Our Ministry in the Ivory Coast

In July of 2002, we arrived in the Ivory Coast, having just completed language school in France. We felt the Lord leading us to work with Jason Hamby and his family. We were there for only 2 and half months when a civil war broke out. The U.S. embassy urged all Americans to leave so on Oct. 1^st, 2002 we left for the States.

After about a month and half we decided that the Ivory Coast problem wasn’t going to be resolved quickly, so we began looking into other options. We got in contact with Randy Alderman, missionary with BIMI to Togo, and he told us that he was on furlough and we could use his house and his stuff if we wanted to work in Togo. So on January 14^th, 2003 we arrived in Togo. God allowed us to use the language and help some of the national pastors and their works. Across the street from where we lived, were two young men who cooked and sold pork. They began to come to church with us along with many others from their village. To make a long story short, we started having services in the village and then bought a piece of land. We have heard that a young man will be starting the work there and a building will soon be built.

After being in Togo for 9 months we decided to go back to the Ivory Coast even with the current instability. We were one of the first missionaries that went back. We immediately began to get involved. We helped Pastor Ambroise to build their church building in Oumé. We started the work in Divo Nord. We took over a new work, started by Jason Hamby named Yobouékro, and saw it grow from about 12 to 70 and sometimes more. We were also able to teach in the Bible Institute and help start another work. We built a church building in Divo Nord and Yobouékro, and helped some of the other works with construction.

The people in the village of Divo Nord are for the most part from Burkina Faso. Because of this I began researching how many Independent Baptist missionaries were in the country of Burkina Faso. To my amazement, all the other missionaries that I asked didn’t know anybody but one national missionary. I later found out that there are two missionary families with BBF in the area, one of which had been there a couple of years and another in language school. God began to burden my heart so in the summer of 2004 we decided that we would move towards the end of the year.