Also, I am establishing for the first time a contact with Christian stations in the two French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe in the West Indies. May the Lord allow a long term collaboration to take place after samples of RFL programs have been sent there (there is also a Christian station in Cayenne, French Guyana; I haven't yet been able to establish a contact with it.)
In Christ, Rev. Eric Kayayan
Letters from Mali
Dear Rev. Kayayan,
It has been a long time since I last wrote to you. Between then and now, many many things happened, but I cannot mention all of them just now. My wife and one of my daughters were seriously taken ill, but thanks to the Lord they eventually recovered.
Some good things also did happen. Thus I was able to have our new church building finished.
Our new radio station called KANUYAH FM SOLLO (Kanu=love, Yah=yaweh), broadcasts your sermons for two hours a day. Reception is perfect in hundreds of villages and at least 99 percent of all the people who own radio sets in those villages listen to our programs. People are so receptive to your sermons that we most certainly need all the new ones that you will produce or already have. Our church is growing and more and more people are openly telling us that they plan to join the Christian community.
Please give my regards to your wife and your secretary.
With love in Christ, M'Bimba Dembélé
Dear Kayayan,
I am going to explain how my family and I became Christians, and how the Lord helped us start an evangelical project in our village, Sollo.
Like my wife, I was born into a family of Moslems and animists. This is the pattern for most families in Mali, as Islam is always mixed with traditional beliefs. However, I have never had any religion before embracing Christianity.
In 2003, Mylennie and Werner van Straaten invited their friend, Pastor Wynand de Wet, to come on a visit to Mali. Werner was then Eskom's Technical Manager in Mali and I worked as the translator for the same company. He was my boss and we were friends. When Pastor Wynand arrived, Werner and Mylennie explained to me that they were making arrangements for a two-week outreach with the pastor, and asked me if I could interpret for the audience. I agreed and what I learned about Christ by dint of interpreting was enough to make me ask the pastor to baptize me. On Sunday 16, February 2003, Pastor Wynand baptized me at the South African Expatriates Church at Manantali, in Mali. Not long after that, I decided to study Theology and asked Werner to find me a university in his country where I could do so. Not only did Werner and Mylennie find one for me, namely Pretoria University, but they also paid for my studies. They helped me enroll immediately and I started a correspondence course.
After the Straaten's return to South Africa, a difficult situation presented itself in my village. A few American missionaries had left a Christian radio station for the villagers themselves to take good care of, but the equipment was too old and the building, a mud house, was dilapidated; the church nearby, the only one for the village and its closest neighborhood, was a thatched little hut in even a worse state.
The villagers, nearly 100 percent of whom were unemployed and lived in abject poverty as they still do, could not even properly feed themselves and their families. As you can imagine, the radio station had to close down and the church building to be abandoned. Services had eventually to be held in the open air, weather permitting.
It was then that the elders of the village held a meeting on 27 November 2005 and asked for my help. I sent for an engineer and paid for the repair to the radio. The station resumed broadcasting and I was appointed its Manager. However, everyone knew that it would not be on the air for long unless we had new equipment and a better structure to house it.
Again everyone looked to me for help, but the challenge was too big for me alone: I had a very good job by Malian standard, the same that I still have, but then I was the only one with some income and I had to help as many as I could among the people who were all less fortunate. I had also to support my own family. As a result, I could not afford the much needed new equipment and new building. At the same time, I did not want the Christian broadcast to be stopped forever. Something had to be done.
I thought of asking for assistance from Werner and Mylennie. As soon as I contacted them, they started raising funds and the building of the radio station began. It was at this stage that I took Addie and Cees van der Sluijs to the building site at Sollo during one of their visits to Mali.
Addie and Cees joined the South-African couple in co-financing the radio station and later the church. The said radio and church have positive influence on people's faith and everyday lives now. Nevertheless, no matter how effective they are in spreading the Word, they are not enough for us to reach our goal, which is to change our community into an entirely Christian one; if we have a school in addition to these two, we can effect that change irreversibly.
Early last December, Addie and Cees again made a trip to the building site at Sollo and were so impressed by the results that we had achieved that they readily granted our request for funds to build a Bible school.
M'Bimba Dembélé
