On January 16th, 2024 we resumed classes at the Mount Horeb Bible Institute, the seminary here in Togo West Africa. It is situated about a 90 minute drive from my apartment in the capital city of Lomé. It is on the way to the tourist town of Kpalimé and the government has done a lot of work widening and improving the highway.
The seminary is out in the country on land the EELCT (Evangelical Lutheran Church of Confession in Togo) has purchased to serve as the seminary and a farm whose crops and animals can provide money to suport the work here. While the highway is good, the road leading into the land is not as good. It probably takes 30 minutes to go from the highway to the seminary even though it isn’t very far.
The “road” into our land was just a path made by foot traffic and motorcycles and a vehicle or two, but some surrounding land owners sold the sand on their land to be used in construction in Lomé, so big dump truck created huge ruts that became impassable during the rainy season. Fortunately the one man who sold the sand had the “road” mostly filled in so we can use it even when it rains.
The other week it was almost 99º F (37º C). The classroom building does not have any electricity, so there are no fans and it can get rather warm.
We have just started an in-depth study of justification, so the students were complaining of brain burn, probably both physically, become of the heat, and mentally. We usually end around 2:30 pm so the students can depart and try to cool off. The sun also shines trough the open area between the bamboo siding and the roof onto the platform where Pastor Blewu and I teach from, so we often move down in the afternoon to get out of the sun. This become less of a problem earlier in the “winter” and in the “summer” as the position of the sun has changed enough to not strike us directly.
We usually drive up Tuesday morning, have classes Tuesday, stay overnight in the teacherage we built on the land, have class on Wednesday, and return to Lomé Wednesday evening. It would be nice to have more days of classes, but the students have families they need to work to provide for. They get enough homework to keep them more than busy.
We installed a solar panel system on the teacherage so we can have lights in the evening and a fan during night.
Unfortunately the first system they installed was not sufficient to support two fans running all night and the AC converter would start beeping early in the morning, waking us up, because the storage battery was used up. They installed a second system while I was on furlough almost two years ago, along with two solar/DC fans (which, in theory, are more efficient), but we have never been able to use two fans throughout the whole night. At least these simply stop, rather than anything beeping, and then often come one for a second when the battery finds a little more energy but then stop again. This still usually wakes me up, as it is an unexpected change in the environment.
What I have been doing to get by is using the solar fan during the day and then when I go to bed, I switch to the plug-in AC fan on the old system. The lights are on the new system with the solar fans, so using the lights in the evening deplete the batteries enough so that the fan will not last the whole night. Pastor Blewu usually doesn’t want a fan at night, so I can get through the night by switching between the systems. I have been trying to get this problem resolved for almost two years now, but so far nothing has been done.
Pastor Blewu likes to cook, so each week I give him some money to buy us groceries and he makes our meals while we are up at the seminary. We often stop at a market in the town right before the smaller village where we turn off to go to the land, as Tuesday is market day there. I will have to take a picture and add it here in the future.
The typical local bread is sweeter than I like. They do make a “salty” bread that I do really like, but they are frequently sold. We often stop at a road-side vender in a town on the way to pick up a loaf or two (provided they have it).
This year the plan is to have the students start sharing the Bread of Life in the villages around the seminary, with the goal of starting congregations that they can then pastor when they graduate in about a year. To help them in this work, we have just begun a course on the study of missions.
I had not planned to start this course this early; I was hoping to have more time to edit and translate the lessons into French, but I agree with Pastor Blewu that it is good to start the course now, rather than later. So rather than waiting to finish translating all 25 lessons and making a bound book for the course, I am translating and handing out a new lesson each week. I am currently furiously trying to edit and translate them all now, so perhaps I will be able to hand out the course books in a couple of weeks after we have only done a handful of the first lessons.
As the students already feel overloaded and are experiencing brain burn, we will be only doing one lesson on the in-depth study of justification and study a lesson on missions/evangelism instead of the second lesson on justification each week. Hopefully this will also let the student thoroughly study and absorb each lesson on justification, as this is such an important topic.
One of the things I really focus on is learning how to preach. Each week one student presents his study of his sermon text. The next week he will preach a sermon based on that text and the next student present his study on the text on which he we preach the next week, and so on. The students have made great progress, but there is still more to learn. Please continue to pray for all their studies.
