Numbers or Letters?

We sat outside a small hut, on a mat the size of a modest area rug. We were at the home of Andire Demande, a dear friend of the Vanderkoois. Andire was blinded as a child from an epidemic that killed a majority of his generation at the time. His wife, newborn baby, and oldest daughter, Diane, sat with us as we asked about how planting the fields was going, how their baby was doing after a recent respiratory infection, and other village updates. Andire did most of the talking, and sometimes his wife would chime in, but Diane mostly just sat there quietly, scratching out pictures in the sand. The conversation eventually died down, and Diane Vanderkooi (it gets confusing, sorry) took the opportunity to talk to Andire's daughter. She was 11 years old and had not had the chance to go to school, since she leads her father around so he can plant his fields. She was still scratching the sand with a stick drawing shapes and different pictures, when Diane Vanderkooi asked her if she knew how to write her name. She looked down sheepishly and responded that she did not - she had never seen her name written. She didn't know what it looked like. Diane Vanderkooi took her finger, and began drawing the shapes of the letters in the sand, sounding out the letters and explaining how to draw them each. The girl just giggled - what funny looking pictures! Diane prompted her to try, and after quite a bit of encouragement, she timidly carved out the letters, each one under the one Diane wrote, studying them intently. I wished that somehow that moment could be etched in my mind, forever with me as I see a girl marvel at the name she has been given, seeing it for the first time in the warm sand of central Africa. 

I am frequently asked what I did while I was in Chad. What the Vanderkoois do in Chad. What we accomplished while I was there. Often it seems that as well-meaning of a question it is, I am supposed to come back with numbers - how many people were treated at the clinic, how many people heard the message of Jesus, how many people accepted Christ. All these are good things, and I can supply you with those from the ministry that God is doing through Mark and Diane Vanderkooi in Tchaguine. 

But... 

I think sometimes it is good to look back and remember the letters. The brief moment when a girl who lives in a culture that would deem her insignificant, was invested in, even in such a small way as showing her how to write her name. The times outside the Vanderkoois' house where the kids would teach me words out of the Kwong Bible stories. The countless times when small, sandy hands poked at each letter of the alphabet, then at the picture beneath it that started with that letter. The reading classes with the women after church, where we would struggle together, letter by letter, to read God's word in Kwong. The times I sought to decipher the words on the clinic "carne" (a small booklet of the individual's medical records) of an ill friend, not being able to make sense of the medicines all written in French. None of these instances count as something that was on my "to-do list" in Chad, and I don't have any numbers to bring back to you besides maybe the number of games of Uno I lost to kids half my age. No, I can't show you much in the way of numbers, but it's all the letters that make up the story of my time there and how God continued to write my story in the context of a beautiful culture.