We finished the youth conference Thursday around lunch, and it was time to say our good-byes to wonderful new friends and make our way with Phillip and his assistant, Maryam, back to the capital city. Before leaving, one of Phillip’s friends picked us up at the hotel and drove us downtown for lunch. This man and another man we ate lunch with are medical doctors and board members of the mission agency. One of our reasons for traveling here this summer is that they’ve asked David to be the sole non-North African member of their agencies’ board. This is a great honor, and one of the reasons the trip has…

Names have been changed. John and Iman are newly engaged, and their affection for one another makes everyone around them smile. In North Africa, when you become engaged, you exchange wedding band-style rings, and wear them on the ring finger of your right hand. At the wedding ceremony, the rings are moved to the left hand. John is an engineer and Iman is a veterinarian, and they volunteer with the branch of this missions agency in the city where the youth conference is being held. Iman owns her own vet clinic outside of the city, and treats both small and large animals. She has sparkling eyes, bubbling-up energy, and her…

Our church back home partners with a national missions training and sending agency, whose vision is to raise up, train, and send missionaries from their country all over North Africa. And they are doing it! The movement of the Holy Spirit in this group of people is palpable. The conference we attended was the first youth missions conference the missions agency put on. It’s in a university town, and about 100 people gathered in the hotel for three days. A student summed up the message of the conference so well when he said, “When I thought of the word ‘missionary,’ I always thought of foreign people moving to our country…

David and I were picked up at the airport Tuesday afternoon by a driver who recognized us through a phone picture. He loaded up our bags in his little sedan and drove us 30 minutes across the city to our friends’ apartment. What is it like here, besides dusty? It’s brown. High rise brown stone apartments stretch as far as the eye can see, lines of laundry stretched across balconies dancing in the hot wind. But the brown is punctuated here and there by green trees, ablaze with blossoms so bright they almost hurt your eyes: frangipani, poinciana, bougainvillea and palm trees. Tropical plants are my favorite because of my…