Thank you once more for your support and prayers. For more regular details make sure you get my email updates, or go to my blog. There are many subjects for prayer and praise:

Life in Burkina Faso

Family Life. Home life has been great since Pierre, Asetu and family joined Seydou, Monique and me. Everyone is doing well, and the yard is always full of fun and visitors. Pierre is busy with evangelism, and runs the weekly Fulani cell group in our yard.

The cost of living. We are all affected by the price rises caused by the world food crisis. In Burkina Faso, as in other poor countries, this is making food too expensive for many people. Seydou says rice in Gorom-Gorom is 40% more expensive than normal. In Ouagadougou there have been demonstrations and a two-day strike. Pray for peace, provision, and for justice for the poor.

Team. Pascal, Pierre, Michel, and the other pastors are doing well, and continue to do a great work. Give thanks for the increasing unity between denominations and commitment to reach out in the whole region.

Fulani. The Fulani Christians are doing well, and meet every Thurs for a Fulani inter-church cell group, while getting more involved in their own churches. “A”, a new Fulani believer, who used to do the call to prayer at a local mosque, gathers other believers for a 5am prayer meeting each day! “Y”, who used to be a Muslim religious teacher, has been starting to preach publicly. We are finding increasing interest in the gospel – in one village we went to, people refused to go home after two hours of preaching, and kept asking to know more. Please keep praying for the Fulani.

Songhai. We feel God leading us into a new area of work, reaching out to villages of the Songhai people. A cell group has started in one village, and a pastor is getting ready to move into another. A church in the US is interested in partnering with us in this exciting new venture. Please pray for these new openings.

Ongoing Developments

School. Plans are progressing for building a Christian primary school in Gorom-Gorom. We have bought the land, and are discussing designs etc. Our plan is to open the first class in temporary accommodation this October, and have the first phase of the school built by Oct 2009. Burkina Faso has the lowest adult literacy rate of any recorded nation, and this is a tremendous opportunity to bring God's transforming grace at every level – social, educational, and spiritual – to those often left behind. If you want to support the school, see HERE.
I will continue to keep you informed, but if you want to know more, go HERE.

Water of Life. Following our initial exploratory trip, we now plan to drill 6 boreholes, and repair a further 5 pumps in the region in the month of November. We will put the pumps in villages with great need for water, where local pastors already have ongoing relationships. We will work with the Friends in Action well-drilling team, and plan to take teams out to help with the drilling. Each well will cost about £3,000. If you'd like to help, please send money to the SALT Trust at the address HERE, stating it is for well-drilling.

Church Partnerships. I am helping start partnerships between churches in Burkina Faso and others in the west. Such partnerships are partly to resource the Burkina churches in their mission to bring God’s love to their communities. But they are also partly to explore what God might want to say to the western church through the church in Africa. They are two-way partnerships, where we serve each other and wash each other’s feet. I am setting up a charity, called the Acacia Partnership Trust, to help facilitate these partnerships and all the work I am doing in Burkina Faso.

Other News

USA. I am going to the US from 5 May-11 June. I will be visiting churches in 6 different states to share about the work in Burkina Faso, and the bring the vision of church partnerships. Details of my itinerary are HERE.

Admin Help Needed. As you'll see, there is a lot going on, and I really need a bilingual administrative assistant to help me out with a lot of the admin on this. Please pray for the right person to join me.

Thank you again for all your support and prayers in all these areas.

Keith