Come with me to the village of Kpaha.

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Jonathan Huff

We knew that 2013 was going to be an exciting year, and it is quickly becoming one already. We are continuing the ministries of our first village church plant and the Bible Institute, while also branching out to start a new church among the unreached Lamba people and also starting a small orphanage on our Bible Institute property. I will give more updates on the orphanage construction with my next post.

We had more questions than answers about these new ministries, but we were confident that our Sovereign Lord would give us the wisdom that we needed, when we needed it. He has opened doors for us and allowed us to get connected to many people that have shed light on our path and helped us tremendously. God has provided us with both a great translator and a wide open door among the Lamba to start our first church.

I would like to take you on a little tour of the village where we are going to start that church in less than two weeks. It is among the largest unreached people group in Togo, the Lamba. The village is called Kpaha and it is another ten kilometers down dirt roads after traveling about thirty-five kilometers north of our house.

The most important thing to do when seeking the opportunity to plant a new church in a village is to talk to the village chief and get his permission to do so. Thankfully, we were able to meet with both the village chief and the chief of the region, “chef canton” and they were both glad to have us come out to their village and gave us their approval to start a new church among them. In the picture below, it was very important for the chef canton that our feet were in the picture too. I just thought that was kind of interesting.

We met them both at the local school where they graciously gave us permission to use one of the classrooms for our Bible Studies as we get started out there. The kids were having a big soccer game that day, but you can see the school in the background.

You see a lot of interesting things when you walk around in the villages.

I saw a lady making this long rope…

using this straw.

Wow! It takes several days for the whole process of cutting the straw and weaving the rope and she sold me the ball of rope for $2.20. Let’s just say that if lazy people exist in these villages, I’ve never meant one.

I next came across this young girl in her kitchen cooking up some pâte. It is basically just flour and water. Heidi has tried some before, but she was hardly able to get it down. Time did not permit me to try some. Maybe next time.

At each stop we take time to get to know the people a little bit, learn about their life and share the gospel with them too. At the next stop, I saw another young girl picking fruit from a tree with a long pole and I asked her if I could try my hand at it too. It was not easy to snag the right fruit with the hook shaped end of the very long pole. I enjoyed trying something new, and they got a kick out of the white guy having trouble doing what they do every day with ease.

After talking to these villagers for a moment, I noticed that the young boy had caught a bunch of frogs and was drying them out on his roof before eating them. Did I ever explain why I do not eat village food? I know the missionary prayer, “Lord, where you lead me, I will follow, what they feed me, I will swallow.” But I have never prayed that prayer and do not intend to.

Now take another look at the picture and notice the clay pot to the left of the picture. Any idea what that is? A fetish for their voodoo worship. They pour the blood from the chicken sacrifices into the pot and also put the feathers on the outside. That’s why we are planting a church among these people. God in heaven deserves the worship that they are currently giving to their false gods.

This last picture was of a very well spoken man that I talked to for a long time about the gospel. He had lots of reasons why he should reject this “white man’s religion” and why he should not reject his ancestor’s religion. I felt like I was living out my years of studying apologetics and I guess I was.

There was a strange sense of confidence that filled me while trying to answer his reasons to refuse the gospel. Even though this man seemed so unwilling to believe the gospel, I know he is no match for the overwhelming grace of God and the awesome power of the omnipotent Holy Spirit. I look forward to speaking with him again and prayerfully sharing the good news with you that he has accepted the good news that I’m sharing with him.

Planes, trains and automobiles. Well, not exactly.

Posted on March 18, 2013 by Jonathan Huff

Togo is a very poor country, that much is clear. I can hire a mason to do back breaking work all day and give him the equivalent of $4 and he will be very grateful for it and ask me if there is more work that he can do. Just this morning, my doorbell rang at 6:45 with another mason wanting work making bricks for the orphanage. I told him to talk to my head mason to see if he will hire him or not.

Because the people are very poor, only a very small number of people have vehicles. Most people pay a moto taxi to get around or find a way to buy an inexpensive little moto that is more like a glorified moped. This moto goes new for about $800.

