Sewards' Online Snapshots: Leaving Kadiolo

Saying goodbye to one of our former english students from Kadiolo who is now in university at Bamako.

We arrived in Bamako a bit early before our departure to spend a few days meeting with a Christian media mission who is interested in helping produce film in West Africa. They are already very involved in Kenya, Rwanda, and some other countries in East Africa. The drama team came up with pastor youssouf to discuss a possible partnership. Great scriptwriters/actors working on radio theatres, the next step would be putting some of that great work on film, right?
We met and discussed what a partnership would look like. It looks very positive.
Good News, (The media mission) wants us to make a local commitee of church leaders to oversee whatever film media work is to be done. Then Good News relies on the local church to review content, and manage the finances that would be coming in to produce films.

So in all these meetings Tom had to translate. Our Good News friends had almost no french, our drama team friends have almost no english. Lisa worked hard to keep everyone fed. So between the two of us, we really put our everything into these meetings for 3 days.

Hopefully this future partnership can bear fruit. We'd love to see some of the drama teams' best work be recorded on DVD. Dvd's can't really be sold in Mali due to piracy, so we're not expecting a big income from this work. But we're counting on pirates spreading the gospel via these dvd's all over west africa. Our dream is to get on a bus, and have one of our dramas playing on the tv monitor.

Trying to translate thought for thought not

word for word on the fly is exhausting work.

The drama team came ready to discuss

and explore possibilities of a partnership.

In Bamako we were also able to celebrate Caleb's 10th Birthday. Our friends opened their home and pool, and the kids had a blast. It barely seems like 10 years ago he was born in the Ivory Coast. Congrats Caleb!

Caleb 10 years old and counting.