CBH Team Travels to Cote d'Ivoire

Saturday, February 6

We flew for two days straight and by the end of the journey I think I was pretty much done with this trip. My hair was greasy, my skin was greasy, the food I ate on the plane was greasy - everything just felt gross. We had some hiccups along the way too. Some ticketing issues, checking in several times in several different cities, and some people in the group had to take some different flight itineraries on their way here. Sometimes when you embark on an adventure like this things can go wrong. Sometimes when you embark on an adventure like this things can all go right. But either way, we thank God for providing for us. As it all turned out, we all made it here to Cote d’Ivoire safely together. So we left on Thursday morning, arrived on Friday night, and slept the night in a nice little house in Abidjan, the capital city into which we flew.

The skyline of Abidjan by night. The city has a striking skyline by night and a lush, green tropical feel by day. We’ll be heading back there later this week, so you can look forward to more details on Abidjan a little later in the blog. I want to focus more on our actual activities today during this entry.

After staying the night Friday night in Abidjan with two of our missionary hosts, Larry Sellers and Sherman Critser, we woke up to a perfect breakfast of fresh tropical fruit, various juices, and traditional French pastries. Cote d’Ivoire was previously a French colony, so much of the food and language have melded with the original culture here. There are actually 22 French speaking countries in West Africa which is one of the reasons we based our CBH-French broadcast here. Our studio is actually located not in the capital city of Abidjan, but in another large city in Cote d’Ivoire to the west of Abidjan called Yamoussoukro. So we elected to drive to Yamoussoukro today where we will be staying during much of the journey.

Frequence Vie sign outside their broadcasting center. On our way out of town though, we decided to visit the main radio station on which CBH is broadcast. It’s called Frequence Vie (which literally means the Life Frequency), a Christian radio station which broadcasts the word of Hope of CBH-French over the whole country of Cote d’Ivoire through regional FM stations. We just began airing these programs in July in 15 minute segments, The radio tower which provides CBH-French to all of Abidjan. but already just early this year we were asked to begin producing 30 minute segments - doubling our airtime. Considering the responses we’ve already been receiving from the 15 minute segments, we are very excited about greater opportunity to reach the lost in this important area of the world! So we stopped by to tour the studio and were then on our way to Yamoussoukro.

CBH-French speaker Daniel N'Goran and sound technician Issa Kouenaon working with team member Lynn Maxedon in the studio (before the work we'll do this week). Once we met up with the rest of our missionary hosts (Larry’s and Sherman’s wives: LeAnne and Kay, respectively), we went to the church in Yamoussoukro where many of our ministry opportunities will take place on this trip. There we met up with CBH-French speaker Daniel NGoran and our sound engineer Issa. It’s always great to catch up with them and I’m very excited to be working with them this next week.

So basically, you can see that though the traveling part of the journey can be a bit of a hassle, once we got going the trip got exciting fast! Please continue praying for us and we’ll keep giving updates along the way. I’ll being highlighting the work were doing here too beginning with the next post.

Thanks for following along, I’ll be in touch.

-Andrew Lyon
Christians Broadcasting Hope

View Additional Blog Entries:

Sunday, February 7, 2010

Monday, February 8, 2010

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Friday, February 12, 2010