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Jul. 02, 2002 Dear Friends, Lively but matronly Rita was the de facto "mother" of our most recent class of Primary Health Care Worker students in Kumasi. Rita wants to be a PHCW to allow her husband to preach full time in areas where the church is not strong enough to support their family. Rita's command of English is exceptional, and she reads well. Rita eagerly joined the men in a contest to find misspellings and editorial errors in the manuscript of the new handbook. Students who pointed out a needed change first received a point. Rita kept a sharp eye out for my arrival to the classroom, frequently pushing her way to the front of the crowd so that she could be first to show me her correction suggestions. The men protested her tactics, but they quickly realized that their best defense was to find errors she failed to notice. Rita even took the initiative to poll the other women students and compile a list of words used in the handbook that are not a part of "Ghanaian English" (like "garbage", "cramp", and "booster"), but in the end a Liberian preaching student edged her out of the first prize (digital thermometers and a solar calculator - purchased for only a few dollars in the USA - were the highly desirable prizes for the contest). Friday the seventeen new students plus three more of the students from the aborted March course in Yendi graduated amid cheers and prayers of thanks. Squeezing all twenty students into the classroom for the final exam was a bit of a challenge, but we are happy that almost all of the students whose classes were interrupted due to the violence in Yendi have now completed the first foundational portion of the course. We are also very glad to have Jerry and Fran Thornton back with us in Yendi. They returned to Ghana in the first part of June and got to work immediately. Their presence has been a huge encouragement to us. Please pray that their health holds out so that they can have a long and productive stay. So, what next? We ask for your prayers for "traveling mercies," as we will be on the dangerous highways of Ghana a lot in the upcoming weeks. We are now on our way to the four day "West African Missionaries Retreat" on the coast. From there we plan to return to Yendi to make final preparations for the World Bible School follow-up campaign. We have to be back in Accra July 16th to pick up the campaigners, and on the 17th we expect to drive all the way back to Yendi. In addition to holding a seminar for current WBS students, the campaigners are scheduled to speak about Christianity and the life of Christ at all the junior and senior high schools in the Yendi district. Several of the schools (including specifically Islamic schools) have sent reminder letters encouraging us not to leave their schools out - amazing, isn't it? July 25th should find us all back on the road to Accra to drop off the campaigners. Right now several people in Ghana and the USA are reviewing the handbook to offer final suggestions. Somehow during July we hope to find the time to complete the final edit of the handbook, adding the index and glossary, some "decision trees" (algorithms), and an introduction, so that the campaigners can hand-carry the CD to the printer. After all that, we are scheduled to rendezvous with Joanna in Germany and have a bit of vacation time together. We hope to be back at work in Yendi in late August, long before the rainy season ends.
In the Service of Our King, |
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