We always get a chuckle out of all of the things that we see people carry on their motos. Just the other day, I saw four adults riding on one moto! The driver looked like he was siting on the gas tank! I’ve seen cows transported in small cars, but another way to transport a bovine is to cut it up first and then have your passenger carry it’s head on his head!

His buddy had the rest of the animal on his bike, it looks like they were headed to the restaurant. Bon appétit!

So the lack of vehicles here brings me to this past Saturday morning. My good pastor friend, Moussa, called on me to assist the church by transporting the body of the recently deceased mother of a church member. So I showed up at the carpenter’s shop at 5:30AM and picked up the casket before heading over to the morgue to get the body and then to the family’s house for the funeral service.

When we left the family’s house thirteen people got into my truck with the casket to head to the cemetery. My poor tires were not handling the weight well, so I asked two people to get out and wait for us to return after the burial or pay a moto taxi to get to the cemetery. While they started the graveside service, I aired up the tires and was then able to take fifteen people back to the house where they spent more time with the family.

There are no domestic flights in Togo. They do have train tracks, but no working trains and relatively few vehicles. So it’s not exactly planes, trains and automobiles. It’s more like motos everywhere and a few vehicles, that also act as hearses when needed.

Thankful for the little things, like water.

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Jonathan Huff

When I decided to start this blog several months ago, my goal was to help family, friends and ministry partners feel better connected to what is happening in our lives and ministries here in Togo. These blog articles would range from things like new efforts at reaching unreached people, like the Lamba, with the gospel to little things like getting “arrested” in Ghana for an expired fire extinguisher. Today I thought I would mention how our strange water supply works here and how thankful that we are when “the tanks are full.”

For some unknown reason the water company only sends water out to our house during the night and unfortunately that is not every night. When we first got here, we knew that we needed to buy some water tanks that could be filled during the night so that we would have water during the day. We bought one tank and then soon figured out that was not enough, so we bought another, and then another. Now we have two tanks on the ground and one on top of the house.

We decided to buy a pump too that would pressurize the water for the house as the water pressure was pitiful without it. The problem comes when the water company goes several nights without sending any water and then the tanks dry up. We can tell when this is happening and we go into rationing mode, i.e. taking military showers and holding off on doing laundry or washing the truck.

One other problem with the lovely water company is how the dirty the water has been of late. We take advantage of the times when the tanks run dry to scrub them out, but when the water comes back on, the tanks get dirty in a hurry.

In an attempt to deal with the dirty water, my plumber found us a filter in town. The filter is trying it’s best, but it is not quite up to the task. I called him today and asked him if there are any better filters around and he is going to see what he can come up with.

Thankfully that dirty filter is only the first line of defense and not the only one. The water gets filtered again as it comes into our house and then we fill up our Katadyn filters for any water that we want to drink. From there the water goes into a water cooler or to about twenty-five 1.5 liter water bottles that we can refrigerate and also have on hand for when the water runs out.

Living in Togo teaches you to be grateful for the little things in life, like having constant clean water. Hopefully we are learning the lesson well (no pun intended).

The people have Jesus, but not his gospel.

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Jonathan Huff

The first two months back in Togo have been very busy, but we are finally feeling that we are getting back into our groove. Keeping a house here in working order can sometimes be a part-time job, as it seems that I have had either the plumber, the electrician, the repairman, the painter or the carpenter at the house more days than not over these past six weeks. Heidi jumped right into homeschooling Abby and learning how to handle all three girls while carrying her heavy workload of cooking and cleaning and continuing to minister to both the kids and the ladies of our “neighborhood”. She is an amazing woman and, in my opinion, the perfect missionary wife. I started teaching in the Bible Institute right after I got back and really before I even had my bags completely unpacked. It is such a joy to teach these students the Word of God, and I’m excited about what God has in store for those that will graduate in June.

