Mamadu

 

Mamadu is our faithful worker.  He comes on Monday morning and stays with us until Friday afternoon, when he goes home.   His village is about a mile away.

He is the son of Daxaa, who was the guardian in the village for us and other missionaries in the past.  We have known the family for a long time.  We don’t know his exact age, but we know that he is in his upper 20’s.  

When we lived in the village our first term Mamadu was away at school and we didn’t really know him well.  It wasn’t until his father became seriously ill that he dropped out of school to help take care of him and meet other responsibilities that came up because his father was no longer able to.  When his father died in 2011 he came and asked us if we could help him find a job.  This was just before we left on furlough. 

We loaned him some money so he could open a small boutique (selling rice, coffee, sugar, etc.) and then went home in December.  When we came back we found him still at the boutique but he was just barely making ends meet and not really enjoying it either.  So we talked about giving up the boutique and having him come work for us at our new place.  He readily accepted and has been working for us since June. 

He has done a little bit of everything including guarding the place while we are gone, helping with the building of the house and kitchen, digging the well, as well as field & and garden work.  In this picture he is hauling grass that he cut for roofing the huts and making an awning in front of the kitchen.

He is fixing to get married soon as he has fathered a child in the village (the “normal” Jalunga way of deciding who to marry – you marry the mother of your first child), but none of these things are sure, so we’ll see what happens.

He asked me to begin teaching him so we usually study a couple times a week.  He is a good reader (not someone easily found in these parts) and is reading the books of the Bible that our coworker Penny has translated (even rarer).  For instance, one day when I was giving a somewhat abbreviated account of Moses and the burning bush and mentioned that “God gave him signs that he could preform so that people would believe that he was sent by God.”  Mamadu added, “like putting his hand in his coat and it comes out leprous and how he could throw his staff down and it becomes a snake”.  Exactly.  J  Gotta love a good translation – thanks Penny.