If you’ve followed along with our journey then you know that we have a heart for our neighborhood and long to connect with our neighbors, but have found this more difficult than we expected. Culturally it’s been hard to figure out how to connect, especially on a deeper level than brief conversations on the street.
This has been a huge prayer point since we moved here. Fast forward to last weekend when our neighbors had a party. Parties here go all day and late into the night and involve a big tent in the road, load music, drums and plenty of dancing. At one point the dancing was in the road right outside our house (see the video below) so we watched from the porch for a bit.
Some partygoers got a kick out of our kids dancing on the porch and it apparently drew the particular attention of some kids who were at the party. Funny enough this was actually our first security breach as Mia had been the last one in once we were done watching the dancing and I (Selina) had forgotten to double check that she had bolted the door securely. She had not. So you can imagine my surprise when, at 7:30pm, after one ring of the doorbell six or seven young girls in fancy dresses walked right into the house wondering if our daughter could come out to play with them! At this point our kids were already in bed so I told them to come back the next day. In all reality we didn’t think they actually would return, especially because we weren’t sure if they were from the neighborhood or had travelled to the area just for the party.
The next morning was a Sunday and we ended up staying home from church after Adam had had some really strange heartburn through the night and wasn’t feeling well (side note: he’s totally fine now!). Around 10am (a time we would have normally been at church) our doorbell rang and a little nine year old girl (we’ll call her G) from the neighborhood asked if she could play. At first I just had Mia and Des play on the porch with her, but eventually asked if she wanted to come play inside. She ended up spending five hours with us that day!
G came back the next day as well and even brought a friend at one point. We ended up being so grateful for those two days with her, especially after finding out that she was leaving for a month for a trip to a village outside of Dakar. We pray she comes back to visit when she returns!
We thought at that point that perhaps that would be the end of our visitors for awhile since G was clearly the most comfortable about coming in and hanging out with us, but apparently word got around and later in the week two more young girls stopped by asking to come play and one even brought her two year old brother! It has been so sweet to see our kids playing with these Senegalese children as this is something we have longed and prayed for, but have struggled to establish. We are prayerful that these friends will continue to come back to play, that our kids can build relationships with them and that we can also get to know their families.
Three things of note:
- These opportunities have been plausible mainly on account of us homeschooling. We have the availability and the flexibility to grow these relationships, especially since we know our time with these kids will be more limited once October comes and their school starts back up. We had prayed that homeschooling would allow greater opportunities for ministry as a family and already God is answering this prayer in cool ways!
- Mia in particular has been very anxious about interacting with kids who don’t know any English. We think some of this anxiety may be connected to the year she spent in French school when she was unable to communicate at all. Even at our church she gets quite nervous to be around the Senegalese kids and has no desire to go to Sunday school since it’s either in French or Wolof. By God’s grace, and again in response to lots of prayer, she has had no hesitation at all being around these kids even though they only speak Wolof and a little bit of French.
- I was talking with a friend from Ghana who noted that the way these neighborhood kids (even the two year old) are comfortable being out and about and in our home is largely connected to the culture. In this we are so grateful to have found a way to open up our home to neighbors even though it is not something we would have thought up on our own!
Please pray with us over these relationships. For wisdom when interacting with the kids, opportunities to share the gospel and also for connections with their parents. This last point is a particularly interesting one as we’ve had four different kids over and have only met one parent so far, G’s mom. She was super nice, but only spoke Wolof so communicating was basically impossible past initial greetings. At least we gathered that she didn’t mind G being at our house, but we would love prayers on how to navigate this wisely.
-Selina