working with WRC and was an eye witness to some of the things going on there. She was informed through close friends, military and others, of many events. When the phone lines were opened we talked almost daily.

It is worthy of note that in none of the political upheavals in Burkina Faso have we felt threatened, with the exception of the days following the assassination of Sankara. That was an uncertain time for all. The Burkinabe always seem to have a proper respect for religious groups. Only once did I feel that I was spared from death. In Ouaga during the period of tension surrounding the Mali war I went to visit a friend in an outlying settlement -on the edge of the city. I knew it was near a military camp but had often gone there and gave it no thought. I drove down through the open spaces to the little village there, near the city. Getting out of the car I was immediately surrounded by soldiers. They asked me if I hadn't heard the shots or seen the bather. Totally oblivious to all of that I replied, "No". They very politely informed me that I had gone through a barrier and that they had shot in the air to, warn me. The air conditioner in the car had closed out the sounds. I was escorted to the camp and came before the "big man." He too was very polite but told me that I had narrowly escaped death for his men were under orders to shoot in the air once and the second time at the offender. I was mortified when he concluded that he would now have to discipline the soldiers - who had failed to shoot met . Oh, for the earth to open and swallow me up! The Mission Protestante sign on the car had probably helped save my life!

My comment at the end of that week of the coup was, "Disappointment, hurt, bewilderment, seem to be the feelings of the moment for many, many people. The country seemed to be moving ahead well - our meetings here were perhaps the best planned thing we had ever done. So now it is patience and waiting to see what is in store. For the church, we dare to believe that something good is going to happen.

For the country, it is hard to be too optimistic. Perhaps, however, as one news commentator on BBC said to another - 'the rainfall this year is probably more important to Upper Volta than who is president.'

It was a strange transition of power that took place after the fall of Saye Zerbo.

On November 7, 1982, the group of young officers had to decide among themselves who was going to be, president. There were four heads, and as one 25

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Burkinabe brother so well said, "They will have to kill each other off until there is only one,” exactly what eventually happened. A doctor, Jean Baptist Ouédraogo was finally announced as head of the new government. He was not one of the "four" and escaped being killed. He now has a private clinic in Ouaga.

Years later I was most surprised to meet this man, and to be introduced by none other than the man he deposed, ex-president Saye Zerbo! It was at a Sunday noon dinner during our Field Forum when we ate at the Silamande Hotel. Saye Zerbo was our invited guest and the other ex-president walked up to our table to greet Saye. Jean Baptist, after his time as president, was in England and while there we understand that at least his wife was converted to Christ.

This government under Ouédraogo didn't last a full year before Thomas Sankara came to power in what was another coup - number four for Upper Volta which soon afterwards became Burkina Faso - The Land of Upright People. viii Books have been written, and others surely will be, to attempt to recount all of these events. I regret never having gotten to meet Thomas Sankara nor his successor Blaise Compaoré. I had a friend who lived in Koko during those days and, if he could be believed, Sankara had been to Bobo a few days before the coup and had told this fellow's sister that the coup was going to happen. My friend described Thomas as a "bandit" or a rascal. Another friend of more recent days was an intimate of Sankara as head of the CDR (Committees for the Defense of the Revolution) at Lycée Ouezzin during the Revolution. Among his many stories, he says that the president at times drove alone to Bobo from Ouaga, under cover of darkness, to see certain people. Sometimes he had to borrow money to buy gas to get home. Stories about Thomas Sankara will fill volumes. My closest contact with Thomas Sankara was a visit that I made to his family. They lived next door to a compound where several of our Ouaga Alliance people lived. During a visit there one day my friends took me to visit Thomas's father and mother. ix Upon leaving I said to his father that I was praying much for his son. The old man lit up and blessed me profusely. But a future for Thomas Sankara was not to be. When he died, under a hail of machine gun bullets that day October 15, 1987 in Ouaga, the media described him as "having passed into legend." An eloquent orator, we often commented that if he had been converted he could have persuaded the world as an evangelist.

At 4:30 the afternoon of that fatal day I. was near downtown Ouaga at a garage when we heard the shots that killed the president and his twelve closest associates.

A few days later, as soon as I dared, I stood by his crude shallow grave which was only a few hundred meters behind our home in the Wemtenga section of the city.

Bewildered like everyone else, I pondered what all of this meant for our future. A blood stained tennis shoe lay to one side of the grave and on other graves body parts were exposed which were later covered by the people living nearby. The leader lay in a shallow hastily dug grave and behind him in a row were the resting places of his twelve close followers.

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The Alliance church in Ouaga met in those days in our home. Our flock quickly gathered there and for several days we were often together to pray and discuss the events swirling around us. One of our members was a cousin to Sankara's wife and had interesting tales to tell. Mariame Sankara herself had previously been at the mission home for a wedding reception when the Colmans lived, there, so we had met her.

Reports were that she made a confession of faith during a Full Gospel Business Men's meeting in Ouaga.' After the death of her husband she felt harassed by the new government and ultimately left the country on a plane provided by the Gabon president. In the weeks before she left, she could be seen on Sunday mornings standing beside the grave of her husband in mourning. Those were very sad days. She later studied in France along with her two sons.

Throughout all of these tumultuous times the church in Burkina Faso was never threatened. The prestige gained through the efforts of the FEME ODE, the good name maintained by the Protestant missions, plus the high profile of the Catholic church and its Cardinal Zoungrana has served well. One of the first programs to come on the television after those tense days following Sankara's death was a Catholic priest delivering a sermon. It is also significant to note that a few years after Blaise Campaor6 came to power in the fifth coup he accompanied Pope John Paul on his personal plane for the Pope's mass in Bobo. He also greatly honored the evangelist Reinhart BonnkĂŠ giving him a chauffeured limousine for his drive from Ouaga to Bobo.

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ONCE UPON A TIME When I read books like THE NIGER VISION or ALL FOR JESUS, I realize again what an easy life most of us have as missionaries today. Yes, there are difficulties, emotional strain and spiritual combat, but we do not have to watch as yellow fever claims the lives of our colleagues or our family members. We do not have to live in extremely primitive conditions. Our method of travel is pretty reliable. The lines of a hymn come to my mind: Must I be carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease, While others fought to win the prize and sailed through bloody seas?

Reading the tales of some of those early intrepid soldiers of the cross help me to renew my commitment to longtime involvement in what God is doing here in West Africa.

It was in 1890 that seven young students, with no money and no training, left the Midwest of the United States and stopped over in New York to inform Dr. Simpson of their intention of reaching the "dark Sudan" with the Gospel of Christ. Simpson and his group of disciples were fascinated with these young people and gave them lodging and food, and later paid the expenses to send them on their way by boat to the coast of West Africa. Of those seven first missionaries, four were dead within the first months, succumbing to a deadly fever, and one died the following year.

Losing five out of seven - not a very auspicious beginning for reaching the Sudan!

But this did not deter the people praying and giving back in the United States it rather incited them to more prayer and to sacrificial giving so that new recruits could be sent to replace those who had been called home to Heaven. The beach head for reaching the interior of West Africa at that time was Freetown in the English colony of Sierra Leone. Freetown was a developed town with stores, homes and transportation, even a railway leading a few miles into the interior. But from there inland the early missionaries had to travel by foot, trusting local carriers to show them the path and help carry their loads. There were swift flowing streams and often these missionaries had to use dugouts to cross over or travel their length.

Fire, local wars, sickness and death were the constant enemy of this original brave band of Christ's soldiers. And they are our spiritual heritage today, as we enjoy the fruit of what they began at the turn of the century. The interior of Sierra Leone was known as the "white man's grave" because so many people had died there. These were in the years 1890 until about 1920.

Robert Roseberry (or "Loosebelly" as the West Africans called him - they could never pronounce his real name!) was one of those early pioneers, and he arrived in Sierra Leone in 1909, a single man who later married Miss Edith Plattenburg, a single lady missionary already on the field. It was Roseberry's dream to reach the vast =reached territories of French West Africa. Until this time no Protestants had gained entry into the French colonies. But "at the close of World War I in 1918, when the peace treaties were being signed, President Wilson remembered Protestant missions. It was then that the St. Germain Treaty came into effect, opening French territories to the preaching of the gospel."" Mrs. Roseberry recounts in her book Kansas Prairies to African Forests, "In 1919 we were appointed to open the first mission station in French West Africa at Baro, nearly three hundred miles inland from the cost.�

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R.S. Roseberry was a great man of vision and prayer. He made the first survey trips into the interior of what is now Mali and Burkina, and during those trips he and his companions spent days in prayer, bathing their trip with this important ingredient of missionary achievement. These early missionaries were obsessed with reaching "the valley of the Niger River" which took them from the head-waters of the Niger in Guinea on up through Burkina and Mali to Tombouctou. Life was so difficult and so full of obstacles that at one point the mission was referred to as "The Forlorn Hope" A stalwart missionary pioneer from Tibet was sent, by Simpson to help out these early West African efforts, and he too lost his life here!

Roseberry tells of arriving in Dédougou for the first time in. 1924 and finding only "one native store". The man had two things to sell: some sugar and "one can of California peaches"!! The missionaries bought the can of peaches for sixty cents, and "had a royal feast" that evening! Dédougou developed quickly, however, for three years later in 1927 when Breidinger bought the Dédougou property, there were "twenty-five. companies (stores) and the place was booming"! xii Others joined Roseberry and his companions and were assigned to work in the "dark Sudan". The cry was "On to Tombouctou"- that mysterious city of the desert, where the Gospel had never reached; although some early explorers had succeeded in surveying the area. The Alliance survey team finally did reach Tombouctou in 1924, and the Michael Kurlaks were assigned to this outpost. There Mrs. Kurlak became very ill, died and was buried beneath that desert sand. Other cities of West Africa claimed the lives of still more missionaries. In Sikasso, Mali, in 1931 the dread yellow fever epidemic started. Mrs. Joder died first, followed' by Mrs. Anderson and a couple days later her husband. All of them are buried in the Sikasso cemetery. In Bobo Dioulasso Mary Freligh, daughter of Paul Freligh, died and was buried in the central cemetery of the city, and later the body of Mrs. Hyndman was laid to rest nearby.

When Grace and Larry Wright (parents of Tim Wright in Mali) arrived on the field they were being entertained one evening by my parents, Leroy and Audrey Kennedy. The Wrights were asking questions about some of the missionaries. Grace mentioned what a nice lady Helen Kurlak was and my Dad replied, "Yes, she's the second Mrs. Kurlak." Grace then mentioned Mrs. Joder and how friendly she had been to them, and again Dad said, "Clara's the second Mrs. Joder!" When Dad mentioned Laura Hyndman as being "the second Mrs. Hyndman", Grace turned to Larry and said, "Come on, Larry, we're going home!"

When the Second World War broke out, missionaries stayed on in West Africa for a time, thinking they were safe. But as France became involved in the War, the French colonists in West Africa became more and more anti-American and it was thought best to send most of the missionary force back to the United States. Some went by boat and a few traveled by air. Mrs. Bell, from Cote d'Ivoire, her children and the Shaw family traveled by ship from the Ghana coast. However, the ship was torpedoed at sea, some of the Shaw family was drowned and Mrs. Bell, her children, and two of the Shaw children found themselves, along with several sailors on a raft.

They spent nineteen days on that raft at sea before being rescued!

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After the War, West Africa missionaries were banging on the door of the Foreign Department, ready to come back. Our family went to live for a month in New York City when the end of the .War was imminent, waiting for a boat to take us to Africa. Finally in May 1945 we boarded a Portuguese ship. (Portugal was neutral during the War). On this ship eighty five missionaries and children (not all Alliance) started their journey back to West Africa. We went via Portugal, where we spent another month, trying to get transport down the African coast, and finally found a small ship which took twenty one of us as passengers. We landed in Guinea Bissau, and then traveled overland on an open platform truck. My five year old brother, Dave Kennedy, fell asleep in the sun and got sunstroke and had a raging fever by the time we reached Tombokounda, Mali, where we spent the night and then boarded a train going to Bamako the next morning! Think of that trip the next time you're tired with a several hour layover in Brussels with SABENA! Along with the returning missionaries in that group were also new recruits, and this encouraged Franklin Ballard and Floyd Bowman who met our train in Bamako and rejoiced that their wives and children were part of that big group of new and returning missionaries. They had gone back early, leaving their families to come when it was safer. This year of 1945 heralded a new era in missions in West Africa. The following was reported at the French West Africa field conference in March 1946: "After the return of the first two missionaries in 1942, these words were written: 'Can our God, who cleft the skies for their return, do the same for our fellow workers who are detained at home?' We are rejoicing as we behold the answer to this cry when we quote: 'Nineteen forty-five has seen the greatest number of workers, new and old, come to the field in the history of the French West Africa work.'"xiii During the ten years following this infusion of new recruits into the West African mission, it was a time of regrouping for the missionaries of the French West Africa Alliance Mission. It was a period of entering yet unreached people groups, of new strides in theological education, of looking again at our bulky administrative structure and trying to streamline that by electing "regional chairmen". Kankan had been the administrative center for too long, and it was two days distance from those working in Burkina, Mali and Cote d'Ivoire. It was also time to recognize that the mission should decrease and the church increase. This is always a hard principle to put into practice. We tend as human beings to think we are indispensable. We don't think the other person is "ready" to take over the job we have been doing. These periods of transition are never easy ones, and they were not easy in the Mali-Upper Volta of 1955! But that story will be told in another chapter Occasionally looking back to what God has accomplished is spiritually healthy. The nation of Israel often looked back to God's miracles as they sang the Psalms in their worship. And we, missionaries of the Burkina Faso field of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, can look back with gratefulness to God and to those who broke the trail into this part of the harvest field seventy five years ago, some of them laying down their lives for the sake of the Gospel.

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In his Pastoral Letter to the Church in 1983, Dr. Louis King says this: "...missions is the chief business of every Christian. The one responsibility of the church is to evangelize the world. In the Christian and Missionary Alliance the first priority of (everyone) is to work for the evangelization of the world." At the end of his Pastoral Letter he quotes A. W. Tozer, saying: “No political developments anywhere on earth can nullify Christ's imperative command. It is not our business to sit back and try to guess the outcome of this or that revolution or political maneuver. Our business is to obey the Lord, to go and keep on going until He sweeps down to call His workers home." xiv In an appendix to that Pastoral' Letter, A Reaffirmation, Dr. King gives a challenge to us as we continue to work today in Burkina Faso: "Equipping ourselves with the newest of technology, and reaffirming our adherence to the Biblical principles that gave the Alliance meaning and momentum, let us go on expecting from God spiritual accomplishments which will mightily glorify Jesus Christ." xv

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HISTORICAL HAPPENINGS BEGINNINGS IN UPPER VOLTA (BURKINA FASO) The C&MA mission work had its beginnings in and around the city of BoboDioulasso. Bobo, known as Sya by its original inhabitants the Bobo-Madare, is a city with a long history. It was favored by the French colonial powers because of its more moderate climate, good water supply and key inland location. The Abidjan-Niger railroad from the coast arrived in Bobo in January of 1934.

In 1923 Rev. Paul Freligh and his wife arrived in Bobo. Paul's sister, Marie, also joined them there for a time. Marie was known as "tall Mary" (Mariama Jan) and it was she who later became one of the principal translators of the first Bambara Bible in Mali along with Mr. Reed from the Gospel Missionary Union.

Not all of those early pioneers were physically hardy people. Richard Johanson, who followed the Frelighs, wrote in a letter to me in 1973, "Freligh could not seem to stand the climate or lack of fruit in Bobo; ran a temperature every day, always 'liverish'; moved to Guinea where he did all right; but found no challenge there, always mourned having to leave Bobo; Alliance pastor for years, then worked with the United Presbyterian church until retirement." Richard also recounted that the Frelighs worked on the Bobo language but they didn't make much progress and gave it up for Jula. The property in Bobo was secured during the Frelighs time. Jula and French services were begun in the city and continued on in that order for many years.

In 1927 the Frelighs left for furlough and did not return. At this time Marie went to Mali. While in Bobo she had teamed up with Dora Hue (later Dora Bowman) and the two single ladies did some amazing travel on foot to distant places preaching in the villages along the way. It is recorded that they went on foot as far as San in the French Soudan (now Mali). Richard Johanson was originally from a South African family that migrated to the States. He and his wife Leah were both adept in linguistics and worked hard on the Bobo language. The fruit of their labors in the language were destined to go to the bottom of the sea in a trunk in that torpedoed ship that put the Bells and the Shaws on a raft adrift in the ocean on their way home during the War. Richard must have been an intrepid pioneer. He visited a large number of the Bobo villages within one hundred kilometers or more of Bobo. He obviously had a solid missiology. He started churches in key villages in and around what has become a metropolitan area. Places near Bobo such as Dougona, Kwa and Dingasso all had chapels that he built. He saw the value of learning the local language well. Here is his appraisal of his first term. "Learning language difficult. No one knew the extent of the four dialects. Thousands of kilometers to survey on foot, by bike and later by car.

Much sickness. Authorities suspicious. People unresponsive."

Of his second term 1932-36 he wrote: "Intensive evangelism with weekly visits in various directions on same day and evening. Response to message in some villages. Some misunderstood the message, giving it political implications, freedom, redemption, salvation from their present oppression.

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(forced labor under the French). By 1934, six village chapels completed; urgent need for rural station apparent. Santidougou established on a shoe-string. Here those interested could come for laboring intermittently year-round; no one available for long term instruction. Short term Bible School and literacy classes held often. Since we now had several hundred followers, authorities' attitude changed completely to one of cooperation."

Richard wrote of his third term 1937-42: "Intensified evangelism with teams to unreached villages. Building activities permit believers to come for instruction, working part-time each day. Chattel built (Santidougou church) with $100 gift from a Florida lawyer; residence built (Santidougou house) with $485 gift from relatives in South Africa. (Bricks, blocks, lumber - hand worked, 26,000 man-hours.) School attempted for boys. Only seven could be persuaded to come. Seven year old boys cannot be spared from farming. Outstations built in Natema and Makuma, where we lived part time. Teams go out from Santidougon to witness as far as bicycles could carry them in a day. We had a Bible House at the nationwide exhibition in Bobo (1938) and got gold medal (on paper) for the pavilion and two others for fruitgrain and poultry."

Upon our arrival on the Santidougou station in 1959 we fou nd bits and pieces of language materials that the Johansons had left behind. The bulk of their efforts were lost at sea. Thus we started all over again with the local language. It was a strange feeling to pick up the work laid down some eighteen years before. How we would have loved to have had Richard Johanson around for at least a while. He seemed as one who had forgotten more than we could learn. Richard's brother, John, who spent many years in Upper Volta and pioneered the Banfora area, was not always optimistic in his outlook. Richard wrote to me in 1964 saying, "Your letter was greatly appreciated the more so because of its cheerfulness and the nice things you said. My dear brother John always tells me only of the wholesale backsliding, and the fruit trees which have died, and in general emphasizes what I already know, that 15 years of work can disappear with nothing to show for it, and a cheap house built for $500 won't stand up very long. So I won't let him talk about Bobo work and country, but only about fishing, building, politics, etc." John was also extremely gifted in language and building skills.

After the departure of the Richard Johansons Walter Pister Sr. came down from DĂŠdougou and occupied Bobo for a time. The war years found the Alliance work largely unmanned. The French priests, of course, worked on unhindered. During those years many of the Protestant converts went over to the Catholics.

At the end of the war in 1946 John Johanson came back and took up his brother's work, living for a time at Santidougou. He worked in Jula as did the many who occupied the work over the next 18 years, each one "filling in� and requesting that a couple be appointed to learn the local language.

The Leroy Kennedys arrived and the two couples shared the station, living alternately in the big house or the little straw roof bungalow built by John, according to which couple had the most children home at the time. The Johansons already had their sights on Banfora and as soon as possible moved down there.

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The little chapel in Bobo was the responsibility of the Santidougou missionaries unless there were other missionaries living in the city, as there were at times. The Possiels resided only in Bobo. French services were provided each Sunday for the few French Protestants (many military) and whatever educated Africans were interested.

Separate services in French and Jula were maintained up into the mid 1970`s. Other missionary pastors the French services were Leroy Kennedy (’58-’60), Howard Beardslee (’61-’63), Charles Bossert (’63-’65), Jim Riccitelli (’65-’67), Delmer Smith (’67-’69; Gerald McGarvey (’69-’71). He was the last missionary pastor for the French service and was followed by Tite Tienou (’71-’73), then Isaac Saye from Mali (’74’76), again Tite Teinou (’76-’78), followed by Jean Calvin Traoré (’78-’82). After those years, combined services became the order of the day.

At Santidougou the Kennedys were followed by the Hyndmans. Mrs. Hyndman had been buried in Bobo and Andrew had married one of the single lady missionaries.

Others such as the Smiths, the Crooks and the Joders also took turns occupying the Santidougou station and doing ministry in Bobo. The development of the work in other parts of Upper Volta will be referred to elsewhere but the Bobo-Dioulasso region is where it all started.

The imminence of independence for the West African countries in 1959 forced the Alliance mission to take steps to reorganize. They had gone so far as electing regional chairmen for the three major regions, and it was a short step to create three new fields in 1959: The Mali-Upper Volta, the Ivory Coast and the Guinea.

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BEGINNINGS OF AN ORGANIZED NATIONAL CHURCH

It is important to realize that all that has been reviewed up to this point is the history of the Christian and Missionary Alliance mission work in Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso, that took place during the French colonial rule. The authorities were the French administrators and it was to them that the mission and missionaries had to relate. The indigenous people were subjected to French authority. Forced labor was the order of the day. Richard Johanson referred to the peopled, "In my day they were held in the iron grip of forced labor...Every man had to work up to six months a year. It was unbelievably brutal and unfair." This is something of the environment in which mission work took place. How much of the French attitude rubbed off on missionaries we don't know but no doubt some of it did.

Arriving as we did just at the end of French rule, we only got a brief taste of it. It was a French gendarme in 1960 who gave me my driver's exam and driving license.

Otherwise, about all I remember is the departure of the French and their posts being taken overly Voltaics.

One of the most illustrious Alliance converts of the early days was Bokari Saba who died in 1946. He is lauded in the book The Soul of French West Africa in the chapter entitled, "The Passing of a Warrior". Bokari was described as a great evangelist, virtually an apostolic saint, who accomplished exploits for God. It is interesting to read in early EXCOM minutes from the 1930's the following: "It was moved and carried that we offer to Bokari Saba a place in the San district on the following conditions: that he be allowed a vacation of two months, at his own

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expense, without pay, to return home to see his people; that, on his return, he be given one hundred francs per month for the first three months, with the privilege of making a farm, and that he give one-half time to preaching the Gospel; that, at the end of the, three months, he-receive: seventy-five francs per month for three months; and that, at the end of another three: months, he receive fifty francs per month. In case he had debts in San, fifteen francs shall be withheld each month until his debts are paid."

The foregoing: perhaps gives us today an insight into the past as well as some things in the present. Was the African of those days unwittingly or unintentionally used as a pawn by the missionary pioneers? As the above remarks indicate, he was obviously controlled by the "mission". We are, after all, often the victims of our circumstances. Early missionary efforts took place in the days of French colonial rule. The Americans also came from a country where African-Americans were forced to struggle for equality. Certainly the missionaries were there in answer to a vision to reach the people with the Gospel of Christ but were there subtle undertones of which they themselves were perhaps not fully aware? It is probably an illusion to think that this was a benevolent era. France was not in Africa to develop the continent only for the sake of the African but rather for its own interests. The church that the missionaries were working to develop was within that context. The relationships between missionary and African were certainly influenced by the French. What would have happened had the continent been allowed to develop without colonial rule is an open question with only hypothetical answers. One thing is sure, Africa would be different if the European powers had not carved it up into its present maze of unnatural boundaries and created situations which people have to live with today.

We leave it to Richard Johnson to conclude our thoughts here. "It is completely impossible to convey in any way whatsoever the atmosphere and conditions of the early years. Many things were not only inhuman and cruel and utterly unfair but unbelievable. Man's inhumanity to man is indeed a cause for millions mourning."

These are the words of an eyewitness of the times.

Corning into the scene as we did in 1959 we saw the end of French rule and the early beginnings of nationhood taking place. It was definitely a transition. One of the older missionaries lived close by the railroad and often watched as the trains rolled by with, of course, French engineers at the control. I was struck one day as I heard him relate how he had seen for the first time a "black man" at the controls of the engine. He marveled that such a thing was actually possible! Several years before we arrived, and while at Nyack College, I well remember the first Area Secretary for Africa, George Constance, coming back from a trip to the fields. He had gone under orders from mission leadership to insist on the ordination of African pastors. The fields had resisted and only an order from headquarters made it happen. The reasons given by the missions were logical - or were they? The cry was always, "They are not ready." The missionaries had been at the controls for so long that the idea of giving them up was not appealing. It was easier just to convince themselves that "they were not ready." An older missionary said to me one day that his generation was finding the transition hard but had no doubt that it would be easier for mine.

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Maybe it has been, but I wonder how much we have also carried over from the past?

It is an interesting sidelight to remember that among the earliest Alliance missionaries were African Americans who, from all reports, served well. The authors of the book Jesus Only relate some very interesting facts concerning Dr. Simpson and his interest in African Americans. It was evidently a part of Simpson's vision to relate black people to the Great Commission. He helped start schools to that end, but it is stated that, "Although the three black schools did not produce the missionaries Dr. Simpson hoped for, nine black Alliance workers did serve overseas between 1913 and 1937." Tragically, from this writer's perspective, are the reported facts, "The integrated work of black and white Alliance missionaries began to unravel in the 1930's. To some extent, consequences of the "Great Reversal", along with unresolved social and racial tensions, became part of the baggage both black and white missionaries carried overseas." It cannot be denied that this is all a part of our African scene in The Christian and Missionary Alliance.

The year 1960 was the year of Independence. I found myself as a new missionary confronted with a challenge that I didn't relish. I was the only man missionary in the Bobo area. There were no French speaking African pastors. The government authorities came to the mission requesting that a Protestant service be held to help celebrate Independence and that they would be attending. I hardly felt my French ability adequate for the task but had no choice but to carefully write out a message and deliver it to mark the occasion.

At the time of Independence there was no organized national church in any of our countries. Obviously, within the missions the "not ready yet" idea prevailed.

One of my early memories is of the mission leadership discussing the meaning of what had reportedly happened in San, Mali. The story had come to the Bobo headquarters that the church leaders over there had staged a meeting and instituted a constitution for a national church. I found out later that one Mali missionary had had a hand in encouraging them to do this. Obviously it was not a mission-agreed-upon move. In these important things the mission often seems one step behind and, like the ordaining of pastors, is unprepared for the future and the inevitable. Again we do not learn from history. The church must have realized that what they were doing did not have the blessing of the mission. It was not a good beginning for the future of working together.

In 1958 the Alliance had finally reorganized the French West Africa field and established three fields instead of one. Mali and Upper Volta were left together. It is an open question as to whether this ever should have happened. Financial reasons were given and also the central Bible school at Ntorosso and the lack of a large center for administrative offices in the Alliance area of work in Mali. While on tour in the United States, I was introduced by one pastor as the missionary from "The Malty-Upper Valley." The home church always had a problem with this name.

Finallys Bobo-Dioulasso was selected as the headquarters for the field and the Leroy Kennedys moved there from Koutiala to set up the new office in 1958.

After the Kennedys' departure for furlough, the Tom Burns from Sangha in the Mali came to Bobo and Tom became mission chairman in late 1961. Tom had had experience with the Dogon church which had developed a good organization.

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Tom had visions of what needed to be done on the national level. The prevailing opinion of those days was that the Mali church was far ahead of the church in Upper Volta in its development. True or not, it led to a neo-colonialistic attitude towards the Voltaic church. Bobo made a lovely city for the mission headquarters, but the action in the church was often directed toward the Mali.

The arrival of the Burns was a turning point in the work in Bobo. Leroy Kennedy had functioned as pastor of the one Alliance church located there on the mission compound. He preached freely in both Jula and French. Before he departed he suggested to the local congregation that they form a committee to care for church matters in the future. This was at the same time that districts were organizing and starting district committees. Up until this time, it is important to remember, the mission and its missionaries were basically in control; they were driving the engines! One of my early impressions was when a certain catchies t had found it necessary to put his children into a Catholic school for the lack of any other solution. A mission leader said to me that the mission would "take a dim view of that!" Giving up control came hard and perhaps it still does.

When Tom Burns arrived in Bobo, he did not speak Jula nor feel comfortable preaching in French at that point. Coming, as he did, from a large and developed district he wanted an African pastor to take over the local church. This was obviously a step forward. His choice was Thomas TessouguĂŠ from Dogon country.

Thus Pastor Thomas came to Bobo where he had many years of good ministry. The National Church at that time was a joint union between Mali and Upper Volta. It was decided that this should be the "spiritual structure" sinc e the two countries had one mission and one Bible school. In the early 60's, however, it was recognized that each country needed to have a church organization recognized by its government. Thus we had the "spiritual" national church and the "official" individual churches. It may have been necessary for the times, but some of us resented the neo-colonial, as we called it, overtones. All mission/church activities during those years concerned almost exclusively the Mali -Upper Volta structure.

The individual national churches were mostly on paper. Komite Ba meetings were held back and forth over the border on alternate years. The Malians, missionaries and Africans, seemed to enjoy the shopping privileges in Bobo. Mission conferences were, of course, always jointly conducted as one mission even as the divergence in interests were becoming more and more evident.

By the beginning of the 70's pressure in both mission and church was mounting toward a separation. In the 1970 conference we went so far as to have a study committee appointed to look at the issue. The field chairman was strongly opposed to the idea of separation. During a meeting of this study committee, he walked in and declared that we were out of order and were to abandon the idea of separating the two countries. Shortly afterwards he left on a furlough which stretched out to three years. Mission leadership changed abruptly and the idea of separation did not go away. When the Voltaic church realized that at least some of the missionaries were for separation, it didn't take them long to move in that direction. Resistance lingered among some missionaries, largely for sentimental reasons. The thought of not being "all together" was more than some could bear.

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Tearful speeches were made on the conference floor, pleading that we not lose this "wonderful fellowship." One could ask the question, where was the idea what was best for the church in all of this?

By 1973 the die had been cast. In a national church conference, held in DĂŠdougou, the Mali and Upper Volta churches bid each other a friendly good bye and the separation was complete. The churches took pains to make it clear that there were no bad feeling in this decision but simply facing the realities of the times. This, of course, meant that the mission was now working with two national churches. The die had again been cast and the death knell of the cumbersome Mali Upper Volta mission sounded. But old structures don't die easily!

