Stories from the Field

April 2005

Left Behind

By an IMB missionary couple in West Africa

War forced the doctors, the pharmacists and the missionaries to flee, but the Toura people — our people — had no where to run. They remained in their mud huts in the rainforests of Cote d’Ivoire while the country crumbled around them. For two years, fighting has come and gone and come again in Cote d’Ivoire, causing senseless death. Political tensions remain high. Violence could come again at any moment. And there live our Toura friends to whom we gave four years of our lives, farming the mountainsides with rice, trying to sell their coffee and their cocoa for ridiculously low prices, just trying to get by. Our hearts are broken that we cannot return to them. But they are not left without a witness! There are a handful of believers among them. Please pray that God would use this fiery ordeal to refine and multiply His church. Pray that the Toura would become dissatisfied with animal sacrifices to spirits and would see the foolishness of fetishes. Pray that the war in Cote d'Ivoire would cause Toura men and women to seek the truth about spiritual things.