Evangelising It Up!!

This last weekend, the church that we’ve been attending had a big evangelism event. It went from Friday to Sunday and our team did ministry on all 3 days! On Friday and Saturday, we performed on a street in Cotonou and then on Sunday, we were the main part of an evening evangelism service. A drama set looks a little different here than in Canada:
- To start, one person introduces us and the first drama
- Then we perform all our dramas, one right after the other
- All of the dramas are narrated while they are being performed and someone will talk about the dramas in between each one
- After all the dramas have been performed, the team goes out into the crowd to start conversations with people and share their faith

On Friday, we did two sets like this. In between the two sets, I got to spend time with all the kids that had watched us! They would follow me everywhere I went and call out “yovo” and try to get close enough to touch me. They completely surrounded me and at one point I tried to count them (it wasn’t easy because of course they were always moving), and I counted at least 50 kids!!! I eventually had to walk away from our performance area so they wouldn’t touch all our sound equipment and cords. And then I took out the camera to take some pictures....big mistake! As soon as they saw the camera, they rushed towards me to try and be in the picture! Of course, if you are too close to the camera, you won’t be in the picture but they didn’t understand that! At some points it was a little scary because they would start pushing to get closer to me and some of them would start hitting other kids and some would fall! There was even a point where I almost fell because so many kids were pushing against me! But I LOVED spending time with these kids!! It was so fun to have them all around me, holding my hands and giving me hugs! And even if they were being a little crazy and even violent with each other, I just wanted to show them God’s love by spending time with them and holding their hand! Janna joined me and we started doing some dance moves and the kids loved it! They would laugh at us and imitate us and show us some of their dance moves too!

It was so good to be able to do some ministry!!! Whenever I thought about coming here, one of the things I was looking forward to the most was doing ministry with the team here in a different culture. And now it’s only been a month and I’ve already gotten to do that!! And it sounds like we’ll have a lot more ministry opportunities!!

Our contact who usually drives us places was unavailable this last weekend, so we had to find another mode of transportation to get to the evangelism event every day. So a couple of our friends on the drama team came to pick us up on their....MOTORBIKES!! Yeah...motorbikes! I’ve only been on a motorcycle once back home. And after seeing how people drive on them here, I was definitely really nervous to get on one. They are always weaving in and out of traffic and trying to fit in super tight spaces! But they were friends of ours and they drove slow for us so it was totally fine and actually really fun! Now we all think motorbike rides are fun!!

Prayer Requests:
o Praise God that the evangelism event went well and that lots of people heard the Gospel and accepted Christ! (No, we don’t know a number yet)
o Continued health and safety
o We have 6 potential leaders right now so pray that God will make it really clear to everyone (the 3 of us and the potential leaders) who he wants on DRIME Benin’s leadership team