“Nous irons jusqu’au bord de monde, la Ja ne faillera pas.”

Each Wednesday afternoon at about 4 p.m., the small group of five Pathfinders sings for the glory of God. I didn’t start this group. In fact, I’m not even the official director. The assistant leader and I just ended up with our jobs by default. Several months ago, the director had to leave, and the assistant held only one more meeting before giving up. I wasn’t a Pathfinder when I was young, so I didn’t have much to go on.

Then God sent us Jenniffer Blackburn from the Malike project for five weeks. Since she knew a lot about Pathfinders, I asked her to help us. She gladly agreed. We had no material and didn’t know what to do, so she started to hunt down information on the Internet. She was able to find the first couple of classes, and I started to translate the first one. She helped get things started and figure out some sort of order. I then hunted on the Internet also and was able to find the manual for the first two classes. That helped me a lot because it gives lots of ideas.

The original group was doing an Adventist Youth program, but because it was a younger crowd, we switched to a Pathfinder program. Because no one around here has done Pathfinders, we are all starting at the Friend level, no matter the age of the person. The kids love it.
The students in Pathfinders are the same ones I do Bible studies with, and we all have lots of fun together and get along well. We do some marching, which I know basically nothing about, but the assistant knows at least some, so she leads out. We are reading through a book about Ellen White and the birth of the Adventist church, something most people here don’t know much about. This is the only such book in French that I have found. Trying to find material in French is difficult. Most of the major books are not translated, and the ones that are translated are too expensive for most people to afford. I just bought Messages to Young people in French and had to pay 26 dollars for one book. That’s typically half a month’s salary here.

Over the past three weeks, we have been working on the seed honor. The pathfinders collected 30 different types of seeds and put them in the back room of the church until the next meeting. When we came back, mice had eaten them. The next time, we collected and glued the seeds to our display boards, and I took the collections home so the mice wouldn’t get them. Then, the weevils started on them in my bedroom. I finally sprayed them with insecticide.

It is very interesting how the honors have to be adapted to different cultures. When you did the seed honor, did you collect mango, teck, vonzou, fonio, baobab, néré, moringa, and karité seeds? These are all common here. In fact, most of the seeds we collected cannot be found in the States. One comedian put a sand grain on his board—a rock seed, of course! Someone found a pod similar to milkweed, and the breeze blew its fluff all over us during the meeting. I found some seeds in my long-forgotten collection of kitchen spices.

It was hard to figure out what the different seed species where in French because most were not in my dictionary. Thankfully, a few weeks ago, the district pastor brought several books in French for the Pathfinders so I can photocopy them.

If anyone has used Pathfinder uniform pants or skirts in good shape, belts, sashes, or anything else that could be useful to our club, we would be pleased to receive them. (Pathfinders here wear white shirts, not khaki, so please send only white shirts.) We are a very poor club. The kids all work, but they need their money to pay for notebooks and other stuff for school, which will start in about a month. Please keep us in your prayers. 

• Twitter