Thursday

A usual day:

6:00 - Crawl out of bed to facetime Toby or my parents :)
7:00 - Rid the bathroom of worms and take a shower
7:30 - Coffee, breakfast, and devotions
8:30/9 - Start school/work/my school/etc.
10:00 - If enough motivation can be found, work out. Today, no such luck.
12:00 - Lunchtime. Usually Cameroonian food, but Thursdays are leftovers
1:00ish - Go back to work
3/4/5 - The help leave, we finish up with school, then go to town or start chores or, like today, dance!
7:00 - American food for dinner! Then devotions and cleaning up the kitchen
8:30 - Once the dishes are done, we hang out in the living room, sometimes watch a movie
Late - Yay bed!

This is only a loose schedule and one we often stray from, sometimes going to Titus' or Julie's house or maybe visiting the orphanage. Today Derick and some others are coming here for dance, and yesterday Chris, Karen, Sarah and I walked down to the SIL office to meet with Ginny, the Scripture Engagement supervisor. We've been working every day writing, formatting, and editing the curriculum, but she's the one who asks questions and nails down practical details, like how much it would cost for each lesson to be printed, how to train teachers to use it, who would fund the translation into more languages, etc. I got a glimpse into all the crazy intricacies Chris and Karen have to deal with just to get the curriculum to a church, and I was amazed. Right now we're writing a set of lessons with both English and Chrambo (a language spoken in part of the Ndop plain), and once we're finished with it, it will be a simple process to switch out the Chrambo with any one of the countless languages spoken in Ndop and beyond. And once Luke is done, Acts, here we come! Their passion for getting this material out there to children is huge - it's hard not to get carried away with all the ideas they have for the future, and projects that could branch off the lessons, like timelines, daily devotionals, etc. I'm so excited to be working with them on this - churches starting to use the curriculum have already reported huge leaps in Sunday School attendance. One church put a line in their budget for Children's Ministry for the first time ever this year, and we've heard that the children themselves are giving enough in the offering to pay for their own coloring pages.

All this makes me realize how much we take for granted in the States; the easy access to materials you need for teaching the Bible in your language, the option of more than one to choose from. Here it's hard to get not only curriculums or Bibles, but things like coloring pages and crayons and pencils and chalk and paper. What Chris and Karen are doing is wonderful, and it's quite the opportunity to work with them and help as much as I can.