New Church Planting Team

This morning I got up very early to take one of our new church planters to the bus stop.  Over the weekend we had helped three of our new church planters to transport their needed supplies from the city to Khongolote in preparation for the journey north.   So I'm up at 4 am this morning and driving in the dark to Khongolote to get Basilio and take him to the bus-stop, which amounts to a rotunda area with buses crammed in everywhere, each bus an independent operator, and what would appear to be mass pandemonium.  But we've learned the system and we drove into the chaos and found the right bus, unloaded the material, negotiated the tickets, and loaded the bus, and I was home by 645.  Not bad - we will probably be doing it again tomorrow or the next day as we have another fellow going north but he needs to resolve a banking problem today (his new ATM card isn't working and that is how we get money to him in the north).  

So, exciting times for us as we send one more team out to reach the country for Christ.  As we drove in, he told me about the special commissioning service for him Sunday at Khongolote - his sending church.  He is their missionary (like so many of our church planters that seem to come out of this vibrant church), going north to start a new work in the Gaza province.   Basilio is one of the guys I've always had a hard time understanding and he me, but we're getting used to each other and this morning did pretty well.  I would prefer that I adjust to them vice the other way around, but I organize the sentences differently still - I spent some time Saturday helping another missionary from the States with some electrical issues, and found him a good electrician.  He speaks Portuguese quite well and I understood him perfectly and so did the Electrician.  But then he explained to me that the reason I understood him was that most Western folks who learn Portuguese, organize their sentences the same way because Portuguese is not their heart language - and that is a lot of the understanding.    For example instead of saying:

The water pump is not working and we think it is because their is a short to ground, we would need to say something like: "the pump of water is not to work and we think because ground of short to exist".  Or something like that....

I didn't take pictures at the bus stop and probably should have, but it was quite crowded where we were and I was a bit reluctant to whip the camera out in that setting - wouldn't want my camera to 'run away' into the crowd.  

Dave