We were happy to have been on furlough in ’73-’74 when the separation became complete. Some were determined to maintain the old mission structure. But the end inevitably came. What to do with everything owned by the mission beca me a big question! There was the Bobo bookstore and its assets, the office equipment, radio equipment, motel equipment, etc. The new Mali mission was going to have to start from scratch and no one could blame them for wanting their fair share of the "spoils". The tales are many of dividing up the stuff. Probably the most picturesque scene occurred when the new Mali chairman declared that he would tak e the chairman's desk with him. The newly elected Upper Volta chairman had the advantage of weight and doggedly sat on his desk so that the Mali man could not remove it from his office! The parting of the ways didn't seem to be too smooth but no hard feelings have been evidenced in the years following. We do forgive and forget as indeed we should. These, however, are some of the "tidbits" of history and we record them for future generations who might wonder "how it all was".

As of 1974 it seemed that the Upper Volta church made a large leap forward.

Statistics, ably prepared by David Shady, indicated that the independence of the national church enabled it to come into its own and out from under the shadow of the Mali church. In 1972 the total church community was listed at 5,800 while by 1984 it had gone up to 23,168. Current figures in the 90's have doubled th at.

When the separation of the two churches took place in 1973, Rev. Thomas Diarra from the Djibasso district became national president. He had been president for many years of the "official" Alliance church in Upper Volta but now became president of the church in its new form. Pastor Diarra was French educated and led the church for two years. At that point he decided to return to Mali from which he originated. Rev. Daniel Bonzi, who had been treasurer of the newly formed Upper Volta church, became national president in 1975.

During these years of development several special conferences were sponsored by the mission which helped in the area of organization. Peter Wicharuk from Canada came for a seminar on organization and management which was attended by most of the pastors and missionaries. Virgil Gerber was with us for a seminar on Church Growth.

In the area of evangelism the New Life For All program from Nigeria became a driving force in the 70's. This program, created in Africa and for Africa, was very effective and used widely with good results. It was in the midst of those good times that Campus Crusade proposed a seminar to introduce their program and the Four Spiritual Laws. It was a good seminar but the effect seemed to be to confuse

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the church with another program from outside. We all went home and translated the Four Laws booklet but the program never took root and it seemed to also bring about the demise of New Life For All as a national program of evangelism. The church has asked for help in getting the New Life For All program started again, but the mission, for whatever reasons, has not gotten involved.

CHURCH-MISSION AGREEMENTS Church-Mission Agreements (known as "the contract") began in Upper Volta in 1976. These agreements were a procedure devised by Dr. L. L. King, then VicePresident of DOM, to help missions and churches who were not getting along. At first they were offered as a solution to fields who asked for help. But later on they were required by DOM. And so in 1976 Louis King came to Bobo for the first C/M Agreement. Each side met separately at the beginning of the week to prepare their own agenda of , items to be discussed. A specially appointed agenda committee, with equal church and mission representation, then met to put the two lists together. When this was agreed upon, nothing else could be added to be discussed by the body. Agenda items were then discussed in joint sessions. Copious notes were taken, and passed on to the secretary and translator (usually two missionaries did this work) and all minutes had to be published in both French and Jula as well as English. It was important that each document said exactly the same thing to prevent misunderstanding later on.

Finally each: side gave two or three members to a committee charged with writing up the final agreement If all went well, there was a signing ceremony and communion at the end.

Dr. King was fond of making the statement, “The church wants money and we want churches. If they give us churches, we'll give them money!" In those days Louis King had a foundation for which he was responsible to administer the money, so there were adequate funds to give the church for special projects. In 1976 a Bible School was on the agenda, a larger downtown church in Bobo, and a new bookstore, since the old bookstore had been closed during the separation of the Mali and Upper Volta missions. Dr. King dipped into "his" foundation and sent money for all these projects, which were then realized during the following year.

The second contract came in 1981, and this time Dr. David Rambo was Vicepresident for DOM. The Contract sessions were very stormy with church leaders speaking out harshly against some mission practices. At one point, after a particularly disagreeable session, Dave Rambo told the church leaders that he would not allow them to speak to his missionaries like that! After the meeting Dave said to some of us he saw no hope other than sending some of these men on for higher education so we could work with them. It was at this meeting that the church was given a truck as well as some other sums of money. Again these projects were funded by special funds available through DOM and sent to the field.

The third contract was in 1986, and David Moore officiated at the meetings, as DOM vice-president. Dave started by making a speech about "the loaf of bread" (meaning the money) he had to give the church. He only had one loaf, and it was up to them how they cut it, in big pieces or small. The church asked for a passenger car for their president as they wanted him to live in the city. Dave saw no problem with

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this and encouraged the mission to accede to this request. It was only later that the mission found out that the "goose" of King's foundation was no longer laying golden eggs, and the mission ended up having to pay for the car and other projects from their allotted budget funds! At the end of these meetings the church suggested to Dave Moore that he bring along more bread next time!

The fourth contract was to be signed in 1991, and this time mission leaders were determined to get the church leaders to agree to more frequent joint committee meetings to discuss the work. The church delegates resisted strongly, insisting that their farming did not allow them the time! The mission politely stuck to their point and the week passed and no signing was possible. But the church and mission leaders present still had communion together to end the meetings! Two years went by before another occasion occurred and in 1992 a fourth agreement was finally signed.

It is doubtful if there will ever be another Church-Mission agreement. They are not working in Mali and Cote d'Ivoire and Guinea. It is time for a new paradigm. In many ways the contract created as many problems as it solved! But these agreements were a fact of this period of mission and chur ch history.

Keeping a healthy perspective in working with the church is so important!

Christ is building His Church. Our feeble efforts may go astray, things that we do may prove unwise, some things seem beyond our understanding, but He sits above it all and sees the end from the beginning. We hope that it is, in part, "because of us" and not "in spite of us" that the Church is going ahead. How much we need His wisdom to work and to pray according to His will and for His glory.

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DISTRICT DISTINCTIVES In the early years of the Alliance ministry in West Africa, missionaries were very mobile. Regional divisions were not recognized in missionaries' stationing. You came to field conference wondering where you would be stationed. The majority of the missionaries were single or newly married, their life style was not cluttered with very many possessions, most of them seemed to have a pioneering spirit, and so they were easily moved from place to place.

But as the Gospel spread and more churches were established, missionaries began to learn local languages, instead of using interpreters from French or the trade language, and thus stayed in one place. The church was developed along ethnic lines for the most part. We must realize though, that the church did not grow at a phenomenal rate during that period as it has in the past twenty years. Those were hard times, and the spiritual fruit was for the most part handpicked. So from the mid-thirties on, ethnic regions were established and the missionaries and church leaders usually worked within that framework. This makes it difficult to give very precise dates for the beginning of the work in certain areas. The capitals of the Bwa work were DĂŠdougou and Sanekui. Much of what is part of the Djibasso, Nouna and OurouĂŠ districts today was actually originally integrated into the Sanekui, Mali, church. However, we shall attempt to put down some dates and items of interest and names of certain personnel for the ten districts of the E.A.C. of Burkina Faso, classing them in order of their dates of beginning. xvi First a few words from the report read by the church at the 50th Anniversary celebration of the Eglise de l'Alliance ChrĂŠtienne: "Today we are gathered here to remember together the work which God has done in our country of Upper Volta. In the beginning the work was done by the Protestant Mission, but since 1964 the work has been done by the Christian Alliance Church. The people of the mission and the people of the church have worked together to preach the Gospel in this country. They are planting churches and teaching and preparing workers for the work of the Gospel. They are translating the Word of God into the languages of the people of Upper Volta. They are also doing medical work which greatly helps the people of our country. The Mission wants to give (italics mine) the leadership of all this work to the Church of the Christian Alliance, and as this happens it will be a great blessing to the people of Upper Volta."

It does not seem to be clear in anyone's mind who is in charge. The Church wants to be and feels that they are, but the Mission also seems to be in charge, and this is why we often hear the church use the expression, "No body can have two heads". I think there is a dynamic here that in all our years of working together we are not understanding. Our church-mission working agreements have only reinforced the idea that we are in charge because we have the most money to give. Let us hope a new day will soon dawn when we can really sit down together, without the mission having a preconceived agenda, and talk out how we want to continue the work. This certainly happens on the district level in many areas, but it seems to be more difficult at the national level.

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SANTIDOUGOU DISTRICT The Gospel was first preached in this district in 1923, the year that the property in the city of Bobo was bought by Roseberry. The first missionaries were Mr. and Mrs. Paul Freligh, Mr. Freligh's sister, Marie, and Dora Hue, who later became Dora Bowman. The Richard Johansons joined the team in 1927. These early pioneers traveled the entire area on foot, surveying the land, preaching the Gospel and doing dialect studies to determine which dialect of Bobo to use.

In 1934 the mission station at Santidougou was established as a training center for the new converts who numbered several hundred by that time. Some of those early Christians came for protection from the French or to escape the forced labor, but among them were sincere believers. Missionaries also built out stations in distant villages and lived there while they taught the local people.

The work was curtailed during World War II as gasoline was rationed to one liter per month! So the missionaries were mainly confined to Bobo Dioulasso, and people came on foot to worship there. The Richard Johansons left for furlough in 1942 and never returned to West Africa. Frelighs had left before that in ill health, and Marie Freligh and Dora Bowman had both moved to what is now Mali and worked their until their retirement.

There followed a period of seventeen years when the Santidougou district was occupied by missionaries who had no thought of being permanent and did not speak the Bobo language. There was a succession of eight couples: the John Johansons, the Leroy Kennedys, the Robert Adams, the Ray Possiels, the Andrew Hyndmans, the Grant Crooks, the Delmer Smiths and the Fred Joders.. Each year there was the same refrain in the district report to conference: Please assign a couple to the Santidougou district to learn the language and work here permanently.

In 1959 we arrived in the Santidougou district and lived in the town of Santidougou. The mission house in Bobo was by then occupied by the Mali-Upper Volta mission chairman and administrative offices for the field. During those long years of missionaries' temporarily occupying the Santidougou station, many situations developed within the church of which the mission was totally unaware.

Imagine our shock when we found out that one of our lay preachers smoked a pipe and another was a polygamist! The Rollo Royles came in 1974, Peggy Drake in 1978; and Karen Winters in 1983. Jetty Stouten joined the team in 1989 as Peggy's partner in medical work.

In the beginnings of the work there were two lay preachers who did most of the itinerant preaching along with the missionaries, and also served as interpreters for those missionaries who did not speak Bobo. Then several men went to Ntorosso to study to be full-time workers. In 1959 there were four of these trained workers. But now in 1997 there are twenty two pastors in the work and sixteen students in theological training.

The churches are making strides in administration, teaching and reaching new areas.

The missionaries work closely with the church to determine where they should minister, and thus Milt is currently assigned to develop the new area of Lena, I have been asked to finish the Bible and the Royles have moved to F么 to develop the work in that unreached area. Peggy Drake and Jetty Stouten continue in their medical ministry

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in the city of Bobo and the district of Santidougou.

District church presidents in this district have been: Sanou Moussa, Sanou Pierre, Sanou Simeon, Sanou Etienne 1, Sanou Etienne 2, Sanou Alphonse.

DEDOUGOU DISTRICT Early in 1927 William Breidinger came to Dédougou and bought property, walled it in, dug wells and had bricks made for a house. He then went back to San (Mali) where he completed his Bambara study. That same year he married Eva, who was in language study in Sikasso, and the next day the couple headed for Dédougou to begin their ministry in this yet unreached area. What a honeymoon!

They went by bicycle and on foot to preach the Gospel in surrounding towns and after three years there were four Bwa converts.

The Breidingers then focused their ministry on the Dafing villages, as they had some contacts there, and this work grew during the 30's. By the end of 1934 there were 1,750 converts in thirty four villages, mostly Dafing. The first chapel in the Dédougou district was built in the Dating town of Bomboïla in 1935. Marie Freligh and Ruth Liebmann (who later contracted leprosy and had to leave the field) and the Joders c ame alongside the Breidingers for short periods of tune to help with the teaching in short term Bible Schools. The Joders were actually resident in Bomboïla for two years.

In 1937 the first Bwa workers returned from Ntorosso and joined the staff to help spread the Gospel message in the Dédougou district. The church in the town of Dédóguoú grew very slowly and it was not until 1938 that a chapel was built there. In the 1950's Jim and Ruth Riccitelli joined the Bwa team and they located at Ouarkoye, building a house there on a hill outside town so that he could be quiet to work at translating the Bible into the Bwamu language. When the Breidingers retired, the Delmer Smiths were appointed to Dédougou and evangelized throughout the district. The Riccitellis left the Dédougou district in 1965 and moved to the city of Bobo where he was French pastor and director of the Bookstore. Two years later in 1967 Dave and Betty Shady came to Ouarkoye, re-routed from Guinea where , they had begun their ministry. Most of the Guinea's missionary staff was reassigned at that time because of Sékou Touré's actions.

In the 1950’s Dédougou was the site of an Alliance French primary school, taught by a former Somasso school teacher. The Leroy Kennedys - and no doubt other missionaries - supported students there for several years. Students from this school later held important professional positions in the country.

Things which have had influences, both positive and negative, in the Dédougou district were the drought and consequent great influx of Mossis into the area from the north and the distribution of relief grain during the 1970's. In more recent years growth has been steady and fast in the Dédougou district, with several new areas opened to the Gospel. John and Betty Arnold were assigned to Ouarkoye in 1988, studied language and in 1994 built a station in Houndé, and have been working to help open up this mainly unreached region.

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District church presidents have been Bonzi Daniel, Boni Pierre, Tamini Blaise.

BANFORA DISTRICT The Banfora district has a long and varied history. It has traditionally included the Orodara area as well until that area was turned over by the mission to the Mennonites in 1976, as neither mission nor church was able to staff it. As early as 1937 the French administrator in Bobo-Dioulasso encouraged the missionaries there - the Johansons and Hyndmans - to establish work in Orodara, and they did this, building a small building in Orodara on leased land. But the first Mrs. Hyndman died and Andrew Hyndman and his son left for the States, the Johansons concentrated their efforts in the Banfora area, and nothing more was done in Orodara until the Leroy Kennedys went there in 1964 and spent two years evangelizing, building a small house and then leaving there in 1966 to again take the chairman's job in Bobo.

In 1937 the John Johansons (younger brother of Richard, both originally from South Africa) settled in a small town west of Banfora. Their beautiful five year old son, the delight of their life, had an intense case of malaria and died as a result. The Johansons were asked to go elsewhere and fill in from time to time he was excellent in languages and a good builder, they were both teachers but their hearts were always in the Banfora area, and they finally came back there to settle in 1947 and stayed until their retirement. They concentrated their efforts mainly among the Gwen, and John tells of having walked to village after village telling the story of Jesus. Some people in the area thought that Jesus was his name as he talked about him so much! The Johansons built the mission station in Siniena and used this as a training center for new converts.

After the retirement of the Johansons in 1969, the Leroy Kennedys filled in there for one year and they too retired in 1970. That same year Eric and Gwen Persson were assigned to the Banfora district. Two years later Ruth Springer came to join them and lived first in Banfora and later in Niangoloko. Neysa Costa lived with Ruth in Niangoloko and studied the Jula language there. Doug and Karen Conkle came to Banfora as missionaries in 1978, and have lived in Banfora and in Sindou and ministered throughout the district. Arjo and Adrie DeVroome and Henk and Adrie Van der Giessen were stationed in Niangoloko and Banfora respectively for language study, and then moved to other areas of the field for continued ministry. Brent and Susan Haggerty came to Banfora in 1987 and also lived for a short period of time in Niangoloko. The area covered by the Banfora church district has many small - and larger - unreached people groups. The Canadian Alliance sent the Goldings to work with the Senoufo people of the Banfora district in. 1994.

The church in this district has developed slowly, but now has some good, well trained leaders who are from the region. Church presidents in this district have been Yiranou TraorĂŠ, Moussa Coulibaly, Enoch HĂŠma and Sylvain Ouattara.

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DJIBASSO-NOUNA DISTRICTS It was in the 1930’s that Marius Bonjour, a missionary among the Bwa in the Sanekui district in Mali, had the vision of expanding the radius of the Gospel to include some of those areas in what is now known as Burkina Faso, specifically the Djibasso, Sanba, and Tansila areas. (Sanaba is now in the Solenzo district and Tansila in the Ouroue district.) There was a restricted migration of peoples within a small area at that time, and some villagers from the Burkina side went to Sanekui and heard the Gospel, returning with the message to their own village. Some workers from Sanekui came over to the town of Kemene to disciple these new believers and thus the work started. In another town a young animist had a repeated dream which troubled him, and about the same time he met up with Christians from the village of Kemene, and he was also converted. So the message began to spread, very slowly at first. Sanekui continued to send workers to teach new believers in the Djibasso-Nouna area. The local people became concerned about people turning to Christianity and persecution began: Christians were put in prison, others were tied up and beaten, some hid portions of Scripture in the rocks so that they could go and read the Word in secret.

Floyd Bowman wrote about the entry of the gospel into this area: "In 1939 several towns were opened to the gospel in the subdivision of Nouna, with remarkable success in every place. In some towns there was an enrollment of from sixty to seventy Christians. But the fetish worshipers did not like to have their children become Christian, and tremendous persecution began, resulting in driving many of the Christians out .of their towns." Mr. Bowman continues, recounting an experience in Doumbala during an evening meeting held there: "The three Bible School students (with us) gave long testimonies....when they had finished Jacques, my interpreter, got up and talked at great length...At last I got up to say what I thought would be a few words. The eagerness with which those dark, faces peered into .mine as I spoke aroused in my heart a sense of responsibility and inspiration and I started to preach to them.The more I preached, the more eagerly they listened and the more they listened, the more I preached. At the close of my message I called for those who wanted to repent, and twenty-six responded and prayed in Jesus' name."xvii This area begged and prayed for their own missionary, and in 1946 wrote the following in a letter addressed to the French West Africa field chairman, whom they address as "Pastor in chief�: "We the Christian leaders of Nouna are gathered together to send this petition to you in the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to beg of you this one thing: It is this, to petition you for a missionary who will sit in the Nouna district. We beg of you, we beg of you, we beg of you. Give us a missionary in order that our people may not go down into perdition. We had heard that Monsieur and Madame Tyler were coming to Nouna. We were filled with joy. Now we hear that you want them to go some other place. We have wept over your name. Our hearts have turned to water, our strength is finished. Oh, our big. chief, hear these poor people and give us Mr. Tyler. We beg you to send Mr. and Mrs. Tyler to the Nouna people.... Signed by Karifa, Dube, Job, Paul, Peter."xviii Rosalys and Fordy Tyler went to Djibasso to work in the district in 1947. They were joined by Lin and Myrna Ballard in 1962, and the Ballards eventually built

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the mission station at Nouna and moved there. Carolyn Burge and Mary Crowgey were stationed together in Djibasso until Mary came to work in Bobo-Dioulasso.

Carolyn stayed on in Djibasso until 1994.

The Nouna and Djibasso districts have always been closely associated, but they split up organizationally in the late 1970's. The church president in Djibasso has been Philippe Dembélé from the beginning of the church's organization there. Moïse Traoré was president in the Nouna district until he moved down to the Solenzo area.

Dao Daniel has been church president in Nouna. .

TOUGAN DISTRICT Tougan district has had its share of "colorful" personalities in its missionary staff! Pop and Helen Martin were the first ones to take the Gospel to this area. Pop had lost his first wife in. the northern desert area of Gao, Mali, and he later married Helen Sherwood who was a teacher and a writer. It was Helen Martin who helped with the editing of Roseberry's books, The Niger Vision and The Soul of French West Africa. The Martins were very "upbeat" people, with a great sense of humor. "Uncle Pop and Aunt Helen" were always our favorites for driving us in the huge mission truck down to Mamou in Guinea for school! They first lived in the town of Sourou and later moved to Tougan.

Pop Martin wrote about a baptismal service in the town of Siena: "You who have prayed faithfully cannot help but rejoice to hear that there were eighteen baptisms in Siena recently. But for us who are in Africa is reserved the joy of knowing personally those who took the step, what it cost them, and what a testimony their lives will be because they were willing to follow the Lord in baptism... Siena...in the rainy season is... a forty-mile trip by a roundabout road.

We planned to get started at sunrise Sunday morning, reach Siena for the morning service, and proceed to the little pond for the baptismal service...Ten miles up the road we were waved down by a group of young people. 'We heard you were going to have a baptismal service in Siena today and we walked over to the highway here to wait for you. May we go along and be baptized?' ...They...had waded through five miles of mud and water to get to the main road. They would be the first baptized Christians in the town of Dyere! At Tougan we picked up our native worker, Basan. By this time our poor little pickup truck was groaning under a double capacity load. The only thing light about it was the hearts of the passengers! We could hear them singing... as we splashed through the water...Back in the church in the late afternoon we partook of the Lord's Supper.

The prayer of Basan as he committed the newly baptized ones to the Great Shepherd drenched our souls in unspeakable joy." xix Before the Martins retired Emma Wooledge, an RN, arrived and worked at the dispensary and maternity in Sourou. The Martins moved to Tougan when the Nehlsens arrived and settled in Sourou in 1956. Jessie also worked in the dispensary.

Emma Wooledge left for furlough and got married and later she and her husband came back to Burkina with the WEC mission. In 1957 Betty Blanchard and Esther Kuhn began a teaching ministry which was greatly appreciated by both the mission and the church. They felt God had led them to this district to stay.

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And this is one of those hard to understand chapters in history. We were just new missionaries when Esther and Betty came back from furlough, all excited about returning to their teaching ministry in the Tougan district. But the mission executive committee had other ideas. They needed a teaching team at Baramba in Mali and were insistent that these women submit to the will of "the mission" and go to Baramba. The women resisted and the excom insisted, so Esther and Betty went to Baramba much against their will and protesting to everyone who would listen.

Several months later Esther had a complete nervous breakdown, was brought to Bobo in a pitiful condition and had to be flown back to the United States, never to return to West Africa. However, Betty Blanchard stayed on at Baramba and found there a very profitable ministry until her retirement many years later.

Dick and Lillian Phillips came to the Tougan district in 1978, studied the local language, lived in Toma, and produced a New Testament in San before their retirement in 1995. The Phillips came back to the field for a year in order to produce more teaching materials for their people. The Nehlsens spent a long, ministry-packed life in the Tougan district, working with the church in the training of workers, developing of a medical program; reaching into the unreached people groups of the area. Their last two years on the field were spent in Bobo as field director. Jetty Stouten and Joke Blumink came to Tougan from Holland in 1984, and Joke is still working in Tougan in extensive medical work, as well as being involved in a teaching Ministry with the church.

Church presidents in this district have been Etienne Drabo and Jacques Tony.

OUROUE DISTRICT Ourouré district is another area which in the' 1940's was visited by workers from the Sanekui district in Mali and the Gospel was preached in several towns.

Even today- one area of the Ouroué district is all Bwa villages. The Bobos of the area were resistant to the Gospel, but finally a few did receive Christ and some went to Bible School at Ntorosso to prepare for ministry among their people.

Among these were Claudias Tiénou, father of Dr. Tite Tiénou, from the town of Ouroué itself. Luka Couiibaly was another early convert and one who trained at Ntorosso, and his son is also a pastor in that district today.

The mission entered this area in the mid 50's, with Grant and Eunice Crooks being the first missionaries there. They built the mission station at Ouroué and, with the church, evangelized in every town they knew of in the district before their retirement in 1985. The 'Crooks' worked in this area during the hard years when the response was not strong. They had very few pastors to work with. And when the Mali war closed the border, it also meant the end of the close ties with some of the larger Bobo churches on the Mali side of that border. Later the Van der Giessens had a profitable ministry in Ouroué and were sad to leave there to return to Holland because of health problems. Today the number of pastors and students in training has greatly increased and augurs well for the future of this district.

The church presidents in this district have been: Luka Coulibaly and Daniel Djonou.

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BOBO DISTRICT The beginnings of the work in the Bobo district are the same as that of the Santidougou district. The city of Bobo (or Sya as the Bobos call it) has always been the cultural and administrative capital of the Bobo Madare people. But as in all large cities, there is a mixed population, and it is among these various ethnic groups the work developed during the years after the Second World War. Another event that affected the work in this district was the moving of the Mali-Upper Volta mission administrative offices to Bobo-Dioulasso. Until 1961 there was only a missionary pastor for the Bobo city church. There was just the one Alliance church until 1972 when the Santidougou district started the church in the Ouezzinville -Sud area of town, and put one of their district men there as pastor.

But in 1961 when Tom Burns came as mission chairman to Bobo, he came from an area in Mali where he spoke only Dogosso. Because he could not speak Jula, he could not pastor the central church in Bobo, and so he brought with him a Dogon pastor, Pastor Thomas Tessougué, who became the pastor of the Bobo church. The Santidougou district was not consulted because this local church in Bobo had always been under the umbrella of whatever missionary lived in Bobo.

Pastor Thomas was a fine man, appreciated by the local people and had a good ministry.

It was at an annual church conference of the Mali-Upper Volta church in 1963 that the Bobo district was created. Thomas Tessougué was elected as vicepresident of the Mali-Upper Volta church at that conference and then someone happened to think that he was not a president of a district, and thus they had violated their church by-laws. Mark Keita, national president of the church and a Malian, said that that was no problem, he would just declare Bobo Dioulasso a district. And from that time on it was a district by itself, with only one church until in 1976 the Sarafaralao church was started and a group in the town of Samadeni associated itself with the Bobo district about the same time. Since then the district has continued to grow and has produced many pastors of various ethnic origins.

The early missionaries in Bobo have already been mentioned in the Santidougou district report. In addition to those mentioned the Leroy Kennedys worked with this church, also the David Kennedys, first as youth workers and later with the church as French pastor. Others who functioned as French pastors were: Howard Beardslee, Charles Bossert, Jim Riccitelli, and Gerry McGarvey.

Missionaries involved in teaching at Maranatha Institute have also worked in the Bobo churches through the years. In addition to these, the Bob Kauffmans, the Darren Rurups, Neysa Costa and Michelle Tatum have served with the Bobo district in various capacities. Jim and Beth Albright are currently working with this district church.

Church presidents for this district have been: Thomas Tessougué and Samuel Sanou.

SOLENZO DISTRICT The background of Solenzo would be that of Djibasso and Nouna. There are pastors in this district who came from both of these areas. Moïse was one of the first converts of the Bwa in the Djibasso district, and he is the lad who had the dream which led to his eventual salvation and going to Bible School. As a young

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man he used to walk on foot over much of the Bwa territory, evangelizing and winning converts for the Lord. Finally in the mid-70’s he went down to a rich farming area near the Volta River, to a place called Tié. He began a church there and branched out into that area, which was not far from, the larger center of Solenzo. The church purchased property in Solenzo town and Lin Ballard oversaw the building of the church building there. In 1990 Dave and Rebekah Hankin went as missionaries to the unreached people of the Solenzo district and built a mission station in the town of Solenzo. There are also large groups of Samo people who have settled in this area because of the drought in their home country, and many of them have active churches and pastors.

Moïse Traoré is still titular president of the Solenzo district, but he has given most of the, work over to Emmanuel Moukoro, who is the executive secretary of that district.

OUAGADOUGOU DISTRICT The Alliance vision for the cities has come slowly in most of West Africa.

Ouagadougou was an open door for many years before the Burkina Alliance mission finally entered it. The Assemblies of God were in Bobo for ten years and had several churches there before the Christian and Missionary Alliance planted their first church in the capital city.

It started in 1980 when David Kennedy was mission director. Some of us on the EXCOM promoted the idea of a move into Ouaga. David and I started making monthly trips to Ouagadougou, holding Sunday afternoon meetings in the homes of Alliance people. Many of them were those youth who had been in David's youth group while students in Bobo. Some of our Alliance people were not happy with us that we had waited so long before beginning. Others, even though active in other churches, were eager for us to do something permanent. Once a month contacts were maintained until we left on furlough in mid-1983. During our absence no one was available to carry them on but upon our return in 84- the excom authorized the continuation of' these monthly visits.

Again in the director's office in '85-'86, I had the opportunity to effect a move into the capital. I walked the streets and drove all over the city looking at potential properties. President Bonzi was with me on at least one visit and we looked together at vacant lots. These were the years of the Revolution and property was difficult to acquire. By the time of the 1986 conference we had pretty well convinced the Peter Colmans that they should become our church planting team in Ouagadougou. It was hoped that the national church would also name a pastor to join the project but that did not materialize quickly. One night during the conference the Colmans were meeting with the Personnel Committee. Rather than centering on the vision of Ouagadougou, the -discussion involved the potential problems and the slowness of the church to appoint a pastor to go with the missionaries. Peter and Judy began to waver in their commitment to go to Ouagadougou, but were finally convinced that this was the right time and moved to the capital.

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Thus began what was to be an exciting year of ministry for the Colmans. They were the perfect couple for the task. Peter's exuberance bubbled all over the city and soon most people knew that the Alliance Church had finally come to town. In their spacious house in the Wemtenga section of the city, the Colman began Bible studies.

By the time the schools opened they were ready to start Sunday morning services.

The house was big and thirty or more could fit inside. Very shortly that was too small and they moved onto the verandah. A few weeks later Peter erected a hangar and the church occupied the front yard where it was to stay for several years.

Nancy and I had from the beginning stated that we would fill in in Ouagadougou our last year before furlough while Colmans were scheduled for their furlough. That became for us what we often refer to as the best year of our lives. It was a pastoral ministry and we enjoyed all of it. Ouagadougou proved to be a city where people's hearts and minds were open; an ideal place for church planting. The opportunity to work with highly educated people and people from many backgrounds was a pleasure. The Russ Luthers had come in the meantime and we enjoyed working with them for that year.

The search for property went on but it didn't get easier. 1986-87 was the year of political turmoil in the capital city. Thomas Sankara was assassinated.

Uncertainty often prevailed. We left for furlough and the Colman returned. By this time the national church was ready to send a pastor and Thomas TraorĂŠ from Banfora was selected. Property search continued, carried on with what was by now a church committee of qualified laymen and their Burkinabe pastor. Property was finally found in secteur 30 and the taxes paid and papers issued. Then more disappointment as a Muslim group quickly built a crude mosque and began to pray on our property. Some became discouraged and it was said that the Alliance would never get land in Ouagadougou. Quiet diplomacy and patience (plus lots of prayer!) paid off and later the government called in our leadership. They expressed regret for what had happened and their inability to correct it since it involved religions. Their proposal was that they give us another piece of property and avoid a confrontation. It was a day of rejoicing when the church leaders discovered what had happened. The Eglise de l'Alliance ChrĂŠtienne had been granted a property three times as large as the former one and in a much better location just a few meters off the rapidly developing city Bypass. Since then the SIAO exposition grounds have been built within a kilometer and the whole area is one of the choice parts of the city. Mamadou ToĂŠ later joined the pastoral staff and the Tim Albrigthts went to Ouaga under CAMA services and then the Steve Clousers served there for three years. Carolyn Burge and the Burgs are part of the Ouagadougou staff, concentrating on the outreach to the Mossi. The church in Ouaga holds great promise for the future.

