Do you believe in miracles? Have you personally experienced them? Over the past few years, we have experienced several of them. And we are expecting more in the months and years ahead! The Bible says, “God also bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders, and with diverse miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost” (Heb 2:4). As we labor to do His will, we have found God fulfilling His Word.
We are originally from Ivory Coast, West Africa. I graduated from the Adventist Seminary of West Africa with a degree in theology and public health, and Elmire received training in the banking field. Seven months ago, we were blessed with the birth of our baby girl, Eliora. We are privileged and challenged to be AFM’s first missionaries from Africa.

We were both early exposed to frontier missions. Elmire’s father, an Adventist convert from Islam, pastored in Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Ivory Coast. The most influential years of my education were with American and German missionaries from different Christian churches.

Just two weeks after our wedding in 2002, God sent us to be missionaries in Burkina Faso, a miraculous beginning to our missionary career. We also experienced miracles during our application with AFM, which we will share in future articles.

Though frontier missions was our passion, we struggled with how and where to serve. We met and became friends with Kurt Unglaub, former AFM missionary to Burkina Faso, and Dana Clark, former AFM Africa field supervisor. Through our relationships with these two godly men, we became convinced that God was calling us to a new path of service.

As we prayerfully considered the call God was unveiling to us, discouragement assailed us. For the past four years, we had been pastoring more than 10 different churches, working in more than 10 different towns, and coordinating 52 Global Mission and Gospel Outreach lay workers. Elmire and I sometimes only saw each other one week a month. The huge amount of administrative work was tiring us and diminishing our personal witnessing. We sought God, and He continued to impress us that we needed to become career missionaries with AFM. We realized that only complete obedience to His will would bring us true joy and satisfaction.

But how could we become AFM missionaries? We are from the 10/40 Window, home to the majority of the world’s poorest people. It was outrageous to think that we could raise the necessary support from this area. How could we leave all the programs we were serving? Many of our friends and colleagues did not welcome our decision to join AFM. We prayed; we waited; we hoped.

Our God is the Lord of the impossible. As we prayed about the challenges, we took His word just as it read, claiming His promises, and He worked a miracle! Two family friends decided to adopt our project. One donated considerably towards our launching goal, and the other supplied the funds we needed to raise before appearing in Adventist Frontiers. On top of that, individuals in the States we’ve never met and churches we’ve never visited heard about our project and decided to support us. Amazing!

Since our arrival in the States in February, the list of our prayer partners and supporters has continued to grow. We are building a strong team to take the everlasting gospel to the Moors in Timbuktu. I visited Timbuktu last year. Yes, it is a real place; and yes, it is in the middle of nowhere! Timbuktu is the center of a people group of almost 3.5 million with virtually no Christian presence. They will not hear the gospel of salvation unless we go and witness to them in their own culture and language. God has called us. We will go. Will you please bear us and the Moor people on your heart and join our team? We look forward to hearing from you.

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