As I explained to those churches that I visited while on furlough, in addition to continuing to lead the Bible Institute and oversee our first village church plant, we are planning to both start a small orphanage and plant a new church among the Lamba people about an hour from our house. The Lamba are the largest unreached people group in Togo, and we are excited to take the gospel to these that have never heard it before. I have been looking for a while for a good translator who speaks Lamba as one was not easy to find. Now I believe God has answered our prayers with a godly young man who grew up in another part of Togo, but who is Lamba and speaks the language fluently. With a translator found, the next thing to do is to determine where we are going to start our witnessing efforts.

After scouting out the area known as Defalé for about an hour, I asked my guide if he would show me the way to the top of a mountain where it looked like the Catholic Church had placed a very large cross. He guided me up the mountain where I found out that I only had it half right. It was the Catholic Church that built this monument, but it was not a cross; it was a statue of Jesus. It is ironic that these people are the largest unreached people group in Togo; they have “Jesus”, but they do not have the true gospel. Please pray with us as we work, by God’s grace, to change that.

What in the world is funeral month all about?

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Jonathan Huff

This is funeral month here in Togo, so I asked a friend of mine to explain in English the background of this month dedicated to honoring the dead and why participation in this celebration is unchristian. I have tried to only make minor changes to the text to make it a little easier to read. As missionaries, we have to be students of their culture in order to best understand how to disciple them in the midst of their very unique circumstances. I hope you find this glimpse into some of the traditions of their animistic world interesting. He chose to focus more on the background (the why) rather than on all of the practices (the what). So he did not mention how prayers are offered to the deceased that they might, for instance, bless the fields of those that are honoring them. The rest of this blog is his explanation.

The Kabiyè people have many traditional rites and initiations from birth till death. When a child turns twenty they are initiated into manhood or womanhood. This initiation is called Evala for men and Akpéma for girls in Kabiyè language. It is a ceremony that involves both families. They have to be in agreement because during this traditional ceremony the uncle of the teenage boy (Evalou) or girl (Akpénou) is the one who will buy the dog that the boy will eat. Eating a dog is a delicacy here. Before the time of the ceremony the boy will have never eaten dog meat before. The girls never eat dog meat at all so the uncle will buy an animal such as goat or sheep instead.

This initiation is to tell the boy or the girl that he/she is a grown man or woman and can now get married without a problem. So during this ceremony the boy has to struggle with other young men of his age to really show that he can enter into adulthood. This shows his endurance and strength to face the future. Things are a little different for the girls, as they have to walk nude in the eyes of everybody without shame to show that they are mature and ready for life.

Five years later the young man goes through another traditional initiation, which is called Kondona. From this initiation, everybody in the community will start looking at him as a man of experience. They will start counting his age after each five years, which is called a Waaa. So after every five years they count another Waaa. After living long enough to have counted 10 Waaas, the man now is reached the age of 75 years old, which is called a Wassi.

When the man succeeds in living till that age, then family and friends will dance during his funeral. This funeral will be a festival and the family organizes the festival. All the children and descendants will participate for the success of the ceremony, which is the honor of the family and the dead. During the ceremony they have a ritual in which the spirit of the late will be taken into the house. They will build an idol in his name. He becomes an ancestor who can protect and defend the living family, his descendants, that he left back. In future years when honoring the deceased they will sacrifice animals and add a new idol.

If the deceased attained 75 years of age, but did not bear children then they would not dance at his funeral because the tradition considers the person as a child still. They will just bury him and finish. It is the same for young people who die before the age of 75. During their funerals, people are not allowed to dance because the person is still a child in the traditional context.

These funerals, in Kabiyè culture, take place in the month of February. Funerals have at least three objectives. 1.) They celebrate funerals to bring the soul of the deceased back to his house. 2.) They want to keep the person as an ancestor in the family and never forget him. 3.) They would like to honor the person. This honor is to mark the humanity of the person. Funerals for humans let them be seen as different from animals. At the same time this honor goes to the family too. It raises the name of the family. If a person dies and the members of his family don’t celebrate his funerals, it is an insult to him and his family. For that reason some go into debt in order to avoid dishonoring the dead.

“Sir, someone just crashed into your truck”.