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THE WAY WE WERE When reading through the reports and articles of those early missionary' pioneers in West Africa, it is, amazing to see how they cheerfully coped with some very difficult situations. They were hardy people, coming from North America during a much less affluent time. But they did miss the amenities of home at times. In 1942 Mr. Roseberry was returning by pontoon plane to West Africa, via Monrovia, Liberia, and he wrote the following to his wife back in Ohio: "It began to pour rain...but stopped as we swooped to a landing on the lake. A boat came out to take us and we were soon on shore in the customs hut...Another plane put us on the Firestone Plantation in Liberia. We had an interesting ride to the airport on a tractor undignified but much better than walking... (At the Firestone Plantation) we are being entertained in a house of modem construction....not quite as nice as the little home in Toledo. No corn to hoe, no beans, no roses, but it is good for Africa, very good." xx Travel is mentioned often in those early reports. In 1919 a lady missionary had written from Liverpool that she was waiting for steamship accommodation to return to the United States. There is such a congestion of ocean travel at the present time that she finds one thousand applications ahead of hers and she must wait her turn."xxi In those early days of the Alliance, through the 1930's, every missionary candidate had to raise the money for his own transportation to the field. For the return trip, you made plans for furlough and prayed there would be enough in the mission treasury to pay for the trip. There are many prayer requests, asking people to pray for Mrs. So-and-so who is not well, that the Lord will supply the funds for her transportation back to the homeland!

Everybody also walked in the beginning years of the work in West Africa, although some people did have cars. I remember Marie Abramson telling me of walking from Bamako to Kankan, by way of Siguiri, with a companion and carriers for baggage, stopping in every village along the way to share, the gospel. People did not own private cars or trucks for many years.

However, things changed in the 1940's. Dr. Snead wrote: "In a large area in French West Africa the only missionary couple among a great tribe was recently forced to carry on their work as best they could without a car. Although the mission station was in a large city, the center from which the best work could be done and the most fruit gathered for the Lord was at an outstation where a caravansary was built for a temporary mission residence. The only mode of transportation other than walking in the hot tropical sun was by bus. Day after day the missionary couple would walk the mile or two for a bus, and then have the bus hurry by because it was so heavily loaded that no other passengers would be taken. Such conditions are a waste of life and money. It is generally recognized that to have proper means of transportation is essential for the successful carrying on of any business or ministry which requires travel."

Mission trucks were ordered and were stationed in strategic areas to be used by all missionaries. Lura Ballard wrote in 1946: "At last we have the truck that has been so long coming. Mr. Ballard had to go to Bamako to get it but before he could bring it home he had to assemble it piece by piece. It was not easy‌ but the truck works

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fine, and it has already been a blessing to the work. Tomorrow it will start out on its first long trip. Mr. and Mrs. McKinney will accompany twenty-one young Christian men and women to the Central Bible School at Ntorosso. Then in three more weeks it will take three of the missionary men to committee meeting in Kankan. On its return trip it-will carry our children ...home from school."

Lucy Hillman wrote about an interesting trip from Tombouctou to Mopti, by horse and river boat. She had been visiting the Bowmans in Tombouctou. "After a hurried breakfast and a fond farewell to Dora..., Mr. Bowman and I mounted the horses that were saddled and waiting for us...Down the sandy, narrow, zigzag streets of Tombouctou we went and out into the open spaces where groups of black soldiers were exercising in the early dawn, and finally on the clean, sandy road that leads to Korioma, fourteen kilometers away. We forded the water with safety....What a beautiful sight to see mirage after mirage on the desert! But alas the going was slow because my horse was knock-kneed. At last we reached Korioma, and while Mr. Bowman mended the sail and helped the men to load the boat, I talked with Salifou... and his wife… The Evangile was to be my home for seventeen days....Many beautiful pictures are hanging permanently in the art gallery of my memory. The mother camels in the big Touareg chiefs camp, with their young beside them. A dear, chubby Touareg baby sitting on the sandy beach in the morning sun. A gorgeous evening sunset and ten dugouts being paddled in close file....Shall I ever forget the hundreds of crocodiles that basked in the hot sun on the banks of the Niger; or the big hippopotamus that lifted his head out of the river to gaze at us as we passed, or the thousands of birds, or the chattering monkeys… And the moon!

Who can ever forget the moonlight on the Sahara desert? That evening the men had to get off the boat again and again to push it off the sand bars....The water was only knee-deep in places, and with our heavy load of wheat it made going very difficult…

(The next) evening the men seemed glad to halt at a place where the ground was dry and where they could spread out their mats. Native boats were stopping there for the night and soon a group of amazed men and women gathered to listen to 'the box that talked'… One man declared he would never forget that lovely music. So then I told them of the heavenly music that awaits us if we belong to the Lord Jesus....Under the stars and the moon I sat beside the now silent Victrola and told of the Savior...of the song of peace He puts in our hearts, and of the future joy that awaits all who trust in Him. Along the banks of the Niger each day the message of salvation is being told to perishing souls."xxii It sounds romantic reading it, but this was not an easy trip alone, for a young single missionary!

Lucy Hillman was a lighthearted soul. She wrote to someone in 1943: "A package containing. Sunday School papers came in the last mail.... There was also a brand new calendar...When I opened it, it was for 1942 and had been on the way for a year! However, I have a 1937 calendar and that does for this year very nicely. Ever since the war cut off our supplies, we make our own calendars." (That's without computers, by the way!!)

In 1928 another report was written of itinerating in French West Africa, this one by Leah Johanson, Richard's wife: "We itinerated on the old Sikasso road.

There are real bush Bobo villages there. We could only go seventeen kilometers

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in the auto, but made the villages on foot....We had one great hike to a village where it seemed the Lord had been preparing the soil‌Here and there (the Bobo people) are becoming friendly and more open. They are a fine people. Folks do not know what they are talking about when they call our Bobo people lazy, ugly, fierce, etc. They are the best workers we have seen anywhere... (In another village) Bobo women came to greet me by the dozens. When we left on the second day they said, ‘We are going to build a room for you so you can come and sit among us and teach us.

We haven't any house fit for you here'....(During our stay) I borrowed everything; our one carrier could only take my bed and a few eatables. Richard slept in a native hammock. What a struggle he had keeping in it, and what a battle he had to keep the mosquitoes from devouring him as his net would not stay putt It is the hunger season now, and here in Boboland they know real hunger. It is pathetic.

There isn't a grain of the old crop left, and the corn is not yet ready...the only thing they are living on is green, half-developed corn. We find it hard to exist (out here) ourselves as there is no rice, meat, chickens, eggs or milk. It makes it a bit hard... but we are not going to stick on the station so long as we can get out. We love the bush country and getting among our own people. We are getting hold of the language out here as we never could in town."

In an article written in 1935, Harry Wright, pioneer missionary with the Assemblies in Ouagadougou in 1923 and later the one who opened up the Koutiala region of Mali for the Alliance, wrote about his visit to the "Sahili": "Sahili! That magic name we first heard in 1915 when we arrived in Sierra Leone that mysterious Sahara where the natives say men were purified and made holy by their conquests for, Mohammed!....My wife and I were invited to make a deputation trip to Ciao and Tombouctou. We used not the camel, but our Model A Ford.... We packed the Ford full of gasoline and water; took our suitcases and bed roll, and with a native evangelist as interpreter, left Mopti....After sundown we entered Douenza, only to be informed that there were no rooms vacant for transients. We assured the Assistant Administrator that all we needed was a jar of water as we had our food and slept in the car, which could be converted into a bed. He said we could drive the car into the yard for protection from wild animals....(The next day) just at noon we arrived at the deserted post of Hombori, the most desolate place we have ever visited.... We were given the abandoned residence of the Administrator for the night...From behind the house we had our first glimpse of the Sahili....just as wonderful as one could imagine...What desolation! We invited the people to come to hear the gospel story but none appeared....(Later) we were awakened from a sound sleep by a noise...the old men were arriving for the service we had promised for them‌We hastily arose, called the evangelist, and began to break the Bread of Life to them. They continued to gather until more than two hundred sat there in the moonlight...Some lingered after the others left, and to the school teacher we gave a New Testament." Mr. Wright goes on to tell of their arrival in Tombouctou, that legendary city of the desert, after being stuck in the sand for four hours. And he describes the solitary Christians in that area, Touareg converts who had rejected Islam, at great personal sacrifice, to follow Christ." xxiii This is the same missionary who when itinerating in the Koutiala district had a hard time getting a crowd because of a large animistic gathering taking place in the village where he had come to preach.

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So he caught the attention of two or three people, and started working away at his teeth with great gusto, and then with a final effort, he pulled out his upper plate (of false teeth!). By the time he had the bottom plate out too, he had his crowd and preached to them the gospel!

These were missionaries who were content with very little, and considered the work of the gospel first. Mrs. Andrew Hyndman wrote a letter from Bobo Dioulasso on February 27, 1937, telling of their latest trip among the Gwen people, that four more young men came to have their names written as inquirers.

She wrote: "We have written to the Governor asking permission to open work in Diarabakoko and Banfora among the Gwen people. It is our desire to rent a piece of land...and put up a small house so that we can live there. Carrying on that work from here, a distance of 102 kilometers, if not satisfactory." But Esther Hyndman was never to realize her dream of a little home among the Gwen. On June 2 of that same year, in the city of Bobo, Esther died very unexpectedly of septic poisoning.

Clara Joder, a mission nurse, wrote of her home-going: "At 6:10 in the morning, just at sunrise, she slipped away to be with Him she loved: The French people....furnished a beautiful, polished, hardwood casket. We buried her at sunset, many French people as well as natives walking the mile from the house to the cemetery.... John Johanson told of Esther's conversion... (and) how God had called her to the field...Mr. Roffe followed with a prayer in English. Mrs. Roffe sang...Just before the service a group of natives came in, knelt around the casket, prayed for the husband, and gave themselves anew to their. Savior....The sun was setting in a golden glow as we laid Esther in her last resting place. Sunset here, but sunrise in glory!" Yes, those were difficult days - no antibiotics or emergency medical trips to the homeland. You came and you knew it was for life!

THE SECOND WORLD WAR YEARS The Alliance Weekly of September 7, 1940 stated: "There is now announced the possibility of the occupation of the city of Dakar in French West Africa by Germany. If this should be achieved, the question of our mission in French West Africa might become acute. Up to the present the surrender of France has not affected in any noticeable way the conditions in that great colonial area."

In March the following year this announcement was made in the Alliance Weekly: "While earnestly hoping and praying that all work in French West Africa can continue without hindrance, precautionary action has been taken by the Foreign Department, as shown by the following cable sent March 13 to Rev. C.C. Ryan, Chairman: 'Cabling you $5,000 available missionary travel when needed. If any missionaries especially those in ill health and mothers with children desire go Gold Coast en route America Executive Committee should release and assist.' No evacuation has been ordered or advised, but if any change becomes necessary, proper provision is thus made."

A few months later, in November, the Alliance Weekly informed its readers: "French West Africa is cut off from the outside world by a strict blockade and only a few of the missionaries there whose furloughs are overdue, have with great difficulty made their way to the coast and found passage home. Meanwhile, those behind the blockade have pursued the work with vigor and unusual blessing, and

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at home longer than regular furlough are anxious to return, but are prevented from doing so by lack of passports and passage."

And what of those here in West Africa , during those days of the blockade?

Here is what Helen Martin wrote about their experiences: "The French can put you in jail and make you feel that they are doing you a favor, especially when the jail is your own mission station in San. (Mali) They came out (to Ntoroso) with a big Chevrolet truck and an explanation that relations between France and America were a little bit strained; and with a this-hurts-me-more-than-it-does-you attitude, bundled us all into San. We spent three weeks there in perfect leisure; no one bothered us, and the government and military officials were all courteous and considerate. They kept the letter of the law to perfection - 'All Americans to be interned' - but the spirit with which they did it showed us where their hearts really were. When the little North African fracas was over,- and we could close up our San house and return to Ntoroso and the opening of Bible School, it was with the good wishes and congratulations of all of our French friends....Then as if that were not enough, along came Pastor Keller, to be the, representative to the government of all the Protestant missions in French West Africa. He was a blessing to us...a fine Christian gentleman and a missionary of long standing. He has his office in Dakar and smoothes out any tangles that we Americans or Protestants might have with the government. So here we sit in the same house in Ntoroso, in the -same French West Africa, with the same sun shining down on us....We look forward eagerly now that missionaries will be able to return to the field; we look forward with eager hope to being once again a part of the world we once knew. Mail service is open again!" 2 Gasoline was almost nonexistent and kerosene was also lacking for lamps.

Alliance Weekly readers were informed: "Missionaries, are now unable to secure any kerosene for lanterns and must resort to the use of primitive, smoky yellow lights given by small wicks burning vegetable oil. This is a great hindrance in teaching reading classes at night."

In the Alliance Weekly the prayer requests continued: * "Praise for the marked blessing of God resting upon the work of our 36 missionaries carrying on behind the blockade. Pray that their health may be preserved despite the lack of many articles of diet formerly imported but now unobtainable." * "Pray that God will rule and overrule in the kaleidoscopic changes, both military and political, now taking place." * "Several families whose furloughs were due last year, only recently have obtained passage and are now en route across the Atlantic on different steamers. Pray for their protection and safe arrival.'"° Mrs. Bell and her children were among those who did not have a safe passage on the ship in which they had sailed from the Gold Coast (now Ghana). The October 10, 1942 issue of the Alliance Weekly passed on a report from New York papers stating that "Mrs. Bell and her (two) children, with 14 other men, women and children of missionary families, had arrived at Bridgetown (Barbados) after drifting for nearly three weeks on a tiny life raft following the torpedoing of their ship‌ '(The children) kept us going' one of the survivors said. ‘They sang every day and were 2

Affiance Weekly article by Mrs. W. S. Martin, July 3, 1943.

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always completely cheerful, and they maintained faith in God all the while."'

The blockade was finally lifted and equipment and personnel began once again to flow into French West Africa. The Alliance Weekly reports: "With our work in French West Africa expanding once again after the lifting of the blockade, much new equipment is needed: one or two trucks and repair parts and tires, a printing press and equipment, a lathe and other tools, paint, nails, chalk, etc., etc. Pray that priorities and permits may be obtained for the purchase and shipment of these things in spite of wartime restrictions." With the advent of a large group of new and returning missionaries to the French West Africa field in 1945, a new era was ushered in as reported elsewhere in this historical account.

NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN During the '70's ' and the 80's, and even to our present day, much has been written about “missiology”. We hear of new paradigms and developing strategies and Muslim task forces and team work and unreached people. We set dates and organize the world according to our North American concepts and worldview.

And we tend to forget that many of these current "buzz words" in missions are nothing new. They are as old as the Early Church who evangelized their known world! There really is nothing new under the sun. Just consider the mentality, courage, planning and enthusiasm of those who have gone before us in French West Africa, as reflected in their writings: Rev. R.S. Roseberry was a great man of passion for the lost, a man who planned his campaign carefully and bathed it in much prayer. I can still remember from my childhood hearing him crying out to God in prayer! His strategy always called for hard work, sacrifice and much prayer. In 1952 this man of God was recognized by the French government and accorded the Cross of Chevalier de 1'Ordre National de la Légion d'Honneur. "During most of his forty three years of foreign ministry Mr. Roseberry has been chairman of the French West Africa Mission; under his leadership it has continually advanced into pioneer territory.”xxv Pop Martin was another pioneer missionary who had a heart for unreached peoples. He worked for years among the desert people of the north in Mali.

During his last years on the field, before 'retirement, he and his wife, Helen, opened up the vast Samogo region. In 1949 he wrote about reaching the Pana people, neighbors of the Samogo. He speaks of the challenge of wide open doors and continues, "Shall we wait until Communism has rallied ignorance and hatred to its standards? Shall we wait until the resurgence of fiendish paganism has turned waiting masses into beasts? Shall the persistent claims of Mohammedanism to be 'the black man's religion' win at last? Shall we tarry until Rome has taken over the educational system? Only we would be to blame! It is not easy to sit and listen to the hard, stinging truth that hundreds who asked us to come first had tired of waiting and succumbed to false teachers." He goes on to talk of their visit to Poro, among the Pana people, and how eagerly the people began to learn to read the Word taught to them. At the end of his article he writes, "Do you think anything will keep us from returning to Poro? We ran out

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of books, we ran out of food, but we came home to stock up and return…something happened to our hearts at Poro. It was this: if the Lord gives us strength, we plan to give this coming year to our people, rather than taking our furlough. We are on our way home now – to Poro!. That’s the real pioneer spirit!

In 1930 the following report was given: “A member of the Sankaran tribe – a tribe untouched by missionary work – confesses Christ and is one of three baptized in Faranah. A Lobi, also the first of his tribe to accept Christ, is baptized in Upper Volta. A pagan tribe, the Tanda, whose chiefs have forbidden them to accept Mohammedanism, on penalty of death, is wholly without a gospel witness.

The back page of the Alliance Witness in the 1950’s reported the following facts about French West Africa: “This is geographically the largest Alliance field…To evangelize a population of 5,000,000 we have 124 missionaries and 150 native workers…Only one missionary couple is working among 150,000 Samogos and only one couple works in the Fouta-Djallon branch of the Foulahs, numbering over 800,000…Alliance workers use 24 languages to proclaim the gospel” Another page in the Alliance magazine of 1935 lists the tribes of French est Africa which were being reached as: Foulah, Meninka, Kisi, Gouransi, Bambara, Sousou, Gberese, Toma, Senou9fou, Koroboro, Kuanko, Sonhrai, Touareg, Habbes, Boso, Red Bobo, Black Bobo, Gwen, Mandes, Yulunka.

In 1944 John Johanson had a strategy all worked out for the unreached peoples of the Banfora district, whom he had stydied at length. Here is his report: “To my own personal knowledge, in that radius of about sixty miles, there are still the following unreached tribes, each with its own unrelated language, and approximate population indicated: Toussian, 18000; Siemou, 8,000; Nieniega, 20,000; Karaboro, 12,000; Toukan, 15,000; Samala, 4,000; Wara, 3000; and several others, besides a large portions if the great Senoufo tribe with ten thousands of souls…The will insist it surely cannot be so easy to reach these tribes. Let me tell you just how simple it actually is. Send us a missionary couple, equipped with a car and about two thousand dollars for building. A suitable site may be chosen in the tribe, application made to the Government, and permission granted to open a station. Native style huts can be built in a few weeks, and the missionary live in them while building the bungalow. The missionary can carry a notebook and while working with the native laborers, write and learn words and phrases of their language. His wife can do the same with the help of a native boy who has attended government school and knows a little French. Within a year they can be living in the completed bungalow, with a vegetable garden and fruit trees already planted. Regular Sunday services and week night classed by this time will be carried on. Probably some of the laborers and their families will have been converted during building operations. Some contacts no doubt will have been made in nearby villages since the missionaries can already speak the native language, albeit with stammering tongue. It will also be know by this time in the tribe that these strangers are teachers of the way of God….The gospel could be made available, just in this manner, to many of the above named tribes…When will they be reached? And to ou9r shame we must answer, Not yet!”

It took us a long time to get to our capital city, Ouagadougou. But those early pioneers had a burden for that region too. What about this report by 46

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Mr. Roseberry, written in 1923? “ From Bobo-Dioulasso we decided to go on to Ouagadougou to visit the governor and also the Pentecostal mission there. We found the brethren waiting for us with great joy.

In the evening the people gathered for the service…old gray haired men were among the number who confessed Christ…When a hundred of these people sing the songs of the gospel, it seems like one hears the cry of a lost multitude seeking after God. It was really the best thing I had seen in many days…I believe there a possibility of a mass movement in the Mossi tribe.”

What about Muslim evangelism? Here again missionaries of former generations had a knowledge, burden and strategy for reaching out to them. Here is what Franklin Ballard wrote in 1941: “Christ said to His disciples: ‘With God all things are possible’. Surely these words included the seemingly impossible task of winning Mohammedans for Christ. We should…try to understand the great challenge Mohammedanism presents. We need to know the facts and have a real interest in our hearts for Moslem people…I believe the reason we do not see more converts from among the Mohammedans is because we do not have the faith for them…we often emphasize the difficulties rather than the power of God….Some of ou9r best evangelists (in FWA) have been won from Mohammedans. Surely this is not failure. It proved God can and will save them…The challenge to those who are missionaries to Mohammedans.. is to have a heart of love and humility..How can one win a soul unless there is a deep love in the heart of the missionary?...One of the cardinal virtues is humility…Dr. Zwemer says: ‘Self-effacement may not be necessary in military leadership, or that of politics or finance. In spiritual leadership it is the prime requisite’…We should ask God to give us a new vision of the task, to call forth missionaries with great love and great humility, to give new uplift to those already at the arduous task of giving the Good News to Mohammedans.

The thrust to reach Muslims was not without opposition, as this report reveals”: “..in Gao the Mohammedans have picketed the mission premises in an effort to hinder the advance of the truth. At other Mohammedan centers likewise the opposition has taken aggressive steps to destroy the preaching of the Gospel.

Today we have better means of travel, a more educated population, a less primitive lifestyle. But probably our knowledge of the people and languages of our adopted country and our passion for the unreached people groups who still remain is no less fervent than theirs. And then we speak of new people groups and strategies to reach them, it may only be an echo of that has been done in the past!

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REVIVALS That the Alliance Church in Burkina Faso has experienced revival in its past is a matter of the record. To write about it many years later, however, is not an easy task. I recently came across a quote from J. Stuart Holden that was an encouragement to me to attempt to record something of what took place twenty-five years ago. May what God has done in the past be an encouragement to those of us in this generation.

"Never allow yourself to believe that the grace of past da ys was but a delusion. Never allow the territory which you have won by God's grace and power to be wrestled from you by the force of the evil one.�

1961- 1962 The first time that revival came to Mali and Upper Volta was in 1961. The movement started in Dogon country. It stemmed from a contact with a revival going on among the Assemblies of God churches in northwestern Upper Volta. Tom Borns came to annual conference with glowing reports of what was taking place in the Dogon church. Some had expressed concern for reported excesses but Tom assured the missionaries that God was indeed in control. The fire spread to Ntorosso through an Assemblies missionary from Ouagadougou: It was at this time that Pastor Simeon Sanou of Santidougou testifies that he was actually born again. He had gotten to Bible School still in an unregenerate state. Because he was small of stature the missionaries mistook him for a boy and sent him to Somasso for French school.

When it was discovered that he had left a wife at home they transferred him to Bible school hoping to make the best of a bad situation. His experience in the Ntorosso revival still shows through today in his prophetic ministry.

Soon the Dogon evangelists were making forays into other areas. "Two of them came to the Santidougou district. They gathered the churches together and preached the message of revival. Things began to happen. There were extended meetings and much confession of sin. Some were obviously helped but others just as obviously simply got caught up in the excitement and there were a few strange things took place. At one point our children were afraid to enter the church and we felt it necessary to protest some of the excesses. The movement did not last long in Upper Volta but it left its mark and probably had a positive effect generally on the churches that were touched by it.

1972 -1973 The revival that came ten years later was of a different nature and much more widespread, intense and longer lasting. The events of late 1972 and early 1973 seem to have their beginnings in faraway Western Canada. An older generation will recall that in the early 70's revival began breaking out in both Canada and the United States. Christian periodicals were regularly reporting on what was sweeping whole areas in a moving of God not seen for many years. The Sutera

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twins were being used in unusual ways in their ministry in Canada and elsewhere.

Rev. Neill Foster was a young evangelist in western Canada who conducted summer camps and evangelistic crusades. Like many others Neill was touched by the revival.

In God's timing Neill was scheduled to come to Mali and Upper Volta for two pastor’s conferences and evangelism in the city of Bobo in October of 1972.

Neill Foster arrived in Bobo before going on to Mali for the pastor's conference at Ntorosso. He probably reported to us what was taking place in North America but I doubt that most of us really understood exactly what he was talking about. He was taken to Mali and it was arranged that I would pick him up in Yorosso at the Larry Wright's station a week later. We were still one field and Ralph Herber was assistant in Mali; we had agreed together that he would lead the mission over there while I concentrated on Upper Volta. When I got to Yorosso the Yorosso men had not yet arrived from the pastors' conference.

When they did drive up in a pickup truck a few minutes later it was obvious that something unusual was going on. Neill was sitting in the back of the truck with the African brothers crowded into the front seat. Everyone tumbled out filled with joy and greeting others with, "I love you!" I confess I wasn't sure just what this was all about. In the days to come I was - also to understand. Neill Foster had come as a very humble servant of the Lord and he embodied his message of humility and love by his every act. Thus he refused to sit in the front of cars while his African brothers sat in the back.

The field Hilites featured headlines in October of 1972 saying, "The Holy Spirit is working in Mali and Upper Volta." It went on to report in the first article, "The blessing started at Ntorosso when most of the Mali missionaries and preachers, with the exception of the Sangha district, met for five days of conference together. There were wonderful times of heart searching by the Word, confession of sin, and making things right. God's love filled every heart. As we heard the reports from Ntorosso we expected the Lord to do great things here in Bobo - and we were not disappointed."xxxii The revival was later reported in Europe in a GBU journal and Evangelist Yves Perrier wrote from the European Bible Institute in Lamorlaye to the mission director asking for confirmation of the glowing reports. The writer had reported, "It was wonderful, a little of the atmosphere of Heaven upon earth.�xxxiii As the week of meetings started in the Bobo church (now the Bookstore) the going was hard. Crowds were not large and people were not responsive. The second day Neill called the staff together and requested that we fast and pray each morning on behalf of the meetings. Within a day the tide changed. It is best to quote what was written on the spot in the field Hilites: "A miracle has taken place before our eyes in Bobo this week. Tite said yesterday that the old Bobo church is dead - a new one has taken its place. ...Lives were turned inside out and cleaned out and filled with the Spirit and love. The "new greeting" (I love you) was on everyone's lips. Each evening services were held in the church, and they lasted until midnight and after. Confession of sin, restitution, radiant testimonies, public apologies, were the order of the day. All day long every day we have had people coming to us to make things right, or to pray. Even unbelievers coming to be saved. The young people in the youth group are unbelievable - God did a deep work in many of their hearts. One young man said he had been like a donkey with

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a wagon load of stones (his sins) behind him. But now he feels free of the load and filled with love." The stories went on and on telling of victories in many, many lives. Street meetings were also held that week and many responded.

One last story from the Bobo city revival sums up the many things that happened. "The week after Mr. Foster was here a man came to the yard who had been prayed for at a street meeting for healing. This man was a Muslim, and had been sick for fifteen years. He had been everywhere to doctors and had taken all kinds of medication. But when Neill prayed for him he said that he knew God had touched him. And sure enough he had had ten days free from sickness. He came on Saturday to say thanks and on Sunday came to tell the whole congregation and to pray for salvation." The November 1972 Hilites contains seven full length pages of exciting reports from all over Mali and Upper Volta.

Following the week in Bobo, a pastors' conference for all of the Upper Volta pastors was scheduled in DĂŠdougou. I left the chairman's office that day and before departing thought that I had better take some money with me in case of need.

Opening the mission safe, I found only large bundles of 500 franc notes. I took a couple of these and stuffed them into a briefcase. It wasn't until the end of the week that I knew how the Lord had arranged all of this.

The meetings started off in DĂŠdougou with an eager expectation of what was going to happen. Those who had experienced or heard of the events in Bobo were doubtless the most expectant. Gerry McGarvey wrote a beautiful report on that week in the Mali Upper Volta Tidings. Gerry describes the beginning of the conference as reports were given on happenings in Ntorosso and Bobo.

Missionaries took the lead in humbling themselves before the Lord and confessing their lack of love. There was resistance on the part of some of the pastors present A group of about ten from one district never did enter into the spirit of the meetings but remained unmoved. At the end of the week as I talked to Neil early one morning he asked me if I had a good sum of money in small bills. He explained that the Lord had spoken to him as he read in 1 John 3:17, "If anyone has materials possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?" Neill went on to say that he had money with him that divided among the sixty-three pastors present would amount to 500 francs for each one and he wanted to give' this as a special gift to the pastors. It was obviously no coincidence that the mission safe had contained only large bundles of 500 franc notes. Where would I have found 63 such bills in DĂŠdougou otherwise?

After a slow beginning the first night Gerry reports what happened. "The next morning was something else! After a message on how we are required to love one another if we are to call ourselves Christ's disciples, Mr. Foster asked that all bow their heads. He said, "You can say that God loves you. You can say that you love God. But can you turn to the one sitting next to you and say you love him? Is there anyone in the room to whom you cannot truthfully say I love you?" Gerry said, "It was just like before a violent rain storm when the sky is black but in one hushed moment all you can hear is the far away faint roar of the coming wind." He continued, "Then it happened! Everyone was out of his seat. We were no longer shaking hands, we were hugging each other. Forgiveness was asked and love was expressed as we shared this moment of divine love together, passing from one to

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another in what must be called an explosion of love." As also a witness to what took place, I can concur. I described it as a virtual Pentecost; the nearest thing to Acts 2 that I could imagine. There were no incidents of speaking in tongues during the revival but had they occurred and been in order I doubt any would have objected. Obviously it was an experience never to be forgotten. Unfortunately, however, some who experienced it seem to have indeed, forgotten.

Some resisted as we have said. The dissident group was not ashamed to appear at the door of the church to ask for their share of the gift of money even though they had remained apart during the time that God was moving on the rest of us. Gerry concluded his article saying, "There were some who were seemingly untouched.

There is much work to be done. But God did some permanent work in many of our hearts."

The weeks and months following the departure of Neill Foster witnessed still greater things as the flame of revival spread from local church to local church.

Etienne Sanou from the Santidougou district was one who seemed to have received a portion of the Spirit that was upon Neill Foster. His ministry was extremely blessed everywhere he went for months following. The district churches responded openly and space doesn't allow recounting all that took place. It was not unusual to have people from the churches walk up to you and break down in tears confessing everything from a lack of love to having stolen a nail from your workshop, so tender were consciences during those days. There was no explanation possible for it other than that it was a miracle of God's grace.

During this time I felt a strong desire to somehow get some of this revival into the Catholic Church; normally one would think this an impossible task. But much to my surprise I received an invitation from the director of the large Catholic Seminary outside of Bobo in Kumi to participate in their "Week of Christian Unity" at the school. It was for a Friday night meal followed by an hour in which I was to talk about our work and answer questions. The "Grand Seminaire,� as it is known, is an important West African institution for the training of priests. Tite, in his research, has found that it has one of the twelve best theological libraries in the world. The director of the school at that time was Anselm Sanou who later became bishop in Bobo. He had visited us in the early days at Santidougou seeking to collaborate in Bible translation in Bobo so we had a longtime acquaintance. This was obviously going to be a challenge. I invited Dave Kennedy and Tite TiÊnou to accompany Nancy and me. I spoke briefly telling a bit about our method of working in the planting of churches and made reference to what was currently taking place. Then the questions started. I had never been before a more polite group of students and they in no way attempted to provoke controversy. I fielded the harder theological questions to Tite. David took some and together we enjoyed an excellent evening. At the conclusion Anselm spoke and stated that his heart was touched with the idea of knowing Christ better and he confessed that that indeed was what he wanted. What seeds may have been sown from our encounter I may never know but it was an inspiring experience. A few years later my relationship with Anselm gave me the privilege of being introduced to Pope Jean Paul during his visit to Bobo in 1992.

