Testers

Each Story must be "tested" a minimum of two times.  This involves going to a Sunny house and getting a group to sit down and listen to the Story, retell it, and answer a bunch of questions that we have about it.  The questions are to ensure that the story has been appropriately contextualized while maintaining absolute Scriptural integrity (not comprehension questions).  Finding willing testers has proven to be fairly difficult since we live in the capital where there is a lower concentration of Sunny people.  And the families seem to be busier here in the city than in the village, which makes it tricky to try to get people to give you a couple hours of their day.  We did locate some women who were willing to be testing groups...it ended up that the main women who did this for us were straight from our village and in the city for medical reasons.  They'd been here for months and months and we were excited that not only would they be hearing the Stories, but that they would be returning to our home village where they could possibly and hopefully re-tell the Stories.  Well, after a short time, both of these women ended up moving back to the village, leaving us virtually tester-less.

In the meantime, some colleagues met a Sunny woman who told them that she'd had a dream that white people were coming to tell her about Jesus!  So we began testing our Stories with her.  She seemed really hungry for the Word.  And she helped us a lot.  And then we found out that she's going to be visiting another country for a few months.  We are trying to do as much with her as we can (for her and for us), but she's extremely busy and it's been difficult to be able to spend as much time with her as is needed.

So our biggest need right now is to find testing groups.  To give you a point of reference, we have more testing sessions that need to happen than we have days left in Mali.  We've been brainstorming ways to get all of these testing sessions done and it looks like we may be heading out to a village or two.  We really need to be able to do multiple testing sessions a day and the only way we can really do this is by going to a Sunny village.  So please be praying for that!