Posted on February 14, 2013 by Jonathan Huff

I hesitate to travel in Togo more than necessary. Our capital is six hours away, the roads are pretty rough getting down there and run-ins with the police occur more often than one would like. That being said, I had several things that I needed to do/buy in Lomé, so I decided to make the trip down there Monday.

Hardly any stores have special parking for their customers, as most vehicles just park parallel to the street in front of the stores where they are shopping. Thankfully, lots of people use moto taxis so a parking spot is usually not very hard to find. I parked in front of a hardware store where I would do some shopping once the store re-opened after the mid-day break that most all stores take here in Togo. While waiting for that store to open up, a friend of mine told me that the hardware store across the street was open, so we went over there to shop and were just about done when a guy came in telling me the last thing that I wanted to hear, “a motorcycle just crashed into your truck!”

Things could have been worse. At least no one was hurt, the guy did not flee the scene, etc. These are the things that you tell yourself in order to keep a good attitude. The guy said that he had to swerve to avoid hitting someone and therefore smashed into the front left panel of our truck. His three-wheeled moto also gashed the tire and ripped the side of our brand new bumper loose.

The guy wanted to me to change the tire and then go to a local garage to see about fixing the rest of the damage. The only problem is that as soon as you leave the scene of the accident, there is absolutely no way to make sure the guilty party takes responsibility for the repairs. Even though it took almost an hour for the police to show up, they eventually did, and thankfully they did not blame me for the accident!

We spent several hours that afternoon between the accident scene, the police station and then the insurance company, but things seem to be going well. Before leaving the police station, the police did remind me as he was standing in the exit I will have to go down to Lomé again once all the police paperwork is done, and the insurance company tells me that the full cost of the repairs will be covered. The funny thing is, this is the second time that a three-wheeled moto has smashed into me and done serious damage.

We pray for safety out here a lot, especially traveling on these crazy roads, and we would appreciate your prayers for our safety too and for the well being of our poor truck that these three-wheeled motos would leave her alone.

Wow! One more story about God’s provision.

Posted on February 6, 2013 by Jonathan Huff

Seeing that we started this blog near the end of our furlough, I wanted to take a few blog posts to mention some of the highlights from our time back in the States.

Shortly after returning to the States we were at one of our amazing supporting churches in Keystone Heights, FL for a Sunday morning service. This is a church that I first visited when working at the Trinity Youth Camp almost thirteen years ago. The people have always been so sweet to us, and the pastor and his wife are some of the most encouraging people God ever put on the earth.

The children of the church had just finished their VBS the week before we arrived, and they were singing that morning in the service. Those cute little kids had adopted us as their missionary of the week for VBS and wanted to present us a check of $500 for the ministry in Togo! When the pastor handed me that very generous check from the kids, he also gave me a church love offering. It was another $500!

The people listened attentively as I spoke about the many ways that the Lord is working in Togo, specifically our first village church plant where many have turned from practicing voodoo to the One and True God. They were so easy to preach to as I explained to them about the necessity of taking the gospel to those that have never heard before.

When I finished, we went to the lobby and waited to greet the members as they left. Before ending the service, the pastor encouraged his people to contribute personally that morning to the ministry in Togo and contribute they did. So many kind people would come by with $20 handshakes that it makes you feel embarrassed to be on the receiving end of so much generosity. One couple gave me a check that I quietly put into my pocket and thanked them for their kindness. When I looked at the check later I was amazed; it was for $1000! Wow!

When we were packing up our stuff to leave, a man in the church said that he wanted to go to his house to get me something before I leave. I told him no problem, we had lunch plans with the pastor, but we had enough time to wait around for him to go home and come back. Well, we were out in the parking lot, with the kids buckled up in our van and the AC on when he returned with his wife.

It was at this point that he handed me a wad of cash that looked like his life’s savings. I was more than hesitant to take such a large sum of cash, knowing that sometimes people can decide to do something in the spur of the moment that they might question later. He told me to take it and assured me that he believed whole-heartedly that this is what the Lord wanted him to do. That one generous couple gave $8,400 for the ministry in Togo! Wow! How amazing is our great God?

THE HUFFS IN TOGO