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It was in late September of 1972, and before the revival started, that I had one of the most unusual experiences of my life. I received a phone call from Nouna urging me as mission chairman to come immediately! The Crooks had recently moved from their station in Ouroué into the Nouna mission house. The Ballards normally lived there but were on furlough: The district pastors had not been consulted and they could not understand what the Mission was doing Moving missionaries in this way. The situation had gone from bad to worse. Now twenty eight pastors were assembled at the church and were very, very upset! The Tylers from Djibasso had come to Nouna hoping to calm the troubled waters. The two couples, however, awoke that morning to find that a storm was brewing - a potential open conflict between the district pastors and the missionaries. When I arrived I found four frightened missionaries. No one knew what to expect or what to do. Things like this always make the mission director's job a challenge!

Pastor Thomas Diarra was both district president and national president at that time. Thomas was a fine leader and while it was his Men that were involved, he himself remained calm. We went together for the waiting confrontation. We entered a small building where the twenty eight men were huddled together. I have never in all my life seen twenty eight men so angry! The words started and it was almost like a "roar" or a "din", so loud was the shouting. Thomas calmly sat by my side interpreting the words into French. What do you do in such a situation? I certainly did not know!

I don't recall being overly emotional or having any particular feelings other than probably apprehension as to how this was all going to turn out. Suddenly, without warning, I started to weep! It was not just the usual sort of crying but I actually sobbed violently and the tears quickly began to wet the earthen floor beneath my feet. It was a strange sight! Twenty eight men yelling in white hot anger and there I sat, representing the mission, weeping. It didn't last for long. Very shortly the yelling stopped and one by one the men got up and walked out. There I sat, alone with Pastor Thomas who had remained his usual calm self through it all. I went back to the mission residence and I remember saying to the missionaries that revival was coming. I don't know why I said it but it must have been a prophetic word from the Lord. The Crooks moved back to Ouroué and we went on into the events described above.

It was almost twenty five years to the month later that the sequel to this story took place. One day, in our home in Bobo, I was notified that Pastor Moïse Traoré from Solenzo had come and wanted to see me. He was staying with his son Daouda up in Sarafalo. Moïse and I never had a common language so I asked Nancy to go along to interpret. When we arrived we greeted Moïse who now is advanced in age, partially blind and halting of step. He had made the trip down by bush taxi expressly to see me. After our greetings the aged pastor said that we were to enter the house.

Daouda, he said, was to come also. He went on to explain that he wanted his son to witness what he was about to do. I still had no inkling of what this was all about.

Moïse began to recount that experience in Nouna of twenty five years ago.

He has always referred to me as "president". Terms of respect in African culture follow one for life, long after the fact. Moïse went on to relate what had happened those many years ago and then confessed that he had been the man behind it all.

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I did not even recall his being there at that meeting. He confessed that he had done wrong and that he had made his "president" weep. Now in his old age, and with not long to live, he had made this arduous journey simply to confess his sin before the Lord and before me and seek forgiveness. His son, he said, was to witness this and learn what true repentance is. What a legacy to leave to one's offspring! By this time the old man was on his knees praying. We then embraced and expressed words of mutual forgiveness, leaving that room in wonder at the faithfulness of God to those who obey Him. Do revivals last? That one certainly did in the heart of this aging servant of the Lord. Many other tales could be added to this one in this man's walk with God since 1972 and the pastors' conference in DĂŠdougou.

In reflecting on this incidence perhaps I have come to understand, finally, what those "tears" were all about. Maybe there needed to be tears shed on the part of the mission for having "provoked the people to wrath" by our sometimes careless disregard for the Church. Such confrontations need not be where there is mutual respect and trust.

Where do revivals come from? Why do they occur only from time to time?

What brought revival to Mali and Upper Volta in 1972-73? Can anyone give an answer? There is something sovereign in the way God thus moves. Preceding, as it did, the years of famine and hardship it seemed like God's gift to a people before they passed through this suffering. Or was it a warning and an opportunity that many failed to take' advantage of? Why does the church so quickly lose such blessing and return to a carnal lifestyle? Some who were so mightily moved during that time have since turned back. Others, however, still carry some of the fragrance of those days. Privileged indeed, were those of us who lived through them.

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MISSION MEANS MINISTRIES Part of being "mission" is making every attempt by all means possible' to reach people for Jesus Christ. The Burkina field has, at one time or another, attempted to use every conceivable method of propagating the Gospel. The following are ministries in which the mission and national church have worked hand in hand.

RADIO Radio broadcasting started many years ago in Bobo. In 1962 Jim and Ruth Riccicitelli came to Bobo, leaving their work at Ouarkoye. Jim was brilliant in music and linguistics. Had he continued on in the work in the Dédougou district for a few more years he would no doubt have completed the Bwamu New Testament.

Disagreement with the district leadership encouraged his move to Bobo. Later a hearing problem with one of their daughters led to the Riccitellis leaving the field. Jim has had many years as a very successful pastor in the States since those days.

At the time of the Riccitellis' arrival, Radio Bobo was offering free time to the religions. Jim quickly responded to the challenge and "La Voix de la Bible" became the radio voice of the Alliance each Saturday night. Programs were prepared at the Radio Bobo studio which assured good quality. In later years a studio was built in the old mission storeroom and remodeled from time to time.

The list of those who followed Jim in the radio ministry includes just about everyone who ever occupied the headquarters station. Many of us had never done it before but we soon learned. Programs were done in several national languages, as well as French. Thomas Tessougué was for years the preacher in Jula. He was followed by Etienne Sanou. A wide variety of others were also heard.

In 1992 Paul Kardol came from Holland and equipped the Bobo station studio with new equipment and attempted to train the local personnel to do a better job. Some local pastors were also trained at CEFCA in broadcasting techniques. Pastor Tychique Dembélé came to Bobo from Banfora to direct the radio work in collaboration with a local committee. All of this prepared the radio ministry for eventually broadcasting from their own studio on a local FM frequency. In more recent years Rollo Royle has worked with the radio committee and helped them to erect their new twenty four feet high antenna, on the church property in downtown Bobo.

BOOKSTORE AND LITERATURE The pioneers in the Bobo bookstore were Howard and Ann Beardslee. After a first term in Sikasso learning Senoufo, Howard expressed a desire to come to Bobo and start a bookstore in 1962. This was the era of literature and the mission chairman has just come back from an international meeting in Hong Kong, designed to get all missions moving ahead in literature ministries.

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The Beardslees were exceptionally gifted people but unfortunately they did not stay with us. Before the end of that term Howard got involved in a doctrinal dispute with C&MA leadership over the question of the inspiration of the Scriptures. Dr. Louis King made a special trip to attempt to reason with Howard but to no avail. Howard recently retired as a Presbyterian pastor in the United States.

The Bobo bookstore started in the front section of the long mud brick building facing the street on the downtown property in what had been the first chapel. After Beardslees the work was taken up by the Riccitellis. Then followed the Bosserts and the Smiths. Nora McGarvey directed it for a few years and several others were involved at various times. The Overstreets finally took charge and moved the store into town in a rented storefront adjacent to the Pharmacie Moderne. Then the dismantling of the Mali-Upper Volta field ended that possibility as the bookstore assets had to be divided. In 1976 with the building of the larger Central Church, the old chapel built in 1961 was remodeled into a bookstore.

A new organization was set up in 1977 to create a proper business with both church and mission as partners. It was a few years before personnel could be found and the new store opened. From virtually the beginning the Bobo bookstore was a burden that kept many people unhappy. Finding mission members for the joint committee was never easy. Getting the right workers for the store, those who were honest and efficient, has been a perennial problem. More than one bookstore worker has departed with as much as he could get away with. One worker asked to try out an expensive camera of mine in view of buying it and then left on the sly; bookstore money and any camera all left with him. Rumor has it that another worker left with enough stock to begin his own business. Moussa Coulibaly eventually took over the direction of the store and was able to bring it back from the brink of bankruptcy. Currently it is operating under the good direction of Pastor Ousmane Sana and the national church profits from it in the operation of its downtown property. Suffice it to say, what the mission started the church has been able to take over.

Finally in 1993-94 CAMA services was instrumental in securing funds from “Help For The Brothers� in Germany to remodel the Bookstore. A complete renovation was done and the store given a new look of which all were proud.

Literature on the Burkina field has had a long history. There was a time when almost every station had the equipment necessary to produce literature in the local language. We hadn't been at Santidougou a year before we had the mimeograph set up on the front porch, cranking out literature for our fledgling short term schools. We also had "literature day" during our annual conferences. Baptist missionaries came one year and showed all of us how to make books using the crude machines available in those days.

The mission produced things like the H ilites which went out as far as to North America, The Mali Upper Volta Tidings was our field paper, nicely produced in the States and sent to a wide mailing list. Then followed the Burkina Report which was for North American consumption. For many, many years John Johanson personally financed the printing of his paper "Kanayelen". This monthly paper in Bambara went far and wide as an aide to pastors for it included helps for preaching. After the departure of John Johanson the Nehlsens began

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another periodical under the title, "Eglise Kibaro.” On the local level at Santidougou we produced for several years a district paper entitled, "Puru Sɛbɛ" containing district news.

Several hymn books have been produced and printed in Hong Kong. The Bobo Turu in 1980 and the Jula Hymnbook in the early 90's are examples. The literature ministry is one that as yet the mission does not seem ready to turn over to the church but that day is probably not far away. The coming of the PEDIM program (Programme Education Distance Institut Maranatha) necessitated another push in literature production in order to provide the books at reasonable cost. PÈDIM began obtaining the latest in mimeograph machine s, stencil burners, etc. In 1986 the decision was made that a part of the PEDIM building at Maranatha should become a literature production center.

At that time PEDIM gave over its equipment to this larger project. This was all before the days of computers and the wonderful Risograph machines.

MEDICAL MINISTRY Strangely enough medical ministry on the Burkina field has had both an illustrious and tortuous history. Untold numbers of people owe their very lives to the medical work done by our missionaries. Though not a medical person by profession or training, I to this day often meet people who thank me for the medical help that I gave them many years ago at Santidougou. We hadn't been long on the station before we realized that the last missionaries who had lived there (the Joders) had given medical help. Mrs. Joder was a nurse and there were no other medical people in small villages in those days. So by necessity, I became a part time medicine man. As the hurting numbers increased, so did my skills.

There was, of course, always the possibility of an evacuation to the Bobo hospital ten miles distant. It was the same on most of our stations though several did have missionary wives or single ladies who were trained nurses.

In the Mali the situation was quite different. There the government was disposed to give financial aid to whatever mission would help out. Workers could be employed and trained and thus actual mission dispensaries were built in several places. This was not the case in Burkina. Burkina in the early years gave money for paying school teachers but not medical workers. The subject of dispensaries was for years somewhat of a controversy within the Burkina mission. There were those for, and those against. The lack of government subsidy further kept the matter in abeyance. Mission direction in the States, usually advised us to just stick with our "back door" dispensaries.

The mission climate in Burkina has never been conducive to medical work as a full time ministry. Rollo Royle went so far as to obtain funding through the FEME to build and equip a modern facility at Santidougou. Unfortunately because of the general attitude in the mission toward medical work, the mission lost control of this ministry when the missionary nurse left for furlough. The mission would not "own" the project and provide replacements. It was later turned over to the government and at least does operate today in the manner of other government dispensaries.

Aside from the Santidougou debacle other efforts have been more successful.

The Nehlsens maintained an active backdoor dispensary all their years in Tougan.

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This had maximum results in outreach to people and there were notable conversions.

Joke Blumink followed in Tongan and is becoming something of a legend with her whirlwind efforts using medical teams from Holland and in the operation of her new and improved facilities. Peggy Drake and Jetty Stouten developed a clinic at their house in Bobo. The large number of Muslim women that started coming to them since they were women enables them to have an unusual testimony. Their mobile clinic has been useful in teaming up with pastors for evangelism. There seem to be endless possibilities for medical ministries in Burkina even though it is not a mission priority.

There were also the years of the "MAP" orders. Each year these orders were shipped out from the States and helped to provide inexpensive medicines and other things for the medical needs of the field. There was always the problem of government permission and the paper work involved. Sometimes these orders included some interesting items such as dozens of cases of "feminine deodorant".

For the lack of any other use for it, the people liked to spray it on the bride and groom at weddings like a perfume.

Unfortunately our Medical efforts do not seem to be something that can become actual ministries of the church. Their testimony to and embodiment of Christian compassion however, does add to the church's and mission's testimony in Burkina Faso.

YOUTH Youth ministry in Burkina had an interesting and dynamic beginning under Dave and Margot Kennedy. Perhaps we should add that this was the "official" beginning which dates from their appointment to Bobo and youth work in 1967.

The earlier beginnings, however, were at Santidougou starting in 1966.

Nancy and I felt the need to do something for some of the youth that were at that time in secondary school. In the summer of that year we held our first French youth camp. As far as we know it was the first in the country. That year we did everything down to the cooking. We had about a dozen young people mostly from the city of Bobo. In 1967 we realized that we then had youth capable of leading a camp themselves and they did an excellent job while we helped out. Some of the early young people in those camps have gone on to important positions in both Mali and Burkina Faso as well as elsewhere. In 1968 David Kennedy held the first National Youth Camp at the new Santidougou primary school with fifteen campers in attendance. It was there that Tite TiĂŠnou dedicated his life to the Lord at the conclusion of a campfire service.

At field conference in 1967 I held the office of Field Youth Director. I made a recommendation to the conference that a full time youth director be appointed.

Unknown to me, the mission chairman (my father-in-law, Leroy Kennedy) had prepared to make the same recommendation. When David Kennedy was selected most missionaries would not believe that it was not a family collusion. The truth is, however, it was not. David and Margot moved from Ntorosso over the protests of the school staff there. Housing was found in a rundown villa in the Koko section of Bobo and there they made history. Those were the days of youth ministry worldwide. The WMPF raised money for youth centers and youth ministries.

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Upper Volta was to receive its share which would sit on account for several years until we seized the opportunity to build the Bobo Youth Center on what is now the Institut Maranatha property.

Dave and Margot lost no time in developing the work. David at one point was holding thirty Bible studies a week in the city high schools. He would look back years later, realizing that one Thomas Sankara had also been a student at Lycée Oúezzin during those days and wonder if he couldn't have done more to reach this one who later led the Revolution of the early 1980’s. Those were the days of large. AYC groups also.

Dave and Margot conducted these North American youth over vast distances in Mali and Upper Volta on tours that took them to almost every district. They could themselves write a book on their experiences. There was the day when they arrived on foot at our station. Their old International truck had lost a wheel somewhere on the way and they could not find it for some time as it had rolled into a field. There was the emergency appendectomy that David required at the Bobo hospital and where he almost died. Also the AYC girl who had a reaction to paregoric and she too almost died. The young man who nearly fell off the top of the Banfora falls was another story. The incident that took the cake was when a group of four AYC people were expected; but seven got off the plane! Lebanon had at the last minute refused visas for the extra three, so to Burkina they were sent - unannounced!

The Bobo Youth Center was finished in 1971 and its dedication is told of in "Celebrations". Saturday night youth rallies were held there with thousands attending. The Foyer was home to hundreds of youth and you meet some today who tell of having been saved or influenced there. Normally churches at some point in time feel they should take over the Youth Centers created by the mission. This feeling prevailed among the JAC in Burkina and would have certainly become an issue had not Moussa Coulibaly been director at Maranatha and himself made the transition of the Foyer into a Chapel for the Bible School. Being, as he was, a Burkinabe, this unpopular move was seemingly accepted, though not happily.

Another colorful chapter in the Youth work was during the Kennedys' furlough in 1970. Replacements for them were found through the GBU (Groupe Biblique Universitaire). Claude and Ann Marie Décrevel, a Swiss couple, came to Bobo to take their place for a year. They' were French speaking and it looked like the perfect situation. They were a lovely couple but it soon became apparent that they did not have the same orientation as the rest of us. Because they were French speaking they made the mistake of thinking they automatically had a special "in" with the youth. The fact that the girls preferred to speak Jula bothered Claude who especially wanted them to be "open" with him. The Décrevels believed that a "little wine" was indeed good for the stomach and that led to some problems. The climax came when Claude felt he should head up a revolt against the Bobo church committee. One day he led the youth out of the church with a war cry, shouting, "To the tents, oh Israel!" and down they went to the Koko house for their own meeting. Kassoum Keita, GMU church president from Bamako and currently president of the AEA and head of Campus Crusade for West Africa, was on scene afterward and stated that this had no doubt set the church back ten years! Yes, it was bad! The Décrevels were connected to the WEC mission and soon their regional director, Alistair Kennedy, arrived in Bobo to

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counsel this young couple. They were closeted in the Koko house for a solid week of orientation - or was it re-orientation? We and the youth work all survived and things got better. Claude and Anne Marie were dear people but had much to learn. They left Upper Volta and went on to Cameroon where they reportedly had a good ministry.

After the Kennedy years youth work was never again the same. Some felt that it was now time for the church to take over youth ministries and they were probably right - up to a point. In fact youth work in the districts has gone ahead very well. District youth camps are now often run and operated without missionary help. The national JAC movement has gone through some years of growth and now UJAC is a reality. In a nation however, where youth make up almost 75% of the population it seems that youth ministry on the part of the mission might still have some importance, especially in large cities. The fact is that since Dave Kennedy left no one - the church included - has ever again taught Bible in the schools like he did. An early morning walk in Bobo or Ouaga will convince you that there are literally thousands of youth, mostly unreached, walking the streets on their way to class. How many more Thomas Sankaras are there among them? A lot of the youth of the Dave and Margot Kennedy years are some of the leaders in the church today, especially in Ouagadougou. The Alliance church needs more such people desperately.

EVANGELISM If the heart of Alliance missions is church planting, then it follows that evangelism is part and parcel of it all. Evangelism has never lacked in Burkina Faso. The early accounts already related attest to the fact that the first missionaries were diligent in this area. At the district level teams have functioned just about everywhere. Our Burkinabe brothers (and sisters) often excel in evangelism. In the earlier years a few notable attempts were made to do city-wide campaigns. One of the first was in the mid 60's when Yves Perrier came from France. Yves had been involved with radio ELWA in Liberia. His campaign was staged on the vacant property just behind the then chairman's house on the downtown property.

(Currently the church president's home.) The meetings got off to a good start but the Muslim Ramadan fell in the middle of it and made it difficult to continue. Yves was an excellent preacher and we regretted that he did not come back again.

Later in the early 80's the Zaire. Trio, with Jim Sawatski, came to Bobo for meetings in the big downtown church. The Saye Zerbo coup d'etat fell at the start of that campaign and curfews ended most of the meetings except what we could do in daylight. Street meetings were held regularly for many years at the five o'clock market and elsewhere. Neill Foster came back in about 1973 for evangelism up in the Sarafaralao section of Bobo. Meetings were open air and they used the big tent.

A special feature was that Neill baptized people on the spot in a hole dug in the ground and filled with water. Many were saved and at least two are now pastors.

The crowning days came when Reinhart BonnkĂŠ came to Bobo in 1991. News of his coming reached our ears several months ahead of the event. Fortunately, rather than react negatively as did the Baptist and Assemblies missionaries in Bobo, we in the C&MA decided to cooperate fully with the preparations which

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began several months ahead. BonnkĂŠ is a charismatic leader and was well known from previous meetings a year or so before in Ouaga. His emphasis on miracles bothered some. By being in on the planning from the beginning, the Alliance was in a good position to exert influence. Even the Assemblies brothers from Ouaga agreed that the emphasis on miracles should be toned down and it was - but they did occur. Those were beautiful days in the city of Bobo and I got the impression that the charismatic leaders in the country were quite surprised, and pleasantly so, with the full cooperation of not only the Alliance church but also all of the missionaries. We were eleven missionaries at the reception held at the Eau Vive upon BonnkĂŠs arrival. More would have been there but it conflicted with the ICA children's arrival on vacation. During one solid week, and lingering afterward, Jesus was the talk of the city. We have never witnessed anything like it in Bobo.

Every afternoon by five o'clock the streets were filled with people heading toward the Hippodrome where the open air meetings were held nightly. Special buses and taxis vied for space both in the traffic and parking area as thousands came each night. An attendance of 45,000 was the top figure for one of the evenings. Miracles of healing did indeed take place and we were witnesses to many. People were saved and. came into our churches for weeks afterward. BonnkĂŠ himself gave all glory to God and promoted zealously the churches that were cooperating. Bobo has never before or since witnessed such a display of Christian unity. Personally, I believe that as a result there was much blessing and little negative fallout.

Surely if it has been ministry that missionaries have been looking for, Burkina Faso has provided them with a fertile field. While the church has stepped into the leadership position in most of these ministries, it seems that there is still a lot to be done wherein missionary help will be appreciated and profitable. With growing populations and new opportunities, the future should be brighter than the past. The challenge is for Mission and Church to create new paradigms of cooperative ministry.

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LET'S CELEBRATE! Celebrations are important to every people and every society. Biblical illustrations abound such as the many yearly feasts of the Jewish people and the temple dedication as recorded in the Chronicles. The Psalms are filled with celebration songs. Several important occasions have been marked in the life of the church and mission in Burkina Faso with special events.

BOBO-DIOULASSO YOUTH CENTER The inauguration of the Bobo Youth Center occurred on October 1, 1972. The Youth Center (current chapel and classroom building for Maranatha Institute) was built on property that was then located on the edge of the residential zone in the city of Bobo. In close proximity to the leading secondary schools in the city, the Foyer (as it was known) held great promise for evangelizing the large student population. Dave Kennedy was youth director just back from his first furlough. His wife, Margot, wrote in the Mali and Upper Volta Tidings:xxxiv "Excitement filled the air in and around the Youth Center as students, missionaries, and guests waited for the program to begin. Greetings and words of thanks were given by Tite Tiénou, the pastor of the French church in Bobo-Dioulasso.

Tien Siaka, one of our students, told about the goals; of the youth center and the program it would have. The Youth Choir, under the direction of Norma Stedman had worked hard to perfect the three spirited choruses they sang, and then inspired us all with their zest and enthusiasm with which they sang.

The main address was given by Mr. Dupré, a French missionary with the Assemblies of God. (Pastor Dupré had been instrumental in helping us obtain this choice property which later made possible the building of Maranatha Institute.)

Town officials and invited guests listened attentively as he spoke. The highlights of his message emphasized that the Bobo Youth Center would meet the needs of all students...for body, soul and spirit.... The prayer of dedication was given by David Kennedy, the Youth Director.

The program was brought to a close, and refreshments were served in. the classroom. The joys of the Christian youth knew no bounds and they exhibited their happiness by singing the remainder of the afternoon."

FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATIONS Fiftieth anniversary celebrations were gala events marking the years from 1972 to 1982. The following quotes are from the Mission paper, Hilites.

Assemblies of God The mission "Hilites" dated March. 1972 reported:xxxv "On the weekend of March 5th, Pastor Thomas Tessougué and the Pierces went to Ouagadougou to represent the mission and Upper Volta church at the Assemblies of God 50th anniversary celebrations. What a thrill to see 5,000 Mossi Christians all

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gathered praising the Lord. There were many visitors from other African countries, the States and France. Over two thousand attended early morning prayer meetings before dawn. Services started at eight and went right through the day, with short intermissions. Everything was done in French, Mooré and English. A well-trained 200 voice choir performed beautifully,- all dressed in colorful robes It was sort of a combination camp meeting and church conference combined.

On Sunday morning at ten o'clock, the prime minister, head of the Supreme Court, U.S. ambassador and many other dignitaries arrived for the meeting. There was a motorcycle corps and an honor guard at the gate. There was a parade in the city and banners up everywhere. It was really an occasion and involved a terrific amount of organization and work on the part of the church and mission staff of the Assemblies."

MALI MISSION AND CHURCH FIFTIETH "The Mali mission and church had their fiftieth anniversary celebration on Sunday, the 11th of February, 1973. How thrilled we were to see all of those government officials sitting there and listening to a very straightforward Gospel message presented by Yiranou Traoré. After a three hour meeting, a lovely dinner was served at the Herber house. The Herbers and other Mali missionaries are to be commended for the good planning and hard work that made everything run so smoothly. The Lord met many hearts during the meetings also. Dr. Bailey spoke on several occasions and the Lord used his messages. One highlight of the conference was the tape prepared by Bob Oversteet featuring retired missionaries who sent their greetings to the church." xxxvi UPPER VOLTA MISSION AND CHURCH FIFTIETH "On March first (1973) there was much excitement on the Bobo station as delegates arrived for the Fiftieth Anniversary celebrations. A special shelter had been set up for the women who did the cooking. They served meals in the carport.

"The big storeroom behind the director's house (present day Lycée Promotion) was rented for sleeping quarters as well as using the former (chapel) Bookstore. The old Bookstore was also used for business sessions.

"A large vacant lot with an old storeroom on it behind the Mission was rented and cleared for the meetings. Grant Crooks and his workers put up a lovely platform in front of the cleared area with electric lights strung down both sides. Benches were brought from the Foyer and the Ouézzinville-sud church and used for the crowds along with mats for the overflow crowds. Upper Volta flags made the station and the shelter have a festive air.

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"On Friday morning a crowd of about one hundred met the Baileys' plane.

We stood on the edge of the flying field as they got out and sang, "Yesu Nana", ably led by Enoch Hani and Allaye Duyon. (Dr. and Mrs. Bailey were returning to Africa after a conference in Bangkok which they had attended in between the Mali and Upper Volta 50th celebrations.) Dr. Bailey spoke at the evening services and there was a good response to his messages, many staying late for prayer. Etienne Sanou, Bomba Diarra (Mali), Damissa Coulibaly, (Mali church president) and Tite Tiénou were the African speakers and all had good messages. (Dr. and Mrs. Bailey, as always, were delightful guests in Africa. Their love and appreciation for the church and missionaries showed through.)

"Sunday was the big day. Missionaries and pastors came from four sister missions and churches in Upper Volta. Some officials also came but because of a conflict with the Diébougou fair, many did not come. We had prepared an apéritif in the carport with fancy cookies and sandwiches, hot meats, and nuts. Jessie Nehisen and Betty Canberg made and decorated the huge cake - in the shape of 50. About 175 guests were served. The Poldings (mission chairman) and Joseph Koffis (church president) came from Ivory Coast. Pastor Koffi presented gifts of money to the Upper Volta and Mali churches during the morning service.

"Everyone was thrilled with the parade on Sunday afternoon when we marched, about three hundred strong, through the city and down to the Cinq Heures market, carrying flags and singing. Then Allaye preached to a large crowd gathered there. Five people stayed to pray afterwards. When we got back to the mission yard many could not stop singing, and marched around continuing their joyful singing. In terms of those contacted for the first time with the Gospel, the hungry hearts met at the altar services, and the many who gathered to praise the Lord together and were encouraged in their faith, we feel the long hours of work involved were well worth FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY IVORY COAST Toward the end of 1982, I wrote a four page chairman's report of the Bouaké Ivory Coast celebrations, and I quote from that here: "A most remarkable thing occurred in Bouaké on December 12th. Inasmuch as it was our privilege to represent our mission, we feel it is worthy of a written report. Pastors Bonzi and Etienne Sanou went with us as church representatives.

"As many of you know, the Ivory Coast church had been waiting for two years to hold their 50th anniversary celebration. Their patience finally paid off and they were honored with a visit by President Houphouet Boigny. This turned the celebration into a national event. Seldom has an Alliance church anywhere in the world ever had such an occasion. At the end of the morning meeting Dr. Louis King, president of the U.S. C&MA, was decorated by the Ivory Coast government. What with that and everything else, Dr. King said that this had been without question probably the highlight of his career.

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Dr. King was also very happy to be able to present the Ivory Coast church a gift of 16,750,000 francs for church construction in Abidjan and Bouake. He has access to special funds from a foundation for such purposes.” xxxviii Here is a summary of some of the highlights of this four page report: A two hour, six kilometer long parade through the city in which we all participated; everyone wearing the anniversary cloth with pictures of the first missionary to Ivory Coast, George Powell, along with the church president, Joseph Koffi; steel helmeted soldiers keeping guard outside the church windows, intently scrutinizing everyone; the regal entry of the president of Ivory Coast on the red carpet, walking under an arch of drawn silver swords, extended by the special presidential guards; Pastor Koffi's inspired Gospel message saying, "You may be the finest citizen of the Ivory Coast but if you are not born again and washed in Jesus' blood you are a slave of Satan. Life in Jesus Christ is true freedom and the way to heaven."; Dr. King being greeted by the president and receiving three kisses in good Ivorian fashion; the TV and press everywhere; the 500 guest sit-down meal at the Municipal Pool; and so much more! xxxix MARANATNA INSTITUTE DEDICATION The July 9, 1980 issue of The Alliance Witness carried a feature article describing the dedication of the new Bible School in the city of Bobo-Dioulasso.

It spoke of a milestone: being reached on that day, April 27, 1980 and the fulfillment of a long-term vision, "An oppressive heat wave that had plagued the country for days was broken the night before when cooling rains swept across the area. The day was perfect as the crowd gathered Sunday afternoon beneath the large tent erected especially for the occasion.

"All seven district church presidents in Upper Volta were there. Church officers from Mali, garbed in their traditional robes, were also present, along with representatives from the C&MA missions in Ivory Coast and Mali. The thirty-two students were… dressed uniformly in bright yellow shirts with the Alliance insignia emblazoned on the front....Rev. Arni Shareski represented the C&MA of North America. Before bringing the dedication address he presented a check for $5,000 as a gift from the North American C&MA toward books for the proposed new library. The library will be named in honor of the late Nathan Bailey who, along with his wife, expressed a very special interest in the school.

"Rev. Tite Tiénou, a graduate of Nyack College and Vaux Seminary, Paris, has been the founding director of this new C&MA Bible School begun in December 1976. Under his able direction the program has been developed to offer a very excellent preparation for Christian ministry. Mr. Tienou will be leaving this year for doctoral studies at Fuller Seminary School of World Mission. Rev. Eric Persson will serve as interim director of the school during his absence." xl

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ORDINATIONS CONCLUDE NATIONAL CHURCH CONFERENCE In the list of outstanding celebrations having taken place over a period of years, the ordination ceremony held on March 16, 1997 also deserves mention.

Pastors Emmanuel Bamiky HĂŠma and Ousmane Paroche Sana were ordained in a most unusual and meaningful demonstration of rejoicing. The ceremony was held in the Foyer building of Maranatha Institute which meant that less than half the crowd was able to get inside. The two men were immaculately dressed in dark business suits and their wives in the latest Burkina fashion of pink, ruffled ribbon dresses.

