Dress Ceremoney, African Church

Just to let you know I'm struggling with uploading photos at the moment, but will try and get some up as soon as possible!

On Friday morning I went to a dress ceremony for one of the VVF patients, VVF stands for Vesico Vaginal Fistula, this is a condition that occurs when a woman has a difficult labour or something goes wrong and they have no medical assistance. The result is a whole in the bladder and the woman is left incontinent, these women are often ostracised from society and feel a lot of shame because they quite often not only loose the child but are left constantly wet and smell quite bad. On the ship the surgeons are able to completely cure them, which consequently brings them a whole new hope and reason for living...

Every time that a woman is discharged that has just had the VVF surgery they have a dress ceremony, which is what I attended last Friday. A new dress is bought for the lady and they have their make-up done so they look and feel beautiful. It takes place in the ward, singing and dancing are followed by the gospel being shared, and the ladies give their testimony. It was such a great atmosphere down there, and was my first time in the ward since it has been up and running. It was the first time that I actually experienced firsthand how these people’s lives can be changed so dramatically, and the new sense of joy and hope that they experience.

This morning I went to a local African church, it was an Assemblies of God church that one of the crew planted in 2005 when he was working for YWAM in Benin, when he left it there were 15 people and today there must have been at least 150 people in the church. As you can expect from a typical African service there was a lot of brilliant singing and dancing, there were about 16 of us from the ship and we all got up to dance at the front during one of the worship songs, which apparently they thought was brilliant! Though I’m not sure we have quite as good rhythm as they do!

The lively worship was followed by about 10 minutes of singing from the children’s choir, which there is a video of below, the sermon was incredibly short for an African service... bearing in mind that it was said in French, then translated into Fon (the local dialect) and then English it only lasted just over half an hour!

We were invited to the pastor’s house after the service, he is actually the director of YWAM for Benin, and was so excited to have us, displaying his generosity with food and drink for us! There were loads of children around and we played with many of them up in the YWAM base. Our car actually broke on the way home and we had to sit in the Landrover for about 45minutes holding the door shut because the door wouldn’t close!

I had Friday off and therefore have had a very long weekend! I took the chance also to go to a local swimming pool for most of the day on Saturday. I went with one friend and it was a great chance to relax and rest after such intense community life on the ship. It was a slightly strange experience, you walk for half an hour along a dirty street, typical of Benin, seeing plenty of poverty which you almost get immune to walking round every day, and then go into the hotel, which is completely westernised and feel like you are on holiday! It is strange to see such diverse levels of wealth so close to one another...