Welcome to Cote d'Ivoire!

Je suis ici!!! We arrived in Cote d'Ivoire on Monday evening, around 6 pm (we are 4 hours ahead of Virginia, so 5 ahead of Oklahoma). Since our leaders, Craig and Brynn and their two children Keenan (2) and Elliot (3 months) are moving here for the next few years we had a lot of bags to find and get to our housing. We found them all though and got here safe! We are staying at what used to be housing for a mission organization, but they all left 8 years ago due to civil unrest if I understood correctly. Either way, it's nice! We can't drink the water and we all learned how to light the heating system if we need hot water to wash dishes or take a shower, but its good! It's an adventure that's for sure. We've had quite a bit of rain, so we haven't gotten to go out a ton. We are learning to live on Africa time! Things move at a different pace here, so we never know our schedule very far in advance. The past two days we have been doing cultural training and learning how to share the gospel and our testimonies. We've also had time bonding as a team which has been really wonderful. There are 12 of us, 7 girls and 5 guys. I am so excited to get to serve alongside these people for the next 6 weeks. It really seems like we've known each other for so much more than 6 days. We got to go to a high school today to teach English to students because they have an oral english exam coming up to get in to university. We got a chance to learn more about their culture and also got to talk to them about Jesus through it too which was great! After that we got to meet the national Campus Crusade for Christ staff for Cote d'Ivoire. It has been 10 years since they have had any student helpers here, so they are very excited for this summer as well. We get to go to the university for the first time tomorrow. It is called Cocodi (not sure of spelling) and has 60,000 students. We will be going to the university Monday through Thursday to build relationships with the students and share the gospel with them through that, and then on Fridays we will be doing outreach to orphanages, prisons, and wherever else the Lord directs us. We will be taking students from the university with us on Fridays to continue to build those relationships and show them the love of Christ in action. Please continue to pray for us! I will write again as soon as I get the chance! Much love to all of you!!!

~ Lauren