Both men had been active leaders in the Flambeaux movement and their young friends went all out to add their touch to the event. Leader Robert Sanou, director of ACCEDES, led in a ceremony of decoration following the order of what is done at the Burkina national level for dignitaries. The pastors received brightly colored honorific tricolor ribbons around their necks along with a wrapped gift. All was punctuated with the traditional Flambeaux military-like flare.

Pastor Thomas TraorĂŠ from Ouagadougou, and vice-president of the national church, preached a challenging message from the life of Joshua, spurring the new pastors on to a life of dedicated faithfulness in ministry. Pastor Etienne Drabo fulfilled the role of elder pastor in giving the charge and actually ordaining the two men to the Gospel ministry. His part is best described as colorful and especially meaningful.

The Central Church musical group provided lively music while a particularly talented balophone player didn't miss a beat. To finish the rapidly moving three hour meeting a dynamic group of Bwas surrounded the two pastors and their wives to give them a traditional Bwa blessing animated with unusual noises and movements impossible to describe. Vacating the Foyer required a long time as the masses of people all had to give their greetings and kisses to the two new pastoral couples.

Yes, celebrations in the life of peoples, organizations, nations or individuals do seem to be important. Blessed indeed are those of us who have had an opportunity to share in some of these in the life of the Alliance church in Burkina Faso. The vital life of the church certainly shines through at such times and their actual life in Christ as Lord of His church is beautiful to behold.

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Oh Those Acronyms!

F

E

M

E

A

O

(Federation des Eglises et Missions Evangéliques d'Afrique,Oceidentale)

Beginning in the early days of Protestant misson work in what was up until independence known as French West Africa, the missions related in one way or another to an organization known as the FEMEAO or Federation des Eglises et Missions Evangéliques d'Afriquè' Occidentale headed for many years by a Frenchman, Pastor Mabile. Pastor Mabile worked out of Dakar in Senegal and visited the different mission bases from time to time. Since all of the area was under the control of the French government, Pastor Mabile performed a valuable service in counsel and legal matters for the many American missions. Particularly during the years of World War II his services were important to the missions, mostly American, which were not always looked upon favorably by the French.

FEME (Federation des Eglises et Missions Evangéliques) Independence became a reality in West Africa toward the end of the 1950's.

Burkina Faso (then Upper Volta) received its independence from France in 1960.

Shortly thereafter the Protestant missions felt the need for a united voice to represent them before the new government. In August of 1961 the mission and church leaders in Burkina met in Ouagadougou to organize the FEME. In the beginning annual meetings were held alternately in Bobo and Ouagadougou to accommodate everyone: Train travel was good in those days and the roads were as yet unpaved. The Assemblies of God, being located in Ouagadougou and having a number of more educated leaders, held the presidency of the FEME until the more recent, election of a pastor from the Apostolic Church. The treasurer was for many years the director of the C&MA mission. This changed about 1985. The FEME has been basically a loose structure with limited effect in practical ways.

ODE (Office de Développement Evangélique) The ODE was the birth-child of the FEME. In the early 1970's drought conditions in Upper Volta attracted the attention of European Relief Organizations, especially the German group known as Bread For The World. The Assemblies, being located in the capital, were in a position to receive visiting representatives of such organizations and they also profited from the aid these groups wanted to give to a needy country.

Receiving the help that they did, the Assemblies looked for a proper way to thank Bread For The World people. Their solution was to ask one of their young men studying in a French Bible School to make a trip over to Germany to personally express their gratitude. Thus the young evangelist Samuel Yameogo became known to the Germans. They were at that time looking for someone from Upper Volta who could be their representative. At a FEME meeting in 1971 Pastor Dupré made the proposition

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that Samuel be made available upon his return to fill this position.

So was born the relationship between the FEME and Bread For The World that was to become so productive. In the ensuing years the work of ODE grew rapidly as the drought of the early 70's became more and more severe. Bread For The World contributed heavily to the FEME. They helped to build the first office complex and housing area in the Zone de Bois in Ouagadougou just off the Fada road. The ODE has been responsible for bringing very large sums of development money into .the country. Samuel Yameogo has become a leading citizen in Burkina Faso and not infrequently appears on national television. The ODE is well known among the multiplicity of ONG organizations in the country.

Inasmuch as the ODE is largely directed by Mossi people and Assemblies of God members, their relationship with the Alliance church has not always been overly congenial. The AG's have very naturally profited from being located in the capital.

The Alliance presence came late in Ouagadougou and we have had to run to catch up.

AEAM - AEA (Association des Evangéiiques en Afrique et Madagascar) (Association des Evangé(iques en Afrique)

Early in the 1960's a continent-wide effort was made to unite the evangelical cause in Africa. The U.S. based NAE was one of the forces behind this. The liberal churches on the continent had been organized into a Christian Council. The AEAM was created to counteract this influence. Ken Downey of The Africa Inland Mission, located in Kenya, was the first General Secretary. Eric Maillefer, on loan from the Swedish Free Church, served for many years as administrative assistant and did much to ensure the success of the AEAM. The Mali-Upper Volta mission chairman (H. L. Kennedy) was sent to the first meeting of the AEAM in Nairobi in 1961. In those early days the Alliance Mission leaders in the U.S. were quick to send their mission leadership to such meetings and conferences even outside of Africa. This gave us the advantage of a larger view of the African church continent-wide and also showed some of us how far behind Mali and Upper Volta were in leadership development at higher levels. The mission chairman came back from Nairobi telling of having rubbed shoulders with African church leaders, many of whom had Masters' Degrees from Wheaton College. As a young missionary it seemed to me that our leadership could not see beyond Ntorosso and its semi-literate level. The years following have shown the seriousness of our early problem.

In 1973 it was my privilege as mission chairman to attend the AEAM conference held in Limuru, Kenya, just north of Nairobi, in a lovely mountain resort.

Tite Tiénou, recently returned from his years at Nyack College and working as pastor of the French speaking congregation in the Bobo church, was sent by the FEME as an.

Upper Volta delegate and speaker. The AEAM leadership was looking to elect an African General Secretary that year. The question of francophone and anglophone Africa was a debated subject. Many wanted a bi-lingual man. Some interesting politicking too place. The powers-that-were seemed to have decided on a Nigerian brother, Byang Kato, who had recently graduated from Dallas Seminary. Tite's name was proposed to placate the francophone block but he had already made it known that he was not interested. Thus Byang Kato was easily elected as the first African secretary for the AEAM. Unfortunately Byang died about two years later

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drowning accident on the coast of Kenya.

It was at the next General Assembly held in Bouaké, Ivory Coast in 1977 that another Nigerian, Tokomboh Adeamo, was elected to fill the position of General Secretary.

Tokomboh was another Dallas Seminary graduate. It was at this meeting that the AEAM attempted to deal with some of the social issues confronting the church in Africa.

Christianity Today, in its August26th, 1977 issue, reported: "Moratorium, cultural revival and human rights have been much debated issues in some African church circles the past three years… the AEAM passed them all up for a less sensational topic - the Christian home." Acknowledging the criticism that they were shying away from major issues, the article went on to say: "The emphasis, however, turned out to meet an African felt need that also spoke to the major issues of the day." Polygamy came up for discussion along with issues such as uncles raising children, the servant role of women and, household evangelism. It was at this meeting where Tite Tiénou was appointed as executive secretary of the AEAM theological commission.

In 1981 I again attended the, AEAM general assembly held this time in Lilongwe, Malawi. These encounters in the larger African context were very stimulating and mindstretching. As director of the Upper Volta mission I wrote: "It was an inspiring trip, a spiritual retreat, and a learning experience. My greatest regret is that all of our missionaries were not able to share in it." I wrote further on in my three page report, "Certainly for most of us AEAM is little more than a name. It is, however, extremely important on an African-wide basis for the cause of Christ on this continent. It helps to fulfill legitimate African aspirations for Christian unity and gives substance to our Christian testimony.” Daniel Bonzi was with us on this trip and when asked at the breakfast table one morning by an American guest what had made the biggest impression on him, he replied that it was the unity that was expressed and felt.

These large general assemblies seemingly became too expensive and after Malawi there was a move to scale them down. More regional meetings were planned.

Mission and church leaders were no longer sent by the C&MA. From my prospective this has been unfortunate and has resulted in a tendency to turn more inward and thus often missing the larger picture. In 1993 at the Lagos meeting the name was changed to AEA to make it fit into a continental grouping such as others like the OAU, etc..

CAMA SERVICES – ACCEDES (Alliance Chrétienne pour le Coopération Economique et Dévcloppcment Sociale) Following hard upon the heels of the blessings of revival in 1972-73 came years of drought and subsequent suffering across Mali and Upper Volta. The Mali-Upper Volta Hilites in September of 1973 published the following: "FAMINE IS: a mother pounding grain for women in the village in order to receive a handful of chaff for her family; a father soaking an old broken gourd in water until soft and feeding it to his family; a family weak from hunger scrounging the woods for edible roots and leaves; mixing sand and sugar to satisfy crying children eating once every three days to make the meager supply of grain last longer; two women begging a cyclist for grain, being refused and later finding him asleep on the path, cutting his throat and taking the grain; stealing grain from granaries, peanuts from fields, even cooked hot grain when

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backs were turned; gaunt, hollow-eyed people, weak and bloated from malnutrition; selling a child for a tin of grain; abandoning children in a village while the family goes elsewhere to search for food; babies dying because a nursing mother has no milk, selling possessions, goats, sheep, cows - selling radios, watches, bicycles for a pittance to buy food; offering many sacrifices-- even human." TERRIBLE!!!

Such were the conditions in Mali and Upper Volta during those early years of the 70's that brought about a cry for help on the part of mission and church. CAMA Services had never served in Africa before. In the meantime, relief organizations and Alliance donors were beginning to channel in important sums of money to help feed the hungry. Missionaries had no choice but to become involved. My personal critique was that the rush to send in aid without creating a proper infrastructure to handle it was close to a disaster in many situations. Corruption was often the natural outcome.

People who had nothing suddenly found themselves with millions of francs under their control. Some districts did a better job of controlling this than others. Some suffer to this day the results of this unfortunate period.

The Alliance, in 1985, sent Gary Schmidt to begin CAMA work in what was by then Burkina Faso. It was too late to save many who had already fallen into dishonest practices. Gary teamed up with Mamadou Jean Drabo and they worked together for a while as a CAMA team. Before all of this happened many field missionaries were actively involved in relief and development projects. The advantage was that we had access to special funds being sent to the field from various sources. This helped those of us in the districts, giving us some relief from our many burdens. CAMA brought organization to the effort and all funds were then usually channeled through them.

Gary Schmidt was the pioneer of CAMA in Burkina but it was for the Tim Albrights to come in 1988 to set up the real organization and see it through to the creating of the development arm of the church known as ACCEDES. Until this was organized, the church leadership often chaffed under the fact that a missionary was working largely alone without actual church control. The organization of ACCEDES came about in due time and the naming of Robert Sanou as director has resulted in a blossoming organization of which we can all be proud.

WRC - CREDO (World Relief Corporation)

(Christian Relief and Development Organization)

During the years of drought the ODE grew and met many needs. There was, however, the feeling that the Mossis and the AG's received an inordinate amount of the help sent to Burkina. In the person of Mo誰se Napon, WRC (relief arm of the US and Canadian National Association of Evangelicals) found a representative capable of organizing their contribution to Burkina Faso. The ODE seemingly wanted all organizations to work under their umbrella but Mo誰se proceeded to organize WRC in Burkina independently from ODE. Mo誰se received his early Christian training partially under the C&MA youth work in the city of Bobo when he was a student. He originates from Leo and the Canadian mission there that has given birth to the Eglise de Pentec担te.

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In the 1980's WRC created the Agricultural School in Poundou with the goal of training young men in improved agricultural methods through a residence program and sending them out equipped with oxen and plows. A large amount of money was put into what was to be a major dam providing adequate water for gardening and the school. This, for some reason, became a fiasco and never succeeded in holding water.

Attempts to make the school operate as a national enterprise seem to have met with failure. The drying up of Canadian support has created a crisis currently as we write.

In the early years the Alliance provided assistance through the Hank Van der Giessens who gave of their expertise in gardening to the Project. In the beginning Moïse stated that his goal was that the Alliance church should inherit this school; something which seemed unrealistic and, as time has gone on, is probably no longer mentioned.

Like other such organizations, WRC has had the ultimate goal of giving birth to a national organization capable of operating on its own. Thus has seen the creation of what is known as CREDO which now basically takes the place of WRC. Moïse is at the head of CREDO and is assisted by Tien Siaka, one of our Alliance laymen in Ouagadougou and former Bobo youth leader.

MCC (Mennonite Central Committee) Also in 1976 the MCC joined the forces in Upper Volta seeking to alleviate the problems caused by drought. Peter and Esther Heibert were the first MCC couple and they lived on the Djibasso station for a while. They were active in well digging and agricultural projects. Ultimately the MCC located their headquarters in Ouagadougou. In Ouaga the MCC has been instrumental in establishing a very effective language school for missionaries. MCC was also the forerunner of AIMM. CPE

(Team de Publications Evangéliques)

The CPE, located in Abidjan, came out of the move in the late 60's and early 70's toward inter-mission cooperative projects. Marge Shelley of the Conservative Baptist mission was a prime mover in establishing this publishing house. The Alliance leadership was involved from the beginning. Joe Ost, Ivory Coast missionary, did the building. Dave Kennedy served on the board of directors and Fordy Tyler from Burkina spent time in Abidjan before retirement working on building for the CPE. His wife, Rosalys, worked on the Boomu New Testament during that time in Abidjan. The Burkina CMA mission has over the years been a loyal participant in CPE. Likewise the Burkina Alliance church has been an active member. Like all such cooperative projects, idealistic as they are, the CPE has gone through many financial crises. In 1996 CPE elected its first West African director, Rev. Jules Ouoba.

CEFCA (Centre Evangdlique de Formation et Communication en Afrique) Another of Marge Shelley's visions was the establishing of an interdenominational center for further training of pastors subsequent to their graduation from Bible School. The CEFCA offers summer courses in a variety of subjects and has assisted many of our pastors in continuing education. Those who attend for three summer courses receive a coveted certificate of achievement. Courses were held for many years on the Mission Biblique compound in Cocodi but now they have their

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own property and buildings on a beautiful hill overlooking the Riviera section of Abidjan. A Conservative Baptist, Dr. Dale Williams, formerly of Madagascar, has been director of the program for several years. Nancy has been on their teaching staff for many years, giving courses in TEE and theological education.

FATEAC (Faculté de Théologic Evangéliquc de 1'Allíance Chrétienne) The FATEAC, founded in 1993, is located in Abidjan and all West African Alliance missions and churches are contributing members. Delegates are sent every two years to a General Assembly. See Theological Education section for more information.

PEDIM (Programme dEducation Décentralisé de l'institut Maranatha) PEDIM is the TEE program developed in Burkina Faso and which is related to the Maranatha Institute program. It is administered by a national coordinator who functions with the help of a committee.

SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics - Socièté Internationale Linguistique)

SIL is an ONG (organisation non-gouvernementale) operating with accords signed with governments, allowing them tax exemption on certain equipment. Their avowed purpose is to first provide the national university with detailed language analysis reports of national languages, do literacy projects in these same languages, and translate the Scriptures. SIL has always been helpful to the Alliance mission and church. Their American base is known as Wycliff Bible Translators. Like several other organizations, SIL has also given birth to a national movement known as ANTIBA, which promotes translation and literacy.

AWF - UMA (Alliance World Fellowship - Union Mondial de l'Allíance) The AWF-UMA was created in 1975, in Nyack, NY, as a worldwide fellowship of C&MA national churches. Dr. Nathan Bailey was the first president and after his untimely death Dr. L. L. King became president. Dr. Ben de Jesus came next followed by Roger Lang, the current president. Dr. de Jesus in now the Executive Director. Their quadrennial meeting was held in Yamoussoukro in 1991 and was a beautiful event. Moussa Coulibaly from Burkina was there as a member of the Executive Committee and Pastor Etienne Drabo represented the Burkina church.

A regional meeting was held in Ouagadougou at SIL in February, 1994.

GBB - GBU (Groupe Biblique Burkinabe Groupe Biblique Uníversitaire) The Alliance in Burkina has received leaders from this organization from time to time for many years. Pastor Réné Daidanso, Chadian pastor and current francophone member of the AEA team in Nairobi, was for some years a GBU leader. He came into Bobo unexpectedly on a tour in the late 1960's and we gathered together

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a number of the Bobo youth for a meeting with him. He has subsequently spoken at one of our pastor's conferences and is a very sought after speaker. Isaac Zokwe followed in the West African leadership of the GBU and is currently Doyen of the Faculté sponsored by the AEA in Bangui, Central African Republic. In 1997 the present GBB president is a student at the FATEAC.

SBB - ABU (Sosièté Biblique au Burkina Paso,- Alliance $íblique.Universe[le - formerly UBS) The SBB is the national level organization that relates to the ABU. This fledgling organization, created in 1989, had some hard years getting started, but hopefully is getting on its feet. Its first director was a sad failure and the second was requested to resign from the office. The current ABU policy is that of creating National Bible Societies in all countries through which Bible translation projects are to be funded and Bible distribution carried on. While independent, they are yet closely related to the ABU.

CHURCHES AND MISSIONS IN BURKINA FASO In order of their implantation they are: The Assemblies of God in 1921. The first missionaries were the Harry Wrights who left a few years later to join the C&MA in Mali and become their pioneers. One of the biggest Assemblies impacts on the country has been their Collège Protestant begun in 1948 in Ouagadougou by French missionaries Pasteur and Mrs. Pierre Dupré. The Duprés had come to the C&MA mission in Bouaké to work on the establishment of their primary school system. Doctrinal disputes erupted and they were asked to leave.

Hearing of the problem, missionary Harold Jones with the Assemblies in Ouaga came to the rescue, taking the Duprés to Ouagadougou.

The Christian and Missionary Alliance in 1923. Rev. and Mrs. Paul Frelighy came to Bobo-Dioulasso as the first C&MA workers. Paul's sister Marie was also in Bobo for a while along with Dora Bowman. Marie later became one of the principal translators of the first Bambara Bible. The two single ladies were known for their long treks on foot evangelizing villages. The Paul Frelighs left the field in 1927 as the Richard Johansons were arriving. The Johansons made a Herculean effort to evangelize and establish churches in the Bobo area until they left at the start of World War II in 1942. See section on history for further information.

Sudan Interior Mission in 1930. The SIM church is known as Association des Eglises Evangélique du Burkina. The SIM worked in the eastern part of the country; the C&MA in the west; and the AG's in the center under Mission Comity agreements that were in effect in those days delineating where individual missions were to concentrate in order to avoid duplication of efforts.

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WEC - World Wide Evangelization Crusade in 1937. The WEC occupied the south-western region. Bobo was their shopping center and their workers were often guests of the C&MA. They have worked in languages such as Lobi and Birifor.

Leo Mission - Association des Eglises Evangéliques de Pentecôte in 1946.

The Leo mission, as it was known, was in the beginning primarily the work of the Davies brothers and their wives and families. Sponsored by one or two large Canadian churches this group differed from the others in that they were a small mission sent by their individual churches. Their workers were always warmly received by the C&MA in Bobo.

AIMM - Africa Inland Mennonite Mission The AIMM came into Burkina following the implantation of the MCC. In discussions with the C&MA and EAC it was agreed that they should occupy the Oradara area including Ndorola. They thus took over the work first begun from Bobo and later supervised from Banfora. This occurred in the late 1970's. Siaka Traoré, first associated with the Alliance and coming from Banfora, was sent to Maranatha Institute by the AIMM for a year before he went on to seminary in Bangui. Siaka has been their leader ever since his return from studies. The AIMM began with the idea of only being a church but were later obliged for legal reasons to also form a mission structure.

Southern Baptists The Southern Baptist mission arrived in Burkina Faso in 1971. They established a vocational school in Koudougou in 1974. Emmanuel Toé, graduate of Maranatha, was one of their teachers for several years. He later joined his father as a Baptist pastor in Bobo, where he died in 1996. The Baptists have a youth center strategically located near the Ouagadougou University. Their work in Bobo began in 1983. The C&MA helped them in the beginning to get located in Bobo.

Apostolic Church The Apostolic Church began with the arrival of Swiss missionaries in 1975. This mission involved itself from the start in social work. They took an active role in the FEME, their missionary becoming treasurer following the years the office was held by the C&MA. Pastor Kompaoré Freeman has been their dynamic leader and currently is the first non-AG president of the FEME. Apostolic Mission This is an entirely separate organization from the Apostolic Church. A good way to remember them is that the church has missionaries in Burkina Faso, and the Apostolic Mission 73

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has no missionaries. This church was, in the early 60's, a break off from the Assemblies of God in Ouagadougou and several Alliance churches in the Santidougou district.

Centre D'Evangelisation An evangelistic movement, the outgrowth of the ministry of Mamadou Karambiri, the Centre has developed into a group of churches. Starting in Ouaga in the Karambiri home in 1984, they have organized groups in many other places. In 1987 they were officially recognized by the government. Mamadou was converted through the Assemblies of God while a student in France. He came home to Burkina to head up the government chain of stores known as Faso Yaar. During the Revolution years he was under attack by some who didn't appreciate his Christian stand. Sankara reportedly protected him and the Faso Yaar flourished under his direction. As his ministry grew, so did his desire to go "full time". He declared he would not leave government service without their blessing. He eventually got this and began full time ministry. His churches seem to be quite "independent" and they apparently vary in their style of charismatic worship according to their pastors. Enoc Paré, from the Tougan EAC district, upon his graduation from Yamoussoukro, was not satisfied with what his church proposed for placement and ultimately went with Karambiri becoming probably his best trained pastor. Enoch's wife also was a close family friend of the Karambiris. Madame Karambiri is a midwife from Tougan and was greatly influenced during her youth by the Alliance youth ministry under David Kennedy.

Mamadoú Karambiri has probably been responsible for winning more functionaries to Christ in Burkina than any other individual. He is often invited to the world-wide charismatic assemblies. He was helpful to the Alliance during the days we searched for property in Ouagadougou. Several schools have been started by the Centre.

Mission Alpha (Eglise du Plein Evangile) This Movement started in Switzerland in 1970, by a pastor from Guinea. They began their first group in Ouagadougou in 1984. They have been strongly charismatic and exerted considerable influence in Burkina Faso. Their present president is Abel Bicaba, a graduate of Institut Maranatha and former EAC pastor in the Dédougou district. They have planted churches in Bobo and elsewhere.

Vie Profonde This group is the outreach ministry of the Deeper Life mother church in Lagos, Nigeria. They have several groups in Burkina. Their head pastor in Bobo has been bi -vocational, working for ASECNA. The Burkina work began in 1985.

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TEACH THEM TO OBSERVE WHAT I HAVE COMMANDED This challenge of training programs (theological and otherwise) is one which has been addressed from the beginning of missions in West Africa. Jesus said, "Go and make disciples", and he also told us to "teach them". In 1942 Mr. Roseberry wrote: "Every effort that is not followed up with the teaching program becomes dead and lifeless in a very short time." xli But remember Richard Johanson's question, "Have you a systematic catechism for instruction of beginner believers, or is it more or less 'by gosh or by golly' as we used to do it??" Unfortunately, in the area of teaching non literates the Scriptures we are still going with "by gosh or by golly". The Southern Baptists in Mali are producing a beautifully illustrated beginner document for non-literate new believers. Perhaps we can use theirs!

SECULAR EDUCATION West Africa had been, since its beginning, an oral communication society. In the early history of Alliance missions in this part of the continent there were those who thought that we should establish primary and secondary schools to teach people to be literate in French, thus facilitating the teaching of the Scriptures. But others argued more strongly that we should teach only reading and writing in the national languages, that our personnel and finances were too meager to waste them on secular teaching. These missionaries were concerned that if a young person were trained in French, he would then get a secular job and we would never have pastors for our churches. (This is paternalism at its worst!) There was a further factor - the government of West Africa did not provide financing for French schools. In Gabon, Zaire and C贸te d'Ivoire there are large Alliance French school programs because the governments of those countries, from the beginning, helped finance the building of schools and the paying of teachers.

In January, 1944, the British Government issued a White Paper which states the following: "Tens of thousands of Africans have enlisted in the services, and have been introduced to a manner of life altogether different from that to which they were accustomed. It cannot be expected that these men will return to their primitive village lives...A situation has been precipitated by war conditions which demands a campaign of mass education - not only the wide extension of schooling for children, but also of adult education....The missionary societies, who were pioneers in educational work in Africa, and who are responsible for a great percentage of the schools, especially in the villages, will be of course expected to direct their energies to the promotion of this special effort". This was quoted in an

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"Alliance Weekly" editorial that same year, and the editor continues: "The proposal mentioned above refers merely to areas which are under British control. But the tendency mentioned is far wider in its sweep. African natives in other parts are feeling the same stirrings of ambition for the knowledge of the white man, and are eager to come out from under his restraint.... Our own untouched areas offer scope for the exercise of our full energies and resources. Men and gifts and prayer are needed, together with larger vision and improved methods." xlii Some missionaries who had a vision for the mission getting involved in French school education – people such as Ernie Howard and Fred Joder – clung tenaciously to their vision, and were instrumental in the opening of the primary school at Somasso, Mali, in 1946. An important part of the Christian and Missionary Alliance work in Somasso was the opening of the French primary school in 1946. After much prayer, the mission decided to go ahead with the school. Ernest Howard sent Thomas Konaté, a French teacher, to the school from Ntorosso. Within a week about a dozen boys arrived and the school was opened. That first year the school facilities were very limited: no school room, no teacher's house, no dormitory, no slates, no blackboard, nothing! Missionaries gave their tithe.... Some of the work was donated... The Berthalons (French missionaries) arrived, replacing Joders at the school. (Later) the Charles Bosserts (also French) took their place. Both couples did much to upgrade the education and improve the buildings and grounds... The school remained open until 1961 with enrollments of 300 or more in the 4 primary grades. Key young boys were trained in this school and grew up to be strong church leaders and lay leaders." xliii A prayer request sent to the constituency in North America during the early operation of the Somasso School states: 'Pray that other national Christian teachers of French may be secured for similar schools in other sections of the field. " xliv In 1952 Ralph Herber wrote the following about the school at Somasso: "At the Somasso school, some of these African boys are being reached. Lads of Christian parents come to prepare for the French 'certificat d'études'. Some come from as far away as the Kissien forests of the Guinea in order to profit from the abundant Christian instruction given in addition to the secular studies. The prayer and labor of the missionary who is unendingly busy in seeing to the nourishment and well-being of his hundred charges, is to see called from their ranks future leaders of the church."xlv Our own Joel Dakio from Poundou, Tite Tiénou and Yirano Traoré are products of this school.

In the town of Dédougou the mission operated another French primary school for several years in the 1940's. But again this was the vision of one or two missionaries and closed with their leaving. However, there are active laymen and pastors in our Burkina churches today who received their training at the Dédougou primary school.

In the mid 1960’s two other French primary schools were established, both cooperative projects of the church and mission: the school in Doumbala (Djibasso district) and the one in Santidougou. Money for the Doumbala school was obtained through a government grant and Fordy. Tyler constructed the buildings. Funding for the Santidougou school was obtained through DOM, from some French School funds that came originally from Zaïre, and Milt did the building. The teachers' residences were funded through personal money obtained from various sources. Up until the 1980's and the Revolution in our country, there was a Christian School Teachers'

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Association, organized and run by the Assemblies Of God leadership, but open also to our Alliance school teachers. This Association received money from the government to pay teachers' salaries in all Christian schools. But when this source disappeared in the 1980’s, the Eglise de I'Alliance Chrétienne found it impossible to continue paying teachers' salaries, and eventually the schools were turned over to the government This is without doubt an area where we failed as mission, in not seeing the importance of training people in French for the future of the church. It was left to the church in recent years to have the vision of establishing Christian secondary schools where Christian youth can be educated, and young people from non-Christian families reached with the Gospel. The Lycée Maranatha in Bobo-Dioulasso has a fine record of conversions to Christ since its beginning. And the Lycée Technique in Dédougou will begin training students in 1997, thus expanding the training and evangelistic arm of the church.

REGIONAL BIBLE TRAINING SCHOOLS We have done better in areas other than French schools and non-literate materials.

From the beginning, missionaries have created written forms for languages they learn and have produced literacy programs and follow up courses for new literate believers.

There are literacy materials available in Jula, Boomu, Bwamu, Bobo and San. In the early 80's we translated Keith Bailey's book, 'Learning, to Live" in Jula, French and Bobo Madare, and it is now being reproduced through the Lit Center in cooperation with other Alliance fields in Africa.

After the return of missionaries to West Africa following the Second World War in the mid 40's, most of our regions began to hold annual "short term Bible Schools".

These were held mainly in local languages, with people from one ethnic group.

Literacy, conversational French, Bible and theology were taught to both men and women. Classes were taught by Burkinabe pastors and missionaries. From these schools many people then went on to residential Bible Schools to become full-time Christian workers. Many of the older pastors we have today began their training through short term Bible Schools.

GIRLS' SCHOOLS The first Girls' School was begun in Baro, Guinea, in the 1930's. This school was directed and taught by several single women, missionaries in the early years. Baramba in Mali was another such school and was also taught by lady missionaries, both married and single. This school is still operating, full every year, and is taught and administered

by Pastor Simeon Dembélé and his wife, who were trained in Niamey at the SIM Bible School there. Here in Burkina girls’ training schools were the work of local regions there was no national school. We did for years send girls to be trained at Baramba in Mali. Djibasso has a large girls' school program which is still functional and ably administered by Esther Traoré. Santidougou had a school for engaged girls for about fifteen years, taught by both missionary women and pastors. It is no longer in session.

Bomboïla Girls' school among the Dating people in the Dédougou district was founded in the 40's and operated by Pierre and Bafore, a Christian couple, aided, by the Breidingers and Smiths in that district. The school was later closed for many years, and

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reopened during the late 80's as a school for both young men and young women.

The Clousers and pastors of the region taught there, and the school is still operating.

There is a similar, and highly developed training school in Kassan in the district of Tougan, and there they teach both young men and young women. Missionaries have taught there through the years, and it is currently operated by Tougan district pastors.

FIELD WIDE TRAINING PROGRAM In the early 70's, before the separation of the Mali and Upper Volta field administrations, a committee of missionary educators was formed, and asked to prepare some basic biblical and doctrinal courses, which would in turn become entrance requirements for any person applying for admission to our Bible Institutes. These were to be written in English, and thus be available for translating into other languages. Courses were prepared for Survey of the Bible, The Christian Walk, Health, Basic Doctrine, God's Road, and others. These courses were translated into Jula, Bobo and perhaps other languages as well, and used in our short term training schools which were still being held at that time..

This field wide training program was actually the forerunner of the PEDIM program which saw the first light of day in 1980. Many people entering out Bible Schools today first study several of the PEDIM courses.

COURS DE VACANCES This one month, training program, taught in the French language was one of a kind. Here are some observations written in the Hilites of September, 1971: "The month long Cours Biblique de Vacances finished on August 31st...

The teachers both testify that if the students didn't learn anything, they themselves certainly did! Certificates were presented at the closing session...seven out of sixteen students had the moyenne....Some interesting observations were the Biblical illiteracy of some of our educated youth, the Biblical knowledge of some that had previously studied in vernacular programs and the influence of some of the homes on the Biblical knowledge of the students. They had five class hours a day, six days a week, or a total of 120 class' hours for the month." xlvi Tite Tiénou and Yiranou Traoré were the professors at this trial course - the first time Bible classes were officially taught in the French language! This was a forerunner of Maranatha Institute.

BIBLE INSTITUTES An "Alliance Weekly" in 1947 stated that "The training of a strong, spiritual native ministry is essential to the development of a strong, spiritual native church. To this end three Bible Schools are conducted in French West Africa". (Ntoroso, Telekoro and Bouaké) The C&MA in North America has always put great priority in helping to establish Bible Training Schools in West Africa and elsewhere. With limited funds, they do their best to help as many as possible. Their idea was to help each of our West

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African countries to have one good Bible School, each at different levels, thus enabling a cooperation between these countries as far as educating each other's students. The Mali was given help with Ntorosso and then later with Bethel Institute, both of which were taught in the Bambara (or Jula) language. Rusty Eramo took training in curriculum development at Wheaton College during one furlough, and helped develop a well-balanced Bambara curriculum for this school.

The Burkina was given money to help begin Maranatha Institute, which is at the sixième level. Tite Tiénou, when beginning Maranatha, patterned the French curriculum content after that of Ntorosso. The Cote d'Ivoire has been given financial aid with Yamoussoukro which was to be a training school at a troisième level. And the more recently established West Africa Alliance Seminary was to be the theological training school at the post bac level.

However, because of the expense of travel, and it must be admitted, a sense of nationalism, each of these countries has now developed other schools and thus diluted the level of the teaching available in each school. Cote d'Ivoire has absorbed their lower level students at Yamoussoukro, and they, all study in the same classrooms. Mali has only four students studying in the French language, attending classes at Bethel, where there is a very large Bambara speaking student population. In Burkina, the national church really wanted another Jula Bible School in the bush when the establishing of Maranatha in the city of Bobo was proposed to them. So they have taken a long time to "own" Maranatha Institute. In 1977, a year after Maranatha opened its doors, Poundou Bible Institute began in the town of Poundou in the Dédougou district. This was at first totally run and staffed by the national church. The DeVroomes have gone to Poundou to live and participate in the training program there. They and CAMA Services have done much to upgrade the buildings, solar system and gardening program. The national church's intention is to eventually have all Maranatha trained teachers on the staff at Poundou. DeVroomes, Conkles and others have worked on the Jula cirriculum of the Poundou Institute to help put it in shape. In order to accommodate the troisième level students from Burkina, Maranatha began a second cycle in 1994.

Just one class, with eight students, is functioning at this level.

As a result of this fragmentation of the training programs in these three countries, the schools at Poundou in Burkina and Bethel in Mali are filled to capacity. But the other schools have a hard time financially maintaining their programs because of too few students. Telekoro in Guinea was begun in the 1940's, as a training school using the Maninka language. In the late 50's the national church of Guinea decided to change over to a French teaching system.

Many of the students did not speak French, and so French language lessons had to be taught first. This school still struggles with the level of French of incoming students.

PEDIM PROGRAM In the late 60's the idea of TEE as a tool of theological training was developed in the country of Guatemala, and from there spread to many parts of the world, including francophone Africa. Paul White of East Africa came first in 1978 to talk about the possibilities of TEE for our church. It was at that time thought that the level of literacy in our country was too low for a TEE program. But a study committee

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was formed, composed of Rollo Royle, Eric Persson, Tite Tiénou and Myrna Ballard. Patricia Harrison of Australia was invited to come and do a TEE seminar to help us decide if this method could be used in Burkina. I had attended a TEE Workshop in Wheaton on furlough, and when I returned to the field began to function on our field TEE study committee. It was in 1980 that the first book (Old Testament Survey) was written, and the pilot project was tried out in Santidougou.

From then on we went forward, and PEDIM has become a part of the theological training program in Burkina. All districts have now accepted the program, and there are at present about eight five pastors who teach PEDIM classes.

In 1989 PEDIM officially became the decentralized arm of Maranatha, with statutes and bylaws. Courses in Jula now number eighteen, and the same courses are being translated into French. New courses are being written each year with a goal of producing about twenty five courses for a PEDIM diploma. Only functional leaders in the church or those desiring to be church leaders may be enrolled in the program.

STUDENTS SENT OVERSEAS FOR STUDY PROGRAMS The DOM of North America periodically gives Scholarships to Alliance theological students for overseas study in the main areas of the world where there are Alliance churches, on a rotating basis. Those from Burkina Faso who have benefited from such scholarships are: Tite Tiénou – Vaux-sur-Seine, 1973-1976 Fuller School of World Mission, 1980-1984 Toé Mamadou Maradoche – Alliance Theological Seminary, 1985 Moussa Coulibaly – Canadian Theological Seminary, 1979-1981 Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1995

FA.T.E.A.C. (Faculté de Théologie Evangélique de 1'Alliance Chrétienne) It has long been the dream of some, and the vision of others, to establish an Alliance graduate level theological study program on the African continent. It is too soon to give an actual "historical" account of the founding of this school, but it is certainly in order to recount some of the facts for the record. There are many questions out there: Why Abidjan? Who selected the board members?

Why only half scholarships for Alliance students? Where do we go from here?

In 1990 the first West Africa Alliance Seminary Board had its first meeting.

One year previously, in 1989 at an All Africa meeting at Yamoussoukro, an ad hoc committee was formed and declared that it was time to begin our Seminary.

They even went so far as to name the board members, missionary as well as church. The mission requested that they name their own members, and did so, including one of the people named by the church and substituting another name because the missionary named was due for furlough. It was also agreed that to get things started David Kennedy, as regional director for Africa, should be a member of the board for a time. The first meeting was held at Yamoussoukro,

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coinciding with the Alliance World Fellowship meetings which most of the board members were attending. Those early board meetings had full agendas - there were so many decisions to be made.

It was at the second meeting of the board that we made a definite decision about location. This was a hard one. We prayed much and discussed at length. We put on the board all the major West African cities, discussed the pros and cons, and finally voted. The vote was split, and it was late at night. So we decided to sleep and pray and come back the next morning to vote again. And Abidjan was then voted as the choice. Some of the reasons were: good communications and travel; access to good libraries, including ICAOxlvii the breadth of the evangelical community and exposure to a larger world. Some of these reasons are positive aspects of West African students studying overseas.

The idea of DOM's giving half scholarships was their decision, not ours. It will be interesting in the future to see if this was a wise decision. It seems now that churches feel the amount they are asked to pay is too much, and so they don't send many students. The Alliance students are currently thirteen out of twenty four.

We desperately need highly trained people in our churches. Educating people in North America or Europe is very costly, and it is becoming ever more difficult to get African students into France for longer than three months at a time because of the visa problem.

So these are all things to be worked out in the future.

But the dream and vision of yesterday has become a challenging reality today.

The possibilities for the future of the Seminary are endless as we work together with the church in establishing this West African theological institution. Nancy Pierce served as secretary of the FATEAC board for eight years. Later the new woman’s building was named for her.

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ALL ABOUT BUILDINGS

There is a socio-economic theory that the buildings we build control to some extent the kind of people (or group) we become. This seems to have been true in the Burkina Faso Alliance Mission and Church. Throughout our history we have had a rural mentality. It was thought by the early missionaries that the cities were evil and that people did not respond to the gospel there. And so we have had many large rural mission stations in West Africa. We established our first theological educational institutions in rural milieus, and we trained no one to minister in the cities. However, during a visit to West Africa in 1921 - a long time before the missiological push to reach the cities of the world! - Dr. A.C. Snead, then Foreign Secretary of the Christian and Missionary Alliance in North America, made a decision that Mission administrative offices should be established in large commercial and/or administrative centers. This decision was far reaching for the future of the work in West Africa. Thus Kankan, an inland commercial center, was chosen as the administrative office of the developing West African Alliance field. The rural mentality was hard to get rid of, however, and was to some extent passed, on to the church. Of course, in a country which is still only 10% urban, it is important to reach the rural peoples, but neither must we neglect those in urban centers. Sometimes in these centers we reach people who in turn go back and open up their rural area to the Gospel.

In 1923 when the survey team, including field chairman Robert Roseberry, reached the city of Bobo-Dioulasso, in accordance with the policy established by Snead, they asked about properties for the Mission in this town. A merchant showed them a property with a small house near the central market square, and Mr. Roseberry purchased the property for $1,166.00! xlviii In those days the marketplace was where the Hotel de Ville is now located. A few years later this property was to be claimed by the government, and so the present church office property was given to the Mission in exchange for their market-front dwelling.

THE DOWNTOWN PROPERTY This property, acquired by the Alliance mission in the City of BoboDioulasso, has a long history of change and more change! It was originally the front part of the present property back to the wall, and contained a long adobe building (about where the church office building is located). This building was divided into sections of church/ chairman's residence/ office/ - all under one long roof! There was also a large storage building; built with dried mud brick.

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In 1959 a small cement two-rooms and kitchen guest house was built (later to become a single missionary's residence), and the next year John Johanson built the four room motel unit beside this small guest house, using 450.000 CFA that was left over in the field GE account at the end of 1959. These six rooms gave additional space for the use of guests and for annual field conference. At the French West Africa field conference in March of 1960, Leroy Kennedy, regional chairman of the Mali-Upper Volta region, asked for and received a generous missionary pledge to build a new church on the corner of this mission property, after having tried in vain to find property elsewhere, apart from the Mission. By November 1960 when the Mali-Upper Volta Mission had their first independent field conference, the church was built and used for meetings. The mission administrative office was then moved from a small room in the chairman's part of the long main building on the mission compound to the old church part of that same building, which fronted on the main street, Rue Binger. The main driveway to the compound was where it is now.

In 1960 the city administrators published an edict that all buildings in the center of the city must be built in cement, and all adobe buildings demolished.

This was communicated to the North American Alliance headquarters in New York City, who sent funds to begin this kind of extensive building. The plan was to build two full size cement residences on the compound. The entry gate was to be changed and placed between the motel and small guest house.

At the November 1960 conference, Tom Burns from Dogon country in Mali was elected field chairman to replace Leroy Kennedy who with his wife was going on furlough. Tom was a builder and he had done his building in Florida where he used hurricane specifications. So he built solid buildings. Many other missionaries were asked to come to Bobo and help with the building. When the houses were finished, one missionary commented that these would last forever and be there for the national church to occupy some day! He turned out to be a prophet sooner than he then thought!

The Burns could not leave their work in Mali until the end of February 1961 and so Milt and I were asked to temporarily move into Bobo and take care of the administration in the two months’ interim between chairmen in residence. Imagine Milt, a language student, not even one year on the field, and in charge of mail, phone calls, cables received decisions to be made. There was no communication but by donkey cart with the plains of Sangha in Mali where the Burns were teaching in a two months' Bible School! Milt was also given the task of getting the building started and I was station hostess, welcoming and feeding missionaries who came to Bobo.

One amusing incident of that period was the flurry of correspondence which Milt had to read, sent by the North American administrative offices in New York concerning their approval , of Tom Burns as field chairman. Tom had dared to put on paper in a letter to the foreign department what many of us thought, that missionaries had become "nothing but cogs in the machinery of the foreign department". The men in New York took exception to this statement, and wanted Tom to recant and promise to uphold the policies of the foreign board before they would approve his nomination! Talk about tempests in teapots!!

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The new houses were built and the porches painted: in Florida shades of turquoise and peach, and the old mission station took on a new look. In 1963 surplus field funds were again used and Herb Nehlsen oversaw the building of what we now call the .church "guest house". In the 1970's New York again sent extra funds to redo the water system and the electrical systems of the compound.

We personally lived for six years in the current church president's house. The large, storeroom which is now next door was at that time the front yard of Pastor Thomas Tessougué, and his wife and family of six children! Those were days of “close fellowship” for them and us! Then the Mission acquired the property on which the Central Church is now located and the pastor was moved to an apartment in the large building located on that property where the church building itself now stands. Since we now had access to our compound from the street behind the mission, the driveway was again changed, this time to the area where the Central Church pastor's house now stands! The old driveway area was filled in with shrubs and children's play equipment and served as a nice play yard! The excom decided to build a carport in the space between the chairman's house and the storeroom.

People would park their cars there, and get ready for their five am departure by warming up their engines for fifteen minutes beforehand – under the mission chairman's bedroom window! The carport was also used by the youth for their all night songs and dance routine! Later on, when the current church property was separated from the ''Mission part of the property and a new church building built, we lost our large storeroom and so the old carport was blocked in and made into the building now standing there!

In the 60's Charles Bossert, then pastor of the French congregation of the Bobo church and director of the Bookstore, was offered the large property from the marketplace down to the street behind the church (where Collège Houet now stands) for $10,000.00! This request for funding was sent to the foreign department, but this was during the period when all funds were going into building the Bible School at Nhatrang, Viet Nam, and our request was turned down. After that it was impossible to find a property in the center of town for the Central Church which was affordable. At a Church-Mission Agreement meeting in 1976, it was decided to wall off the back part of the Mission property and give it to the church. Dr. L.L. King would then give $18,000.00 from his "foundation" to put up a new church building there. Milt built this church in 1976-1977. The large storeroom on the back of the lot was torn down first, but it had been constructed around a steel frame. This steel frame was carefully dissembled and marked (like a n erector set!) and it later was set up on Maranatha campus and became the framework of the TOUGAN building there! In 1974-1975 DOM gave funds to help build new offices, and Fordy Tyler built the present church office building.

Now the driveway had to be moved again… I told you there were changes and more changes connected with that property!… and this time the drive returned to its original site on the front of the property where it remains to this day!

But we're not through yet!! There was the tale of THE WALL! When the mission gave the back part of our property to the church, a wall was planned to separate the two properties. "Good fences make good neighbors,” some people thought. The next question

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was: Shall we put a gate in the wall?? One missionary said if there was a gate, he would resign; another said if there were not a gate, he would resign. The gate won out, and all the missionaries stayed. Sometimes the gate remained closed and locked, sometimes it was open to a steady stream of people. Whatever you decided on that downtown property, it was in the middle of a swirl of people always; the chairman's house was next to his office and he was always on call; the guest rooms were right there, the chairman's wife was in charge of the guests and the keys hung on a board inside her living room! It was Grand Central Station!!

THE COLMA MISSION Did we learn from history and try something different when we had the chance?

What do you think? Let us continue our saga of the downtown property. First of all, a digression: During the 50th Anniversary celebration in 1973, Dr. Nathan Bailey gave a gift to the Burkina church of 600.000 francs, intended to help them build a church office building. This money stayed in an account for several years. Finally in 1978 Tite TiĂŠnou was able to get property in Colma for the church. The church was asked if they wanted us to use their money and begin building. They assented, and the shell of the present Mission office building was put up. At Mission-Church Agreement time in March 1986 the Mission offered to do one of two things: 1) finish the shell of the new office building and equip it for their occupancy, or 2) trade their property for our downtown mission property with its old, well-used buildings. This was a complete surprise to the church, and after great deliberation they returned to say that they had to accept the offer of the downtown property, but they wanted us to first build a new front wall to replace the deteriorating one.

This took time, and President Bonzi was in no hurry to move. It was in 1992 that the downtown mission property was finally deemed ready to turn over to the church. In the end Milt and Rollo Royle worked for days cleaning up old broken down washing machines and spare metal of all kinds and trucked loads out to be dumped in old wells. Tim Albright also planted numerous new trees around the yard. We moved out and made a "new beginning".

But actually it was more a question of history repeating itself. Some suggeste d that we should maintain our office building at Colma and maybe even put a guest house there. But that our mission director should live in his own yard and have regular office hours like they do in some other countries. This was discarded in favor of having the director again live next to the office where he is available at all times and crowding on as many buildings as possible in as little space as possible.

In other words, trying to duplicate what we lived with downtown! We had the chance at that period in history to make life easier for our field directors and we also could have seen the church increase (its image) and we decrease ours. But we opted instead to reproduce what we had had. There was even a discussion about the wall, as there was in the downtown property! On the original plans for the Colma property there were walls between the two houses and between the office building and the residences - just as they are now. However, one director did not want any

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walls so planted trees instead. The next director wanted only one wall, the one between the residences and the office building. And the third director finally completed the walls between the two residences!

The Ntorosso Bible School was another case in point of being bound by our buildings. A few early Christians and missionaries got blessed under a large baobab tree in the little village of Ntorosso, thirty kilometers from the government center of San. The decision was made to start a Bible School, and money was invested. It grew like topsy, and became a white elephant to maintain: no city water, no electricity (in the days before solar). But there were all those buildings and it was too late to change, and so Ntorosso continued on for a couple generations. Here is an account of that spiritual high which in turn generated the Ntorosso Bible School: "The first morning at Ntorosso we gathered for prayer and God's Spirit moved on us from the beginning.

One Foulah woman especially...was used of God in that prayer meeting. The burden of her prayer was the baptism of the Holy Spirit with fire from on high. As our praying went on, suddenly strong men began to cry out to God that He would help them and give them power. The prayer meeting continued for nearly three hours... Right on through the conference the Spirit of God was manifest in our midst." And further along in the article: "We have already begun to plan for a regular Bible School to be opened the first of January." xlix It is also of interest to note that during the early years of Ntorosso Bible School the teachers were single women. In The Alliance Weekly of October 15, 1938 there is a picture of eleven students (all men) and three teachers (all women) at the Ntorosso Bible School in French West Africa! Mali finally changed: their Bible School location to Bethel, right on the outskirts of the town of Koutiala.

There has always been great discussion on this field concerning the pros and cons of renting versus building. In most rural areas there is no choice - we must build. But in our cities we can find relatively inexpensive rents which provide adequate housing.

The church would prefer that we buy property and build, as those buildings revert to them when we no longer need them. All of our properties are now in the church's name, with a clause that we may have occupancy as long we need them. Some properties have already been turned over to the church for their exclusive use: Siniena, Sourou, Santidougou, DĂŠdougou, downtown Bobo, Ouarkoye and Djibasso.

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OF CONFERENCES AND COMMITTEES If you stick around long enough, you see and learn a lot, One thing you learn is that if you wait a bit things will change. Another thing you learn is that "God so loved the world that he didn't form a committee..." And you also realize that there is much more heat than light generated by many discussions that we missionaries are so fond of having, whether official or unofficial discussions! But committees and conferences are a fact of life as long as you have a mission.

CONFERENCES I can still remember conferences from my childhood. The two major memories are sneaking in the back of the chapel to sit and listen to the missionaries' discussions and taking the conference picture! Yes, we have always taken a conference picture, and it's better organized now than it used to be. Of course it is a bit easier to organize today's thirty people than the eighty five adults and thirty seven children present in one picture! But it was not only the number of people that was difficult in those days - each person also wore a sun helmet. These were large bulky, stiff hats which everyone had to wear because of the lethal African sun! So there had to be room between all those rows of people for each one to remove his sun helmet and hide it behind him on the count of "....TWO!..." just before the picture was snapped on the count of "...THREE"!! The whole picture taking process took most of two hours!

The children were always at conference because we were home from school in March when the annual field conference was held. The older children watched out for the younger children; I don't remember any babysitters from those days. We were always being chased in our noisy games from the vicinity of the Kankan church building as that was where the business meetings were held . But some of us older kids soon learned that the discussions inside the church were much more fun than the games of tag outside, and so we would unobtrusively creep into the back row and sit quietly watching our parents debate. Our favorite debaters were Uncle Floyd Bowman, Uncle Franklin Ballard and Uncle John Johanson. They would debate each other and anyone else, and they were good! Some of the favorite subjects were educating people in French, whether polygamists should be baptized and who should go to Mamou to be houseparents that year. We learned a lot during those debates. Until "Uncle Roseberry", the chairman, would see us and roar, "All children clear out of the chapel! Out of the chapel, young people!" And back we'd go to our dull games of tag!

The year 1960 was the last French West Africa conference, and the only one Milt ever attended - he was not impressed! First of all, you had to pack and transport beds and linens for all your family for the conference. They had enough beds at Kankan to supply one for each woman missionary, so since we had two children that meant taking three beds and four sets of linens and towels. And a lantern or two since the electricity was not very good in Guinea. Plus enough clothes to keep everyone dressed up for a week, with no laundry facilities available. When you arrived at the conference you received your work assignment! Milt’s was to help cut up meat, and that job began at five thirty in the morning. So I got the children up and dressed them. My job assignment was to set up and clear tables in the dining room since everyone ate

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together with the meals being supervised by Mrs. Kurlak, Kankan hostess, and her cooks. This meant Milt had to be sure the girls were washed for meals and bring them to the table (if he could find them!). The Kankan Mission had two very large compounds, separated by a city street. Actually, Milt spent most of his time keeping track of the girls, as I sang in the conference choir. This choir was led by Ralph Shellrude, and we practiced for hours until he thought we were perfect! “We” meant about half the missionaries attending the conference – the rest were babysitting the children! We practiced during noon rest, after the evening service, during any “free” time. Milt said he hated listening to the finished product after he heard it so many times during our practices! Neither was he impressed with the dining room process where you all stood for a song and prayer at the beginning of the meal and waited to be dismissed at the end! So that was conference at Kankan. The “good ole days”. I almost forgot to say that it took us two days to get there, going across two rivers by ferry on the way, unpacking our own cots to sleep on!

After that 1960 conference we met annually in Bobo. I got so I dreaded conference time approaching, wondering what disaster would strike and we’d be involved in the next! One year my sister had hepatitis and I took care of her baby and toddler plus my own kids and helped take food to her in the hospital; another year a Mali missionary got terribly burned and during conference we all took food to the hospital to help out; still another time someone had a nervous breakdown and we all helped out with this need; another busy conference was the famous Ballard wedding – not a disaster but a busy time! Myrna’s wedding gown did not come, so Ruth Riccitelli stayed up all night and sewed one for her. Milt was a groomsman for Lin, they were using our car to go to Santidougou to our home for their honeymoon, Debbi was a flower girl and I was planning the reception. I’ll never forget that conference! But there were harder days ahead…

I hadn`t realized that when your husband was the field chairman, you automatically got to prepare for conference in those days! Bob and Mary Kaye Pease from Mali were appointed to help us do this, as we were a two country field. Mary Kaye tuned the piano for conference, Milt got all the reports ready, and Bob and I set up temporary quarters for all the missionaries coming in. We rented apartments – and you would not believe some of the dilapidated apartments we found to rent! They had to be cleaned, fumigated, furnished, down to the last pot in the pan because by now everyone was doing his own cooking during conference! Bob Pease and I sorted and cleaned the large stacks of extra pails, pan, mattresses, chairs, rickety tables and camp stoves and gas bottles in the mission storeroom, and transported load after load to those ghastly apartments in uptown! And then we did the process in reverse – assigning dishes, cooking pots, pails, mattresses etc. to each apartment and decided who was going to stay

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where. If you had small children you stayed on the mission compound, and if you were single or without children you stayed in the market-fronted apartments. I still shudder sometimes when I drive around the market in Bobo and see the empty windows of those apartments staring down at me!

Conference used to also be highly organized. We came with a blank slate, no preparations made except for a speaker, and then the rat race began! First a program committee was named, and you would do anything not to be on that particular committee. Because they met early every morning and late every night and many hours in between; you see, no one could do anything on the conference floor until there had been both a "first reading" and a "second reading" of the program committee! Another committee to avoid was the personnel committee.

They stationed everyone on the field for the coming year, and each individual missionary had to be called in to the personnel committee to express his opinion.

When all the decisions had been made and the committee members were totally exhausted, there was a first reading of the stationing committee, and then it was tabled for twenty four hours. During that time anyone could go in to this committee and complain about anybody's stationing they did not like on the report. More hours of sitting and listening. And then the final report was read. It was an unwritten rule that no one could discuss anything about stationing on the conference floor. After the final reading, everyone would stand in assent to their stationing, and then Fordy and Rosalys Tyler would sing a duet: The Hornet Song.

You know - "He did not compel them to go 'gainst their will, but he just made them willing to go!"

There were many other committees of conference and each missionary had to be a member of at least one committee. So there was never free time - you had committee meetings and prepared a report when you were not in business or devotional meetings. Add to that preparing meals for your family and for the people staying in your home if you lived in Bobo, plus a three hour fasting service on Sunday (while you kept your kids happy), and you can be thankful for SIL Ouagadougou - low, hard beds and all!

VACATIONS Now, vacations don't seem to fit in the same chapter with conferences, but historically they did. This was because everyone went to the same place for vacation - Dalaba in Guinea. All missionaries were divided into two groups and you went on vacation when you were assigned! Try that one out on the Baby Boomer generation...! I marvel now that people (we) actually went along with that.

Missionaries attended conference in Kankan in March. Those who had school age children usually took their children to school directly following conference.

Every missionary went to Dalaba for vacation either the month before or after conference. Each missionary stayed a full month, as Dalaba was in the Futa Djallon Mountains and had a cooler climate. Every kind of fruit and vegetable was available there, which varied the diet, and this was supposed to be best for one's health. For those who lived in Burkina or Mali, they were usually assigned to go on vacation after conference, because of the heat up in this area at that time.

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The Alliance vacation spot at Dalaba is on a large terraced hill, and in its heyday each of those four terraces was lined with houses - some nothing more than shacks, others more substantial homes. There was no indoor plumbing and no running water.

Some of the cottages had fireplaces because if was often cold and damp. The view, especially from the top terrace, was lovely. Missionaries owned these little houses, and equipped them, leaving a complete set of dishes, pans, linens, etc. packed away there, ready for the yearly vacation. The kids always had fun. There were picnics at "The Pines", a large grove of beautiful pine trees in the valley below the mountainside where we stayed. At least once during the month everyone drove to picturesque Kinkon Falls, where the scenery was lovely and the swimming cold. Every afternoon was volleyball on the lower terrace and the evenings were for games. Some of the Guinea missionaries still go to Dalaba for vacation; but many of the old shacks are gone now, and you're no longer told when it's your turn to go! Milt and I took our family to Dalaba one year for vacation it rained most of the time, the three girls all got measles and had high fevers and were sick and we had no indoor plumbing. It is not our favorite memory!

In the 60's some of us used to go to Ghana and Liberia for vacation. This was more like living. You could swim in the sea, and the mission guest houses were well equipped.

The stores were full of American goods, so you could also stock up on supplies. In Ghana there were even Rest Houses where you could stay a week, pay a very basic fee, and have all meals provided and your laundry done for you. Morning coffee was brought to you on the verandah at ten and afternoon tea was served in the parlor at four thirty. That was my idea of a real vacation! A little leftover British culture in the Nkrumah era in Ghana! That was also the era when missionaries got a certain number of kilometers of paid mileage for vacation!

The next step in vacations was going to the Guinguette, a wooded area with swimming just outside the city of Bobo Dioulasso. Parents during those years did not go so frequently to see their children at I.C.A. - the roads were bad and we were actually only allowed so many visits by the school - so we had time to spend some vacation time elsewhere with our kids. Most people opted for the Guinguette since it was cheap and fun! Well, it was fun once you got there, but it took days to get ready: repairing the tents, packing the necessities of life, baking goodies. Not only the Burkina missionaries went to the Guinguette but people came from Mali and Cote d'Ivoire; often there were over a hundred people camping together at the Guinguette. The woods were covered with every kind of camping gear you can imagine. Sometimes we even took a generator for electric lights. There was swimming, meals together, hikes, spear fishing, games of all kinds, and many discussions. More than one change of mission policy was decided at the Guinguette! Some of the house helpers also went along, and the older MK's spent time around the campfire at night with them listening as they compared their "patrons' camping equipment. At one point the man who worked for the then field chairman was quite incensed that although his patron was director of the mission, his tent was the tackiest one there!

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Then came the time when all missionaries with children spent their vacations going to I.C.A. You carefully counted your days of travel and your days of visiting the kids, and added in the days off that you never get a chance to take at home. If your child was homesick at school or you had to consult with teachers, the time didn't really feel anything like vacation! In the early days of I.C.A. there were four rooms in the BouakĂŠ motel, up where the church school is now. There was no electricity, except for a couple hours at night, and that was generated by a very noisy motor so that your conversations all had to be yelled to be heard! Neither was there running water except for one barrel up on the roof - for four motel rooms, one family per room. We all spent time out back pumping water up into that one barrel for all of us to use! It was quite a vacation! The recent addition of an extra week for parents with schoolchildren is a great idea, and gives families a time to get away together, outside the school context.

COMMITTEES Missions, it seems, cannot function without committees. One of their duties is to deal with the trivia that clutter the daily landscape of a mission. In reading the old excom minutes in the mission archives, dating from 1930 and 1932, the words sound familiar: ** "The motion was made and carried that Mr. Adam be granted a verandah on the south end of his house according to specifications, to be paid for at his own expense." ** "Moved that money for the repairing of the mission property at Labe be taken from building funds." ** "Moved that Mr. Loose and Mr. and Mrs. J. Johanson constitute the auditing committee."

Sounds sort of like our FLT minutes doesn't it? Trivia doesn't change a lot... But here are some different sounding minutes from back in the 30's: ** "Moved and carried that Mr. Waite's carriers be paid by the mission in bringing his child as far as Faranah on the way to school." (How would your child like to go to I.C.A. carried in a hammock??) *** And here's a "goodie" - notice the sequence of these minutes, all part of the record of Feb. 2,3,4, 1933: ** "It was moved and carried that Mr. Bowman be granted permission to marry Miss Hue." ** "It was moved and carried that Miss Hue be stationed at Tombouctou." ** "It was moved and carried that Messrs. Bowman and Sauve (who had been stationed at Tombouctou) be placed at Dire until Mr. Bowman's marriage."

(No one could marry without excom permission in those days and the majority of the staff was single. The Bowman were later married in Tombouctou, in a very romantic ceremony in full moonlight!)

Here are minutes reflecting the spirit of those times regarding single workers: (They must have been reading the Apostle Paul!)

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** "The motion was made that we ask the Board for six single men for advance work, not including the party in France." and ** "It was moved and carried that in view of the varied and difficult languages and the climatic conditions and the difficulty of couples with children being used in pioneer advance, that we discourage the sending out of recruits with children. "1 But the single men and women who came as missionary recruits did not stay single long! They paired up and married right here on the field, after processing their' request for marriage through the executive committee and foreign department! Here is an interesting item from The Alliance Weekly, March 26, 1927, written from Mopti: "The Christmas season was ushered in with happy wedding bells ringing, for on the day preceding Christmas it was our privilege to perform the wedding ceremony for two of our fellow missionaries, Brother' Willard S. Martin and Miss Jennie Russell....In accordance with French law we went first to the government building and had a civil ceremony and then returned to the Mission and had the religious ceremony...The room had been prettily decorated by the ladies and a little temporary altar constructed. Mrs. Howard played the organ as the bride and groom entered. The natives who were lined up respectfully outside entered the room behind the young couple and stood quietly watching the first Christian wedding they had ever seen....After the service the natives clapped their hands and danced in true native fashion serenading the bride and groom. The natives were given a wedding dinner of rice and meat, but an American meal had been prepared for the newly married couple." li Just to round out this section on early excom actions, let me share a rich quote from Richard Johanson. In speaking of Milt's comments about the separating of the fields, Richard writes: "If only we could have separated them fifty years ago when it started. You cannot imagine the time I had to waste running to Conference at Kankan, to Dalaba, and above all the endless Exec. Comm. meetings where we would perhaps appoint a "catechiste" somewhere whom we had never met, (usually demote him next meeting), then perhaps work out a stationing solution for some single lady (we had scads of them) who could not get along with her present companion. We would authorize building of some house of which we had no idea, and what with poor roads and delays, etc., it often took two weeks for one exec. committee! Then the field chairman's visits and endless surveys all over the landscape, which of course were useful in some cases. The field was simply too vast and utterly impossible to administer. Worst of all, the emphasis on the Niger Valley was a misplaced one because those Moslems did not respond like the pagan tribespeople."

The rule of thumb for excoms has always been four meetings a year. In the days of long, hard distances to be traveled, one of these meetings coincided with annual field conference. In the old vast French West Africa field, there had to be representatives from the Sudan and the Ivory Coast, as well as from Guinea, where the meetings were held.

Later in our history, after the separation of the fields, the Mali and Upper Volta were still one mission, and half the delegates were from Mali and half from Upper Volta. The women never came with their husbands to these meetings, and the men doubled up in one car to save money. Each man came with his shopping list, and it was the duty of the chairman's wife to fill these orders: Bobo was the shopping capital and between excoms we shipped food orders, car parts, tires, rose bushes, medicines out to missionaries in both countries.

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MISSION CHAIRMEN/DIRECTORS While thinking about committees, we also think about chairmen.. The first mission chairman of French West Africa was R.S. Roseberry, early pioneer, servant of God, man of vision, one who ruled with absolute authority. He was never called Robert by anyone except his sweet, taciturn wife, who called him Robert when speaking to him and Mr. Roseberry when speaking about him. The missionaries called him "Bishop" and her "Madam". Mr. Roseberry called her Madam when speaking about her and Edith when speaking to her. The Bishop was in charge, and until his retirement he was always automatically voted as chairman, a unanimous vote. When he went on furlough Clifford Ryan took his place for a year. Clifford Ryan was known as "C.C." to distinguish him from his brother, "L.E.", also a missionary in Guinea.

The Bishop required very strict accountability in the work, and sent out periodic memos to people. One such was that all missionaries were to strictly observe the "touring season" (itinerating season) from October 15 to January 15 when a special effort of prayer and itinerating should be made by all workers!"'

The Bishop kept careful track of his missionaries, including their dress. During my father's first field conference, in 1937, the Bishop sidled up to him and said, "Mr. Kennedy, I hear that some of you young missionaries are not wearing underwear because of the heat here! Do you wear underwear??" My father's answer, "Bishop, that's none of your business!" And he walked away! There were a few rebels around even then!

There was one missionary wife in the early 30's who was what the bishop termed "a lemon"! Her husband was a gem, a good builder and great in the language, so the field kept the couple on. Here is an interesting account of their situation, written by field chairman C.C. Ryan to Mr. Mason, Foreign Secretary, in April 1932: "Regarding Mrs. ___ case, the whole matter was seemingly dropped. She was allowed to go to Labe with (her husband), and as the building work took all his time, and as there were no missionaries there to give any report concerning her stay in Labe, and as her husband expressed himself to Mr. Roseberry in private conversation that he would have nothing further to say, that it was in the hands of the committee; and, inasmuch as there was no further call from anyone, either from the committee or the rank and file of missionaries, and inasmuch as she had written a letter saying that she no longer desired to meet with the committee as it would excite her too much and make a bad matter worse, her case was simply ignored! She was given no recognition on the conference floor and was appointed to no committees, but simply ignored at every turn. They were merely appointed to make their headquarters at Dalaba under the direction of the excom for the ensuing year. Mr. ___ has finished the building at Labe, and is scheduled for the next few months as follows no mention of his wife being made. She has never been encouraged nor forbidden to do missionary work."

Here's another memo written by the Bishop to his missionaries: His two subjects. are "Broken tools" and "Idleness". He called attention to "certain rules” in the Field Manual regarding the giving of gifts to the native Christians and native workers “this policy is detrimental to the establishment of the indigenous church....We have learned recently that the standard by which native Christians measure the missionaries spirituality is on the basis of how many gifts are given… Every Christian should be taught to seek the Lord alone for the need of body, soul and spirit… we trust that workers in the homeland who may be returning in the near future may understand that it

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is decidedly against the will of the Executive Committee for them to bring or send gifts to the native Christians. Any native evangelist or teacher... whose loyalty is secured by gifts, is a broken tool and of no use in the harvest field."

So much for giving gifts! Now for "Idleness" and from the same letter addressed to “Fellow-workers! "(Idleness) we know is not a very pleasant word to consider and there are a great many words or phrases we might use in its place as an excuse such as "lack of initiative', I do not like to teach', 'teaching is not my line', 'the houses in the district are hot and dirty', 'my car will get wet', 'the roads are bad', 'the sun is hot', as soon as I get this job done I will go..', 'there is a lion in the way', 'I am not called to preach', and a thousand other reasons why we do not do the work we have been appointed to do, and the year passes by and little progress has been made‌ We have a limited number of workers in each district. If one worker fails to do aggressive missionary work it means that the program for that district fails. Our young ladies as well as married ladies are doing excellent teaching. It often happens that a wife or mother may not be situated to do very much itinerating or visitation work, but is that any excuse for her not having a teaching or translating ministry? Is it right to send a single lady into a station for a teaching ministry when the ladies on that station are in good health and could do this work? One of our young ladies, who expects to be married soon, began her work of teaching two weeks after landing on her station, with a class of twenty enrolled. Does it mean when she gets married that she should give up this work and fail to take an active part as a missionary? If so, then marriage is wrong." How would you like to get a letter like that from your field director today?

The West African fields never knew another Bishop! My father was elected chairman of French West Africa and found a letter in the file from a missionary from what is now Burkina saying that we never again wanted such a dictator for a field chairman. That every missionary should have his turn at leading the mission, no more of these absolute rulers! The following is a list of those who have been field chairman (now called directors after the 1992 reorganization): Robert S. Roseberry (1910 - 1950) C.C. Ryan (during Roseberry furloughs) Leroy Kennedy (both of French West Africa and Mali-Upper Volta) Tom Burns (nine years) Gerry McGarvey (one year) Milt Pierce (six years) Dave Shady (six years) Dave Kennedy (five years) Jim Albright (two years) Herb Nehlsen (two years) Doug Conkle (one year) Brent Haggerty (two years)

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The right hand of the field director is always his bookkeeper/secretary. Until about 1990, one person functioned as both bookkeeper and secretary. The mission chairman did much of his own correspondence or relied on voluntary help within the missionary family. During most of that time we had what was called “The Time Bank.� This was the only bank in the world where you could put in as much as you wanted, but you couldn't take anything out! It was a form of accountability for missionaries on the field. Each missionary had an account (a page in a notebook kept in the bookkeeper's drawer) and in this account was listed the exact date of arrival on the field. If a person (or family) stayed longer than his four year term, his account registered the exact number of days in the credit. If he left before his four years exactly were up, then his account registered that time in the debit. The time of anyone leaving for sickness was not counted in this way. The time thus gained or lost by individual missionaries accrued to the field Time Bank Account. Once a year, a report of this was sent to the office in the United States. If it was noted that a field was way in the red in their Time Bank, this was called into question. No one mourned the passing of the Time Bank, especially those who had to keep track of it in the office!

The following served in this office on the Burkina Faso field: Lucille French Carolyn Wright Marian Pond Barbara Douglas Myrtle Overstreet Nora McGarvey Betty Shields Norma Stedman High School girl, a friend of the Burns Betty Canberg Marge Kauffman Mary Crowgey Charleen Foster Sherry Hoover.

The Rurups Rollo Royle The Staytons

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LANGUAGE LESSONS

Good communication is such an integral part of a missionary's life, and much has been said and written about languages in West Africa. People jokingly say that the tip of the Tower of Babel fell on West Africa, and those of us who work here can well believe it! In the May 25th, 1946 issue of "The Alliance Weekly", Franklin Ballard wrote this: "I have read two articles on missionary work in Africa which stated that with four main languages we could reach all Africa. I sincerely wish that were true, but it is sheer optimism. In French West Africa alone we are using sixteen languages, in which some of the dialects are mutually unintelligible....At our short term Bible School I collected words from nine dialects (of Dogoso) represented among the students. Of the words thus gathered, there were only two which were the same in every dialect, and these were possibly foreign words....The language problem is still very difficult in our part of Africa. To state otherwise is mere wishful thinking'."

The discussion about language is one that has generated much heat over the years. Missionaries have debated whether local language spelling should be based on the French or English system – or use a linguist's orthography. They also debated using the five vowels as opposed to seven vowels. They debated using Arabic forms of names versus French forms of those same names. There were private debates between individuals and public debates on the conference floor. Committees were often formed to make decisions which became binding on everyone. Letters were written to experts to get their opinions. Dr. William Welmers, based at the University of California, was an expert on West African languages and for several years spent time each year studying the Senoufo related languages. He wrote long letters to our mission to answer linguistic questions. This was in, the late 50's and early 60's. Gene Olsen, before her marriage to Walter, was also a missionary linguist who worked in Burkina. George Klein, regional director for Africa in the 60's, had handpicked Ruth Springer, who had a master's in linguistics from the University of Michigan, for the same kind of job and sent her to this field in the late 60's with this in mind. However, Ruth was more interested in personal evangelism among the youth, and so did not materialize as a resident linguist.

The early language discussions used to be without much true linguistic basis until a few people got SIL training, and then you had the trained and the untrained holding forth on their pet ideas! Some of those early missionaries who learned languages before the science of linguistics was really developed, were very

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knowledgeable and were not in the least intimidated by those who had gone to SIL. I remember in 1948, when I was a teenager, "Uncle Roseberry" heard me speaking Jula and told me I should study linguistics in college and come back and work on some of these "tonal languages". When we were assigned as missionaries to one of those tonal languages, I wished I had followed his advice!

The mission from time to time would put out a document (and this has been from the beginning of the work - some of these documents are dated 1932!) telling people in all languages what the "translation rules" were. For example the form "Yehowa" for the OT "Yawe" was required and the name "Yesou" for Jesus. It was further required that all reading primers must have the name of God in the first lesson. This was fine for Alla, which used high frequency letters of the alphabet, but not so fine for Wuro or Demenu which were harder to teach!

One of the biggest - and hottest - debates was whether to learn the trade language or the local ethnic language. During one conference when this was discussed on the conference floor, and some pretty powerful speeches were made, one older lady came out in tears, thinking that other people thought her whole missionary career was in vain because she had not learned the right language!

We in Burkina Faso today are most fortunate in this area of language, as the government has established sub-commissions for each major language in the country and many of the smaller languages as well. The government is also very pro national languages, even teaching the writing of Jula, Mooré and Fufulde on public television each week and having at least one news broadcast per week in each of' those languages. The University of Ouagadougou has put in a new major of translation and interpretation in their linguistics department this year. It was a privilege for me to be asked to sit in on the establishment of this new major in December 1995, with the heads of the department, as a "resource person" w ith experience in translation..

This also shows the government's good attitude towards the work we as Protestant missions do in translation. The mission no longer makes global decisions for those of us in translation, but expects us to work with our government commissions to establish our orthographies.

In our generation, our consciousness of how important language is in West Africa began very early. When we went to France we were given to understand that everyone was required to get was called “the moyenne.” This was the basic diploma given at the Sorbonne or the Alliance Française in Paris, which is where we all studied.

Letters were written to language students in France encouraging them to do their best to get this diploma and underlining the importance of learning languages well for the benefit of future ministry. Those ideals are certainly still true, but perhaps we "hound" people less about them today!

A new missionary was allowed exactly one week to settle your baggage when you arrived on the field, and then you were expected to put in a full day every day in language study. During the 60's and early 70's you were also required to fill in a monthly accountability sheet for language study. How many hours spent in book study, in visits, in listening, in speaking, in memorizing. They also needed a slot for how many hours it took you to fill out the form! This form was given to your language supervisor, a copy was sent to the Regional Director, George Klein, and

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he would reply to the individual language student, either encouraging or scolding!

There have always been some general language requirements for all language learning since the year one. But in 1978 Dick Phillips, Ruth Springer and I were asked to set up more complete language requirements which could be used with all languages, and the results of that consultation is what we use today.

The Christian and Missionary Alliance has never actively recruited Bible translators, but we have been involved in many translations of the Scriptures in various parts of the World. The GMU in Bamako headed up the first translation of the Bambara Bible, and the Alliance gave Marie Freligh as a full-time translator to this project. Because of the many ethnic groups in these countries, we have been forced to participate in the translation of the Word of God for these people.

Sometimes SIL has partnered with us, as in the Dogon translation in Mali, and more often the Bible Society has helped train translators and supervise translations, especially in the languages in which we work here in Burkina Faso.

The United Bible Societies trains translators through intensive periodic seminars. The first of these which- was held in West Africa was in 1962, and was in Bobo-Dioulasso. Some of the "greats" of Bible translation came to us as professors: Eugene Nida, Robert Bracher (translator of the first Good News English Bible, who has his devotions in Greek!) William Reyburn, linguist and anthropologist from Cameroon, and others. A primary school was rented in town, and we had classes all day and private consultations in the evenings as needed. Translators came from Guinea, Ivory Coast and Mali, all C&MA. The classes were taught in English, and for those who brought along West African translators, a British gentleman from Ghana gave them special classes in translation principles every day. Another such seminar was held in the early 70's, again for a month, and this time Jean-Claude Margaux (of Français Courant fame), Phil Stine, Roger Omanson and Charles Taber were our professors. These were the days when missionaries were the major translators and the West Africans the "helpers", but the helpers were all invited to this second workshop and the courses were taught totally in French. Those working on translation during this period of time were the Bobo Madare, the Bwamu, the second Bambara translation, the Boomu and languages from other West African countries.

Later on in the 70's the Bible Society changed its focus and put more effort into the training of West Africans to be the major translators. The missionaries became the exegetes, secretaries and/or the coordinators of the translation projects.

This is the system with which the Jula, Samo, Bobo Madare and Boomu teams are working now. The Bible Societies also encourage interconfessional translations, and they organize shorter periodic workshops, concentrating on one book or subject.

About 1985 Jacob Loewen, Mennonite anthropologist and linguist, working with the Bible Society, was about to retire and made a trip to Burkina to visit his missionary colleagues in Orodara. Pushed by the Mennonites, and thinking their idea of a new Jula translation a good one, Jake came to Bobo and asked to talk with the Alliance about this proposed project of doing a Jula translation which would be a model and a sort of "textus receptus" for all other translations in West Africa.

Milt, as mission director, was present at that meeting with Jake, as well as E.A.C. president, Daniel Bonzi, and Tite TiĂŠnou and I (who knew both Jula and a bit about

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translation). After much discussion, Jake proposed a translations workshop with Judy Timyan in Bobo, with prospective translators from both Protestant and Catholic churches, out of whom would be chosen the translators for this project. He asked the Alliance for a coordinator (that's where Mary Crowgey came in!) and promised exegetical and linguistic help from the Mennonites (which never materialized). The workshop with Judy Timyan (whose parents were Alliance missionaries in C.I. and who worked for years as a consultant with the Bible Societies) was held at the Auberge in Bobo and Jean Ngo (a Catholic catechist) and David Zerbo (from the E.A.C.) began their work as translators. David was an intelligent, hardworking school teacher, and functioned well as a translator until he incurred the wrath of the church leadership and was quickly replaced by the church in the person of a pastor, Pascal Sanou.

Translation work is never easy. The enemy of the Church of Christ does not want to see God's Word put into the hands of the people, and thus it becomes a very real spiritual battle at times. It is a ministry that needs much prayer and perseverance, as well as patience and understanding. The Bwamu translation is one which has gone through many battles, and still has not come through victoriously.

Jim Riccitelli, missionary to the Bwa, in the 50's and 60's was ideal for the work of translating the NT in Bwamu. He worked hard at the task, and had a major part of the New Testament in manuscript form. In the words of a report from the DĂŠdougou district, "Mr. Riccitelli continued the Bwamu New Testament translation until 1965. At that time a serious palaver developed in the Ouarkoye church...(and) the district church asked Riccitellis to leave. ...As a result the Bwamu New Testament project ....was discontinued." and later: "The Bwamu New testament translation was again undertaken 1978 after thirteen years of waiting by the Church. It is hoped that this Bwamu New Testament will be finished soon..."

But this too was doomed to failure. SIL has been involved and it is hoped that eventually they will produce a New Testament for this large, growing church. But SIL personnel has also changed over the years.

Translation projects which have been completed by the Alliance in Burkina are: Boomu NT, San NT, Bobo Madare NT, Jula NT. By the end of 1998 hopefully the Bobo Madare and the Jula Bibles will also be completed.

In "The Alliance Weekly" of August, 1945, the following prayer request appears: "Pray for the missionary who is to return to America in the near future bringing the manuscript of the whole Bible in Bambara...The Bible is to be printed in America and sent back to the field, the first whole Bible to be translated and printed in our field of French West Africa." Imagine that bulky, heavy manuscript, so carefully packaged, and then realize that today we can transport the same material in five small diskettes at the most! We've come a long ways!

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MISSIONARY KIDS The subject of missionary kids is one that has been discussed and dissected, poked and prodded, questioned and conjectured about more than any other single subject within the framework of the missionary calling. Being an MK myself, I and others like me - sometimes resent the research done into who we are and what makes us tick. If you were to examine any other single group of people - like doctors' children or plumbers' kids - you would probably come up with some interesting findings too. However, in today's evangelical climate of "Family first" and parental paranoia about their children's future, it- is not to be wondered at that MK's come in for some study - especially those who have grown up in "primitive" cultures and attended school away from their parents. Whatever else you may discover about missionary kids and their shortcomings, they evidently are a sound bet for continuing the missionary endeavor. On our field, for example, we have about thirty currently active missionaries and six of those are MK's, about 1/5. This is pretty much of a world average for the Alliance.

Often the problems with MK's is not with the children but with the attitudes of their parents or other adults. West Africa is a great place for kids to grow up! True, the early missionaries felt that people should not live here with children because there was lack of proper sanitation and medical help at that time, and some children died. But many adult s also died during those days - they were hard times! Life for a missionary child in Burkina is a great one. He lives free, everyone around loves him and will take care of him, he can't get lost. He doesn't need to fear talking to strangers or being kidnapped. He learns to live without the trappings and possessions of North America - unless his parents insist on making him materialistic. He learns to live with and make friends among people of other cultures and he learns their languages and habits. His mind is broadened by travel and exposure to different levels of society. Within the missionary community he also has a large extended family. From an early age he can be part of his parents' ministry and help with specific work like literacy teaching, preparing literature, helping in the dispensary, etc.

This chapter will probably be more autobiographical than historical, but it will perhaps show some of the evolution of MK life and education. Much of how an MK reacts to who he is depends upon his parents. The experts tell us that if a child sees his parents as deeply loving him, and their work as being very necessary, it will be easier for him to accept the absences he must learn to live with early in life.

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From day one in Africa I was included in my parents' work. I gathered my little friend in the village - so my mother says - and preached a strong arm evangelism telling them that either they walk the Jesus Road or the lions would eat them!

Lions coming into the village were a reality in those days, so I was being culturally relative... I played the little pump organ in the Bobo church in the 1940's as a teenager, when my Dad led the Sunday worship there. I walked with my father six kilometers to another town on Sunday afternoons to participate in the local church service. And I went itinerating with my parents in remote villages where they went to preach the Gospel. They were good years and I have pleasant memories of those times, now fifty years later.

"Mamou" has become a "dirty word" in Alliance circles these days and the I.C.I. (Independent Council of Inquiries - about Mamou) is continuing their work to help hurting, abused people from certain periods of history at Mamou. Having said that, I will now admit that I was a student at Mamou, and that my two years there were positive ones. I went to boarding school when I was in seventh grade (my parents had been in the States with me during the War years) and I was also a kid who obeyed the rules (and they were many!) so I avoided trouble. I do remember when my mother came with my brother and sister and left them and how they cried and screamed for hours after she left and I was left to comfort them.

But basically we were happy at school. We had some funny rules: No letter to parents, no Sunday supper; you couldn't write a private letter to anyone - the house parents read them all! Twice a week the mail came in the morning, but we were not allowed to have our letters until after we had eaten lunch. So you ate your meal with a lump in your stomach, wondering if your parents letter got through this week. That was until we arranged a signal with the mail carrier who would meet us in the dining room before lunch and signal with his eyes whether you had a letter or not. Then our hearts could sit down and we could appease our hunger. We memorized reams of.

Scripture - you couldn't have your breakfast until you recited your verse at the entrance to the dining room each morning. The school nurse thought charcoal powder and sour milk were good for any intestinal problems we might have and so we had to periodically take a dose of this. I always stood next to another student who loved sour milk and would trade his empty glass for my full one and drink mine too. If one person in the dorm had a sore throat, the whole school lined up and had to have a throat swab. No one could help me out there, so I gagged my way through this ordeal every time!

We had lots of good times too. The house parents did special things for birthdays and often took us on picnics to Monkey Rock. We went for walks through the forest roads on Sunday afternoons. We would run into each other’s rooms at night after lights out (kerosene lights, that is!) and sometimes get caught, which meant a punishment. One night Betty Olsen (who later died in a Viet Nam jungle as a missionary prisoner during the war) was giggling in our room when we heard the housemother heading our way. Betty rolled under my bed and "Aunt Peggy" came in to sit with my roommate and me to have a little serious bedtime talk, but we had a hard time being serious - wondering if she would discover Betty under my bed! She never did!

My house parents were, for the most part, understanding, our teachers were good, and we made wonderful, lasting friendships with the other kids. There was no high school

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provided for MK's in West Africa at that time, and so I studied correspondence school on my own, sometimes at home, sometimes in a supervised setting, at Kankan, Guinea, with high school kids. There were not the large classes there are today in a school like I.C.A. I was always the only person in my grade. The school term was from the end of March through the first of December. But this conflicted with school terms in North America when families went on furlough. So the school year was changed to begin August , 1st and at the December 1st break you were only halfway through the academic year. The end of March when you returned to school you finished out -your school year, and began the next grade August 1st. Guinea parents came occasionally to see their children, but Mamou was a long distance even from the Guinea missionaries. There were no paved roads in those days and the ferries were hazardous! So children did not see their parents for four months the first time they left home, and after that it was eight months each time. That was long!

Going to boarding school myself was easier, I found, than sending my own children to school. I still mourn sending my little first graders off to school. Cheryl was the only one who went to Mamou, and that for only one year. But that was three days trip for us. As I mentioned, parents did not go to see their children during the school year at Mamou. So Cheryl's first time away from us was four months. Milt was one of the drivers who went to pick up the kids by truck and Jeep, and Cheryl never said a word to him the whole trip - just looked at him and grinned a toothless grin! What went on in her little head during those four months?

Did she think we had abandoned her? She had wonderful, caring house parents in the Tylers, and when later her little brother was born she wanted to name him "Uncle Fordy"! We went on furlough that year so that was our last experience with Mamou.

In. 1963 the Baptists began their school in Bouaké, Ivory Coast, much closer to Burkina, and we were thrilled to hear about that while on furlough. We wrote and asked if they had a place for our two girls when we returned to the field in February, 1964. Our children were the first ones from Burkina to attend I.C.A.. The Baptists graciously crowded our two girls into their one dorm, which was all they had at that time. It was about that same time that Mamou was closed and the buildings taken over by the Guinea government during Sékou Touré's time so I.C.A. was built just in time!

Rules were very stiff about visiting the ICA school. The school personnel felt that parents upset the schedule, and so you were given regulations about when you could come and what hours you had to leave. It was not encouraged to have a meal there and after eating one I knew why!! The school was on the semester system, and in the middle of each semester there was a long weekend. The school totally shut down and so you had to take your kids out of school that weekend. The BoboBouaké trains were running well then, so several times all our Bobo kids came home for that long weekend, a Thursday through Tuesday. Later the school went to a trimester system, and first of all Burkina parents chose two of the three tri's to visit; then someone started going every tri and we all followed suit. The road was awful - totally unpaved and in certain seasons we could spend hours in a mud hole or waiting for a large truck to be pulled out of a hole, blocking the whole road!

None of us had air conditioning in our cars so we arrived windblown and dust covered at the end of a twelve hour trip from Bobo!

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Travel to boarding school is another thing that has changed through the years.

Trains used to be fairly reliable between Kankan and Mamou, and so the children were driven to Kankan from Mali and Burkina and then sent by train to Mamou, with an adult accompanying them. Kids would climb in the truck early in order to get the best places on the barrels placed in the front of the truck bed. We often traveled at night – to save the tires from the heat of the day! – and so we would see wild game as we traveled.

Traveling to I.C.A. has changed through the years. For years everyone went by train. Here is an excerpt out of the Hilites of January '72: "The cars kept rolling into the Bobo yard on Monday, January 10th. The yard was full of children, all sizes, playing games or just sitting around talking. The station master allowed us to take up the trunks that afternoon and consign them, thus saving all that confusion the next morning. A group ticket for thirty people was purchased, but when the train pulled in, there were only twenty four first class seats and there were many other passengers too!" The Mali kids came to Bobo to ride down with our kids, so it made a full car. Kids took mammoth lunches. One boy was always nervous about going away to school, and he would start eating his lunch before the train left the Bobo station to calm his nerves. About eleven in the morning he would be stuffed and he'd go up and down the train aisle offering what was left to everyone else, then he would sit quietly until the train got to Bouake about dark that evening. It was a twelve to thirteen hour trip – when it was on time. Then for a while we sent the kids by plane, but Air Burkina only had a small eleven passenger plane and it had to make a couple trips to pick up all the kids, so that didn't work for long.

Finally we resorted to the present system.

Today there are other options – international schools, local schools – but for many the boarding school is still what is best for our children. The newly formed PTA at International Christian Academy is a forward step, and hopefully can prevent some of the problems that have abounded at certain times in boarding schools for years.

One word about administrative committees for boarding schools. When the Alliance ran Mamou, I remember the groans produced after the long hours of deliberations several times a year to keep the place running. When we started using I.C.A. we then had a dorm committee, made up of the field chairmen from all fields sending kids to this school. Many of their deliberations were the details of running the dorm – repairs, needed funding, personnel. But we came across some interesting comments from one dorm meeting and I quote here some excerpts: "One thing that came to our attention was the point system that (was) set up for our children in the Bethel Dorm. The parents in the Ivory Coast have protested strongly against this system and have tried to get the house parents to let the kids off the system for a week once in a while. It involved quite a bit of hot discussion!"

Ah yes, the point system; this was a new list given out to each dorm child at the beginning of each week, and the child had to answer each of ten questions each day for a week, and score himself. It was to teach good manners and responsibility to the children, according to the house parents. Some parents thought it taught the children to lie! Other kids were uptight for fear they were always doing something wrong. It ran the gamut of saying "thank you" to people, to shutting the door quietly to having your devotions every morning, to cleaning your fingernails before school! It was one of those things that left with the departing house parents. There

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was another situation where the parents bewailed the fact that the dorm father made and sold clacks and never took time to be a dorm-father!

"One problem which I think is very serious concerns Mr. ____ who is teaching a Bible class for some of our children. He is not only very legalistic, but very Mclntyrish in his approach. He told our children that probably Billy Graham is the anti-Christ, and is telling them other things that we cannot agree with. Tom (Burns, then chairman in Mali) protested to Clatterbuck (I.C.A. principal)‌ The Baptists are strong on closed communion, and I am sure that our December discussion on this will be very heated. Bud and Jean Hotalen have already had a communion service in the Girls' Dorm for only those who wanted to come. Only one girl said she didn't want to partake, but she wanted to assist at the service. So I am sure that will be a topic for discussion."

Missionary Kids – they're around to stay – for as long as their parents stay, And probably some of you will be welcoming this year's crop back as colleagues on the field some day!

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OF THIS AND THAT This chapter will be a drawing together of various interesting bits of' information that didn't seem to fit anywhere else! Faced with the vast amounts of documents, letters and reports we amassed from various sources, and heads filled with a virtual treasure chest of memories dating back into the dim 30's, we had to make some hard decisions on what to include and what to exclude.

We did think of "things we'd like to forget", like  the time a missionary in her testimony paternalistically talked about the African children from her village as "those little chocolate drops", and there were Burkinabe present who understood English!  or the missionary who clipped out the part of the Suzanne film he did not understand from his American perspective and then there were two versions of the film: the real one and "the missionary one".

– or the missionary's dog who came up and urinated on a Burkinabe pastor's leg as he was standing talking with a group of missionaries!  or the new WEC lady missionary who arrived at our home in Bobo one night about two a.m., having come on the train from Ouagadougou. She was traveling alone and had befriended a Burkinabe man who took her friendliness for a sexual come on, and on their arrival in Bobo forced her into a taxi, took her to a hotel where she fought with him and finally took her just outside the town and raped her!

Her mission director could not speak enough French to take her to the police court the next day to make a complaint, so Milt was asked to accompany them and "do the honors"!

Ah yes, they weren't always "the good ole days", but most of our history is positive, challenging and can teach us some things if we are willing to learn! *

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Recently a new missionary asked the question "Is it all right to entertain Burkinabe in our homes?" It is shocking to see that anyone still needs to ask questions like this. In the early years of life here in West Africa, the French were very much in control, and wanted to keep the Africans subjugated as much as possible. It would have been a no-no in those days to entertain the average Christian friend in your home, as missionaries were dependent on the good will of the French to remain in the country. This was unfortunate and perhaps set the stage for some subsequent misunderstandings and wrong attitudes.

In the 60's and 7O's we began to make conscious efforts to interact with the church socially as well as on a ministry level. We personally lived in a situation with no other

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missionaries next door to guide us, and so from the beginning, we entertained local pastors and families, without comment from anyone in the mission. Another young missionary couple did not fare so, well when they invited their district pastors to come to their home for a retreat, fed them and provided beds for them to spend the night. News of this leaked out, and at field conference that year there was a public, "inquisition", as this missionary man was asked whose beds they had used for these pastors. Well, he gulped, some of them belonged to a fellow missionary then on furlough, but he had covered them well with their own quilts. What shame!

Come to think of it, this ranks, with some of those things we would rather forget!

In this same vein, one evening in the early 60's we were invited into Bobo to attend an informal reception for a returning missionary family. As we were sitting around eating cake and talking, a European man knocked on the door, and was warmly invited in to share in our party. A few minutes later the local pastor also knocked at the door wanting to greet the newly arrived missionary, who had been his teacher in Bible School. The missionary was called out to talk with the pastor outside, and the party inside went on without including this pastor! Again shame on us for being so exclusive in our social contacts!

Now for something more positive in this vein from the past: (from: Hilites, September '71) "....when the church and mission executive committees met for their annual joint meeting, both missionaries and nationals testified that they had never experienced better fellowship with each other. There was a spirit of mutual trust and understanding. My role of "Martha" during, the meetings gave me a chance to hear many snatches of conversations as I helped feed the thirty one men, seated around six tables in the carport‌ We have never entertained more grateful. or thoughtful guests and we felt privileged to be part of this meeting. One thing that impressed the missionary men was that even though we as a mission could not do much of anything for some of the requests the church made - dispensaries in Upper Volta, another Bible School, a secondary school - there did not seem to be any hard feelings. As one man said, “It's wonderful to come out of a Komite Ba meeting feeling blessed!'" Eating together and meeting on a social level cements friendships, which seems to make it easier to deal with each other on an "official" level.

For many years we also invited delegates to our field conferences. This started in the mid 60's and continued for some years. When we were the Mali-Upper Volta field, there were four delegates each year, two from each country. The purpose was to be open and frank with them about what we do at our missionary conferences, and also to give them a model for their own organization if they wanted to use it.

The men who came did not come as delegates but as observers. They did not participate in debate. Interpreters were assigned for all the meetings, and sat behind the observers, giving a running translation of what was being said by everyone.

Sometimes the delegates asked the interpreter a question if they didn't understand what was going on. These pastors were included in all public meetings and the conference picture. They were invited to sit in on any committees if they wanted to as well. We signed up to take turns feeding them during the week of conference.

The inclusion of these observers stopped when one year the church told us that they did not have anyone who was free to come that year, and we never extended the

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invitation to them again. Our field conference is during the farming season in Burkina and this was perhaps not a convenient time for most of our pastors to attend: We also made an effort to promote missions in the E.A.C. of the 60's. Our then chairman, Tom Burns, had come back from a world conference with some new ideas to challenge our church to be a sending church as well as a receiving one.

They did not go so far as to send people to another continent, but there were some positive efforts made on the part of the church to send people from one ethnic group to another and even from one country to another within the West African framework. Among these were: - Silas Dembélé and his wife, from Sanekui, Mali, who came to work in Orodara for two years.

- Daniel Dembélé and his wife, now director of Poundou Bible Institute, who went from Djibasso down to Siniena in the Banfora district.

- Thomas Dembélé and his wife, from Sanekui in Mali, also went to Siniena to minister in the church and were caught there in the Mali-Burkina border war.

Thomas was terrified, thinking he would be deported if soldiers found him, and he tried to hide in the crawl space above the ceiling in the old mission house. He fell through the plywood ceiling onto the dining room table, getting badly bruised and ruining the ceiling! As soon as the border was open he left for Mali post haste!

- Daniel Guindo and his family were missionaries from Dogon country in Mali, sent to the displaced Malians and Burkinabe living in Abidjan. He had a good ministry there for several years.

One name which sometimes comes up in conversation is Jean-Calvin Traoré.

He was the son of Pastor Levi of the Nouna district, and worked as a planton for the mission in the early 70's. He also worked as a clerk in the Librairie Evangélique. Jean-Calvin attended Yamoussoukro Bible Institute and did well as a student. He always excelled in English and was an excellent interpreter. He worked on the Boomu New Testament translation project. In 1978 he came to the Bobo Central Church as pastor. Jean-Calvin was an outspoken critic of the national church leadership, and after a particularly bitter experience (from his viewpoint), he left one night for Ouagadougou, leaving behind an angry letter for the church president. He left a softer letter of explanation for the mission director and also for his wife. Later, when he was settled in Ouagadougou, he sent for his wife and family. In Ouaga Jean-Calvin received a scholarship to the University and earned a maîtrise in English, writing his thesis on American literature. While he was at the University of Ouagadougou, he began his long battle with tuberculosis. In 1987 we visited him in the Ouaga hospital, later he went back home. For a time he was assistant pastor at the Auto-Gare Assemblies of God church in Ouagadougou and later taught at the Assemblies of God lycée in Koudougou. But he finally succumbed to TB about 1990. He remained our dear friend until his death. With a softer spirit and a stronger body, Jean-Calvin, Traoré could have been of great service to the Eglise de l'Alliance Chrétienne in Burkina Faso.

Missionaries have also had friendships with ex-patriots living in our areas, with both positive and negative results. These people sometimes gravitate towards us 25

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because they do not speak local languages or need something that we can provide for them. And sometimes missionaries have befriended these people with a sense of concern for their spiritual state.

One classic case was that of Vandenberg, a Belgian who had lived many years in Africa. Looking back later, many of us agreed that he was probably a fugitive from justice in Belgium, but we did not know that at the time! This man lived in Dédougou and in Tougan and was ostensibly a businessman. He raised pigs and hauled them to Bobo to sell; started a movie theater and a bakery in Tougan; he also had a lot of questionable relationships with Burkinabe women, until he finally lived in a marriage relationship with a very lovely Peule lady. Vandenberg was often looking for a free meal or a free bed to sleep in when traveling, and what better place than with a missionary? He also made promises of gifts he would give, which never seemed to materialize. He was much friendlier to missionaries living in Dédougou and Tougan and even Nouna where he often went to purchase pigs, and these people knew him well (they thought). He was clever enough to respond positively to their witness to him, and would even sometimes attend church! Then one day the government caught up with him for some kind of fraud and delivered him to the Bobo prison. There were those who felt that he was wrongly accused and even took food to him in prison, thus implicating the mission in his situation to a certain extent. One day, just about noon, when we were in some kind of conference, Vandenberg drove into the mission, with his wife beside him, and said he had just been released from prison and needed to get home to Tougan. He was driving Lin Ballard's old car, which he had bought, and his battery was low. So he asked to borrow Herb Nehlsen's battery just to get him home. Herb generously gave him his car battery, and as the car left the mission yard someone jokingly said to Herb. "Well, that's the last you'll see of that battery!" And it turned out to be true. The police later came to the mission yard wondering if we had seen Vandenberg - he had escaped from jail! But by then he was across the border into Ivory Coast, no doubt, and was never seen again in Burkina! Herb, however, had to go and rescue "Vandy's" dog in Tougan. The Tougan officials claimed Vandenberg's house, and asked Herb to take the dog because the animal wouldn't let a black man near him!

Now for a brighter story - that of Hans and Marika von Binsberger. This was a Dutch family who lived in Bobo and worked with a United Nations project. Marika was obviously a spiritually seeking person, and came around often to the mission asking searching questions of various people. Gerry McGarvey was pastor of the French church at that time and he it was who led her to the Lord. Her husband was at first a bit antagonistic to the Gospel - although very friendly on the social level but when they later moved to Korhogo, in Ivory Coast, he too made a commitment to Christ. They returned years later to Ouagadougou and welcomed all of us warmly to their home there. Hans still makes occasional trips to Burkina on business, and the family is faithfully following the Lord. One of their sons took theological training and is pastoring a church in Holland.

There was also Madame Morahr, a French lady, living with the Catholic sisters in Bobo, and saved through the efforts of Hetty and Charles Bossert. After becoming a Protestant she lost her place with the nuns, so she and her enormous dog, Zénith, stayed in a motel room at the mission. Zénith would escape from the room and she

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would run screaming across the compound after him! In order to earn a little money, she clerked in the Bookstore for a while. She was a woman with many problems and the Bosserts breathed a sigh of relief when she finally returned to France! Dr. David Sokol was an American doctor working at the Centre Muraz in research. He was a Christian, had had Alliance contacts in the States and gave money every month to our Mission for any project we wished. The man who was head of the small group of Marines in Ouagadougou in the 80's was, a, fervent Alliance church member, saved through the efforts of Gabon missionaries when he and his wife were stationed in Libreville. He also contributed financially to mission projects, and opened his lovely air conditioned home to any of us visiting in Ouaga, who needed a place to stay! An American Jewish family from Seattle, René and Stevie Braveman lived in Bobo a year and Dr. Braveman has frequently returned here for further study. He is chairman of the African studies program at the University in Seattle and we have maintained a casual friendship for many years. They are mildly interested in our work, although she once told, me when I talked to her about Christ, "Nancy, this is all very interesting but I don't think I am convertible!"

Through the years there have been many visitors from North America, although we used to have fewer than we do now, with the new wave of "work teams". Two visits stand out from the past. One is that of the Harold Boons. Dr. and Mrs. Boon's son, Ed and his family, were missionaries in Burkina for two terms and it was during this time that they came for a visit. Since Dr. Boon was President of Nyack College, we planned a Nyack College alumni reunion: "In Bobo we had a banquet for forty four people the night (the Boons) arrived here. Gerry McGarvey and Margot Kennedy provided special music, Tite Tiénou told a bit about his impressions of life at Nyack, and Dr. Boon showed us recent slides of the Nyack campus." Dr. Boon made the statement in his remarks that Tite Tiénou had left Nyack College a better place than he had found it!

The Boons were planning a trip around the field, but all came down with flu, so had to cancel their plans!

Another memorable visit was that of Dr. and Mrs. Linwood Barney of A.T.S. Lin and Elsie came to the Mali-Upper Volta field on a sabbatical world tour gathering information and experiences for their teaching at Alliance Theological Seminary in Nyack, N. Y. During their stay they visited every mission station in Mali and Upper Volta where we had personnel in residence. The trip was filled with unusual incidents, almost as if we had planned this for ex-missionary-anthropologist Barney! For part of the trip Milt and I drove them in our VW "Bug". Our first stop out of Bobo was at Djibasso to talk with the Tylers. The thermometer in the dining room registered 114 that afternoon about four o'clock! Milt always claimed that Djibasso was the only place you could get second degree burns sitting on the toilet seat in hot season! It was a very HOT hot season that year, so in Mali we slept outside, and the first night the Barneys had a hard time getting to sleep, cot by cot with someone they had just met, in the blackness of a Mali night, with the bats swooping overhead! The next night in Sangha they slept better, but the following morning we killed a snake in the closet of the house where we were staying Leaving Sangha in the afternoon, we had planned to stay at the "modern" motel in Sevadi, Mali. It even had electric fans! We told Barneys before we all went to bed that if they got too hot at night to take a quick shower and go back to bed without

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drying. But at midnight the generator was turned off and there went the fans! Lin woke up in a hot panic and rushed to the shower. But the water only flowed when the generator was on - the staff didn't expect anyone to be taking a two a.m. shower! - so Lin and Elsie passed a pretty warm night in Sevadi. The next night we slept at Ntorosso and again our beds were placed out under the stars. Lin heard a buzzing noise and flashed a light up to its source and disturbed a large, hanging nest of bees! They swarmed around us, Lin and Elsie were both being bitten and we were all swatting at these buzzing bees! The Welburn Smiths called across from the next yard, "Don't pay any attention to those bees - they won't hurt you, they're friendly bees!" The Barneys, nursing their stings, were not too convinced!

They voted that the two worst roads in the entire world were Sangha-Bandiagara and Bobo-BouakĂŠ! Some years later I heard Dr. Barney talking about that trip in a lecture at the Seminary, and the culture shock he had gone through! We assured them that we had NOT intentionally planned all the "extras"!

Well, the stories are legion, but enough is enough, and we will call it quits here by saying: You don't have to be crazy to be a missionary, but it sure helps!!

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THOSE WHO SERVED

The following is a list of the missionaries who served in Upper Volta - Burkina Faso since the time the Mali-Upper Volta Mission was formed in 1957: Leroy and Audrey Kennedy - Lived in Bobo as field chairman. Served as French pastor at Bobo church. Worked also in Santidougou, Banfora and Orodara districts.

Retired in 1970. American.

John and Betty Johanson - Served in the Santidougou district. Started the work in the Banfora district. Field builder. Retired in 1969. American Torn and Deloris Burns - Lived in Bobo as field chairman. First worked in Mali and returned there after the Mali-Upper Volta division in 1974, from where they retired in 1983. American.

Charles and Hetty Bossert - Served as French pastor and worked with the Bookstore in Bobo. They then transferred to Yamoussoukro from where they retired in 1990.

French.

Howard and Anne Beardslee - Worked for two years in Bobo Dioulasso in the Bookstore and as French pastor. Left the field because of doctrinal differences with the CMA. American.

Jim and Ruth Riccitelli - Served in the DĂŠdougou district where they began the Ouarkoye station (built by John Johanson) as a haven for doing translation.

Moved to Bobo their final two years on the field to work in the Bookstore and be French pastor. Left the field for health reasons. American.

Delmer and Jane Smith - Served in the Santidougou and DĂŠdougou districts and also as house-parents at Mamou Academy in Guinea. Returned to Burkina and later left to become a pastor in the U.S. American.

Lin and Myrna Ballard - Came to Burkina single and were married that same year. Worked in the Djibasso and Nouna districts. Served as house parents at I.C.A. from where they left for the U.S. in 1990 for health reasons. Myrna died in 1994 and Lin returned to the field in 1996. American and Canadian.

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Fordy and Rosalys Tyler - Built the Djibasso station and worked there many years. Served as houseparents at Mamou Academy. Fordy did field building and Rosalys worked in Boomu translation' and literature: Retired in the mid-'80's.

American.

Herb and Jessie Nehlsen - Served in the Tougan district most of their career.

Worked as houseparents at I.C.A., Field director in Guinea for one year. Field director for their last two years in Burkina. Retired in 1992. Returned to work in Abidjan for two years. American.

Milt and Nancy Pierce - Worked with the Bobo Madare people group. Served as mission chairman for six years. Worked in Ouaga one year. Field building, theological education and Bible translation. American.

Bob and Myrtle Overstreet - Served in the Bobo Bookstore and as mission bookkeeper. Bob was French pastor. They went back to Mali from where they came originally and retired from there in 1997. American.

Gerry and Nora McGarvey - Worked in Bobo as French pastor and in the Bookstore.

Gerry was field chairman for one year and Nora was bookkeeper. Served for many years at Maranatha Institute and retired in 1994. Originally worked in Mali.

American.

Emma Wooledge Orcutt - Served in the Tougan district, at Sourou in medical ministry for one term. Married while on furlough and came back to Burkina with the WEC for two terms. American.

Barbara Douglas - Served as secretary bookkeeper for almost a term. Had to return to the United States for health reasons. American.

Marion Pond - Missionary in Mali to the Dogons, who came to Bobo to fill in as bookkeeper-secretary for two years. Went on furlough and married and never returned to the field. American.

Bob and Betty Adams - Studied language in Burkina when they were newly arrived, worked in Mali for many years, then as house parents, first at Mamou Academy and later at I.C.A. They chose to be members of our field and retired from here in the 80's. American.

Carolyn Wright - Headed for Mali when she came to the field in 1959, came to Bobo as secretary-bookkeeper for two years first. At the end of her first term, went to the States and was married and did not return to the field. American. .

Grant and Eunice Crooks - Served in Sanekui, Mali and Santidougou and then spent the rest of their years of service in OurouĂŠ where they built the station. Retired in mid-80's. American.

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Lowell and Esther Bowman - Went to Mali and became persona non grata with the Mali government because of some unwise decisions concerning the sale of medicines..

Were brought to Bobo for a year of language study. Left on furlough and did not return to the field. American.

Lucille French - Came from Guinea to the Mali-Upper Volta field to help set up the new office. Spent one year here and went back to Guinea from where she retired. Went back and married a friend from college days, who had become a widower. American.

Betty Blanchard - Worked in the Tougan district for two years in teaching ministries.

Returned to Mali and retired from 'there in the '80's. She married widower John Johanson from Burkina after her retirement. American.

Esther Kuhn - Came to the field as a teacher for Mamou Academy. Worked for two years in teaching ministries in the Tougan district. Sent to Baramba where she had health problems and left for the States. She never returned to the field. American.

Walter and Doris Pister - Served first at Mamou Academy for a short time and were then transferred to Burkina were they studied Bwamu at Ouarkoye. They had a hydrocephalic baby and went immediately to the States for medical help. While they were gone they were voted not to return. Came back to Burkina under WEC for a term. American.

Dave and Margot Kennedy Went first to Mali and then asked to do youth work in Bobo. Served in youth ministries for many years, was then field chairman for several years. Asked to help open the Abidjan work, so left Burkina for Abidjan, from where they were asked to go to National Office in Nyack, New York, as regional director for Africa. American.

Norma Stedman - Came to Bobo as bookkeeper. Spent one term in Bobo. Went on furlough and did not return to the field. American.

Betty Canberg Smith - Came to the field as secretary-bookkeeper and ably served in that capacity for many years. Left the field in the mid '80's and. did not return.

Was married in 1994 to a friend from college days. American.

Bob and Marge Kauffman Came to the field as associate missionaries to be an aid to the field chairman. Bob worked as field builder and Bobo station maintenance man. He also worked with the field evangelism team and did radio work. Marge was guest house operator and worked very capably as bookkeeper-secretary. American.

Dave and Betty Shady – Came to Burkina from Guinea in the 60’s. Worked in the Dedougou district for many years. Came to Bobo to serve as field director.

Transferred to the C.I field to work a s house parents I.C.A. American.

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Claude and Anne-Marie Décrevel - Came for one year to serve in youth ministries.

Returned to their work with GBU. Swiss.

Ruth Springer - Sent to the field.as a language consultant for the Mali-Upper Volta field. Ruth chose to stay in Burkina where she worked in the Banfora district, living in -Banfora and in Niangoloko. Left the field for furlough and never returned.

American.

Ed and Karen Boon - Started out in Mali and then came to Burkina to teach at Maranatha Institute the year it started. Did the radio ministry as well. Left Burkina for furlough and decided to transfer to France. American.

Eric and Gwen Persson - Began their ministry in the Banfora district where they studied the Gwen language and were involved in teaching ministries. Came to Maranatha Institute to replace the Boons and served there until they resigned for health reasons in 1996. Canadian.

Rollo and Joan Royle - Served with the Bobo Madare people group, living in Santidougou, Bobo Dioulasso and Fô. Served as field bookkeeper, in radio and theological education. American.

Betty Shields - Came as a short term worker and spent two years doing the books in the Bobo office. Transferred to do the same work in Mali but because of sickness she could not finish her term. American.

High School girl - We can’t remember her name. She was brought to the field by the Tom Burns to help out in the office. As a teenager, she felt very comfortable doing the mission books, lying sprawled out on the living room rug! American.

Dug and Karen Conkle - Served in the Banfora district, living in Banfora and Sindou.

Was mission director for one year. Lived in Koudougou for six months in 1996.

American.

Dick and Lillian Phillips – Served first in Viet Nam, where they were prisoners of the Viet Cong for nine months. It was impossible for them to return to Viet Nam so they transferred to Burkina where they did translation in the San language and medical work living in Toma in the Tougan district. Retired in 1995. Returned for a year to finish some translation work. American.

Peter and Judy Colman - Lived and worked in Bobo, working with the Bobo church and teaching at Maranatha. Director of Maranatha Institute for one-year. Began the church in, the city of Ouaga and worked there several years. Returned to teach one year at Maranatha, left for furlough and remained in the United States for doctoral studies. American.

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Neysa Costa - Served in the Banfora district, living in Niangoloko.

Transferred to the Bobo district where she did Christian Education and theological education. After her second furlough remained in an inner city ministry with the Alliance in Birmingham, AL. American.

Esther Cowles Schaeffer - Served in the Bobo district, working with the local churches in women work and Sunday Schools. Taught at Maranatha Institute. Left for furlough and seminary studies and married Andrew Schaeffer. Together they have served in Nigeria and Guinea. American Michelle Tatum Stanford - Studied language and worked with the women of the Bobo district. Left after one term, married, and with her husband, is a missionary among Muslims in England.

Peggy Drake - Served as a nurse in the Santidougou district, living at Santidougou. Later moved to Bobo and works in a medical clinic ministry. American.

Karen Winters - Served as a nurse at Santidougou for almost a term. Resigned, returned to the United States and married. American.

Sherry Hoover - Came for a short term to fill in as bookkeeper-secretary. Also taught classes in Bobo. Married and living in Canada. Canadian.

Carolyn Burge - Served for three terms in Djibasso, teaching in the girls' school and doing evangelism. Moved to Ouagadougou. American.

Mary Crowgey - Started her service in Djibasso, transferred to Bobo to work in the Jula translation project. Has also filled in as secretary and bookkeeper in the Bob o office. Works with the Bobo district. American Dorothy States - Came from the Cote d'Ivoire field for one year to teach at Maranatha.

Was school nurse at I.C.A. Retired from C. I. in 1995. American.

Carol Van Bremen - Came from the Cote d'Ivoire field for one year to teach at Maranatha. Retired from C.I. in 1995. American.

Charleen Foster - Came to work in the Bobo office from C么te d'Ivoire and served two years before returning to C.I. American.

Paul and Gre Kardol - Came to work for one year in the radio department of the church, revamping the programming and remodeling the studio. Dutch.

Steve and Debbi Clouser - Served two terms among the Dafing, starting the station at Safane. Then moved to Ouagadougou to work with the church there. American.

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Lammert and Britta Hukema - Transferred here to Burkina from Zaïre and taught for two years at Maranatha, where he was also bookkeeper and she secretary. They went from here to Russia and now Gabon. Dutch.

Joke Blumink - Served in Tougan in medical work and teaching ministries. Dutch.Jetty Stouter - Served first in Tougan in medical work and then in Bobo working with Peggy Drake in medical clinic ministries. Dutch.

Jim and Beth Albright - Came to Burkina via Mali and France and served at Maranatha Institute in teaching and nursing ministries. Served as field director for two years.

Worked also with the Bobo district. American.

Gary Schmidt - CAMA Services, working in Burkina for two years and set up the CAMA office here. Later married and went to Latin America. American.

Tim and Ruth Albright - Served in CAMA Services and worked in the city of Bobo for several years before moving to the capital. Worked to set up the development arm of the church, ACCEDES. American.

Arjo and Adrie De Vroome - Studied language and worked first in Niangoloko.

Moved to Poundou and has served with the Bible Institute there in teaching, nursing and building ministries. Dutch.

Henk and Adrie Van der Giessen - Began language study and work in Banfora and later moved to agricultural ministries in Poundou Agricultural School. Then served in Ouroué until they had to leave the field for health reasons. Dutch.

Brent and Sue Haggerty - Began ministry in the Banfora district. Moved for one year to Bobo to teach and do nursing at Maranatha. Went to Niangoloko for a short time. Served as field director for two years. American.

Gretha Stringer - First served in Zaire, then for a short period in C. I. and now working in the Lit Center and teaching ministries at Maranatha Institute. Dutch.

Gerald and Dorothy Hogenbirk - Came from Côte d'Ivoire to teach for one year at Maranatha. Returned to Cote d'Ivoire and later went to Hungary to serve.

Canadian.

Russ and Laurie Luther - Served in Ouagadougou for a term and a half.

Returned to the pastorate in the United States. American.

John and Betty Arnold - Served in the Dédougou district, first in Ouarkoye and later in Houndé, where they built the station. American.

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Wyman and Carma Nelson - Served in Tougan for one and a half terms and came to.

Bobo during their second term to teach at Maranatha Institute. After furlough continuing in doctoral studies. American.

Darren and Marilyn Rump - Served first of all in Cote d'Ivoire. Came to Burkina as bookkeeper and secretary, also worked with the Bobo district. Stayed three years and resigned. American.

Dave and Rebekah Hankin - Served first in the district of Nouna and began the station in the Solenzo district. American.

Mark and Jeddie Brumley - Studied the Jula language and worked in the Bobo district.

American.

Dave and Denise Golding - Studied the Jula language and worked in the Banfora district. Canadian.

Larry and. Nancy Burg - Studied the Moor language in the Ouagadougou district.

American.

Jerry and Peggy Stayton - Came to work in the Bobo office as secretary and bookkeeper.

American.

Collette Beaudais - Newly arrived and living in Bobo, teaching English at Maranatha.

Canadian.

Bonnie Van Ornum - One term in language study and literature work in the city of Bobo Dioulasso.

There is a total of 119 missionaries on this list. Twenty four have retired from active service. i

From Richard Johanson's personal letter.

The big government Lycée in Bobo is named after Ouezzin Coulibaly iii Collège de l'Avenir was founded by Nazi Boni and in its better days was among the best. iv A daughter, Deborah, was a member of the Bobo youth group during her youth. Later she worked in Abidjan for Air Afrique for a time. Another son Michel is a local hotel operator and heads the College.

None attend church today as far as I know. v Mrs. Jones is somewhat of a legend in the Assemblies of God. After the death of her husband she went to South Africa and worked for years in correspondence coures. Her daughter, Virgina Corbin, was at Mamou with Nancy and is now wife of the Assemblies Africa director. vi Published as MESSAGE Pour une régénération nationale dans la réconcilliation in Noisiel, France April 27, 1989 vii Saye states that he has profuse notes of his experiences but cannot write a book while certain men are still in power. Sankara and Blaise were "his boys" at one time. His conversion occurred while in prison reading a Bible given to him by the Cardinal while he was president. During an evening with him in the Nehlsens' home in Tougan he allowed us to record his testimony. He has given this in many places since.

Saye and his two wives are faithful members of the Ouaga C&MA church. viii Burkina means, "Upright" in Mooré; "Faso" means father's homeland in Jula. The person takes the name Burkina bɛ from the Fulfulde language, bɛ being person. ii

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ix

Thomas has a younger brother who sings in the Assemblies of God choir in Ouaga. The parents are devout Catholics. x It was reported by Samuel Yameogo that Thomas called him at one time asking for help in studying the Bible. Otherwise he seemed to be interested in eastern religions. They said he attended the AG church at least at times while in Isa with the Commando military. xi Excerpt from Kansan Prairies to African Forests by Edith Roseberry xii The Niger Vision, page 91. xiii Excerpt from Alliance Weekly, March 30, 1946. xiv Pastoral Letter to the Church, Louis L. King, May 28, 1983. xv A Reaffirmation, by Louis L. King, President: xvi Much of this information is based on Eglise Buruju Uebe. xvii excerpted from an Alliance Weekly article. xviii Alliance Weekly Article, January 25, 1947. xix Alliance Weekly article. xx Alliance Weekly article, October 17, 1942. xxi Alliance Weekly, June 7, 1919. xxii Alliance weekly article, August 10, 1935. xxiii Alliance Weekly, July 13, 1935. xxiv various Alliance Weekly articles. xxv Alliance Weekly Article; 1952 xxvi Alliance Weekly article, "Tremendou Needs - Burning Hearts, by W.S. Martin. xxvii Alliance-Weekly, February 15; 1930. xxviii Alliance Weekly article xxix R.S. Roseberry, Alliance Weekly article, November 7, 1925. xxx Franklin Ballard, Alliance Weekly article, May 10, 1941. xxxi departmental report from the 1930's. xxxii Hilites, October 1972 xxxiii Letter dated March 30, 1973 xxxiv Mali-Upper Volta-Tidings; December 1972 xxxv Mali-Upper Volta Hilites; March 1972 xxxvi Mali-Upper Volta. Hilites xxxvii Mali Upper Volta Tidings, March 1973 xxxviii Reported in Fraternité Matin December 13, 1982 xxxix Chairman's Report, December 1982 xl Alliance Witness article by Milton Pierce, July 9, 1980 xli Alliance Weekly, October 30, 1943. xlii The Alliance Weekly editorial, March 11, 1944. xliii unpublished, untitled paper received from the Mali mission. xliv Alliance Weekly prayer request. xlv “Through French West Africa” by Ralph Herber, Alliance Weekly article. xlvi HILITES, September 1971 xlvii ICAO is Institut Catholique de 1'Afrique de l'Ouest. xlviii gleaned from the Niger Vision, by R.S. Roseberry, C.P.I., 1934, p. 86 xlix excerpt from an "Alliance Weekly" article. l assorted excorn minutes from Mission archives file li Excerpted from an "Alliance Weekly" article. lii personal letter from Richard Johanson, 1976 liii field rules recommendation, 1931 liv L'Observateur, le 16 décembre 1996 - interview with Pasteur Dupré

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EPILOGUE We have researched and written, laughed and cried, edited and re-edited, made choices of what to include and what to exclude, printed and re-printed arid have finally decided to leave the manuscript as it is. There are probably still mistakes, and we ask your indulgence in this. It has been an enriching experience for us to delve into the records and memories of the past seventy-five years of Alliance ministry in West Africa.

We feel privileged to be part of what God is doing through His church here.

This brief, partial history of the Burkina Faso mission and church is not intended for a wide reading audience. Our target readers are those who have been, are and will be part of the missionary body of this field. This has determined the content. We pray that it may be helpful for all of us to read of the past, and thus appreciate the perspective of what God is continuing to do through His workers in this field.

Special thanks go to several people for making this finished product possible: - to Mark Brumley for his ready help with the computer work.

- to Marge Cowles for the hours she spent researching and photocopying articles from the Alliance Life archives.

- to Tite TiĂŠnou for reading the manuscript and correcting certain dates and details.

- to Jetty Stouten for designing the cover for this history.

- and finally to Brent Haggerty, without whose encouragement we would not have had the incentive to produce this document.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

"All for Jesus", Niklaus, Sawin, Stoesz, Christian Publications, Inc., Harrisburg, PA 1986.

"A Reaffirmation", Louis L. King, 1983 "Eglises et Mouvements Evangéliques au Burkina Faso", Flavien, Ouagadougou, 1990 "Eglise Buruju Sɛbɛ", local publication of EAC, Bobo Dioulasso, Burkina Faso.

"On to Timbuctoo", Rebecca Steiner, publication of Mali CMA Mission. "Pastoral Letter to the Church", Louis L. King, 1983 "Pour une régénératíon nationale dans la reconciliation", F. Guirma, le 27 avril 1989 "The Niger Vision", R.S. Roseberry, Christian Publications, Inc., Harrisburg, PA 1934.

"The Soul of French West Africa", R.S. Roseberry, Christian Publications, Inc., Harrisburg, PA, 1947 "Une Grande Aventure", Marius Bonjour, ICHTUS, 1984 Articles culled from Alliance Weekly, Alliance Witness, Alliance Life, photocopied from archives, Colorado Springs, CO.

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