Video: The Ministry in Cameroon is GROWING

Transcript

Missionary Jon Cassel – Most all of you know that I am serving as a missionary in Africa for well over 20 years now. I continue my agricultural work with the Baka peoples here in the rainforest in the east of Cameroon. One of the prime focuses is to introduce a wide variety of tropical fruits with species that grow all on their own with minimal care.

Growing up on a fruit and vegetable farm, in southeast Pennsylvania, I remember pop taking scrupulous care of our fruit trees — pruning, spraying, thinning, weeding, and pest control, and ecetera. Here with the Baka peoples, chemicals are out for any number of reasons, and care must be of a simple nature. The goal is to establish trees that are essentially carefree. It is a learning experience for me as well.

One of our easiest trees to grow is a jackfruit, which bears the world’s largest fruit. A single jackfruit can weigh over 60 pounds. Here’s our pastor Nestor and Gula with a grown tree in our mature orchard. What you see here on the tree can grow to twice that size. The flesh is yellow, very sweet, and delicious.

I work closely on a daily basis with our farm manager, Teo. Here he has a rollinia. When ripe, it is soft and can be torn open with the hands, and the white flesh is sweet and delicious. Gwen cannot get enough of rollinia.

One of my favorites is the surname cherry. This smaller tree can, under ideal conditions, bear cherries nearly year-round. At least three or four yields annually. The cherries grow to full sizes, green, then turn yellow, orange, red, and then a bing cherry purple, and then they’re ready to eat. And boy, are they good!

We have a nursery where we start a large variety of new trees. Here is Pastor Nestor in our nursery. Behind him you will see a swamp with some felled trees that we cut down. We have started swamp palms in the open swamp. These wet-rooted palms produce huge quantities of palm nuts that can be pressed for cooking oil and other uses. They far outproduce dry land palms.

In addition to our fruits and vegetables with our ever-growing orchards, we must have plenty of bees for pollination. We have several hives on the mission property that Nestor and Teo care for. We have an expert in the provincial capital, Bertoua, that helps us. We have him coming in mid-January to offer a beekeeping course to our Mayo’s villagers.

We are also looking for good sources of income for our Baka peoples. There are two agricultural projects in our area that are run by Christians. One specializes in pineapple production, the other in black and white pepper production. There is a good market for pepper, and there is a low risk of it being stolen at harvest time. I’m sorry to say that theft in our and anyone’s fields with orchards is an ongoing problem here. We are looking into getting, into producing pineapples and pepper.

Pepper is an interesting subject for me. It grows on vines that grow on host trees, a variation of the cocoa tree, which also grows in our rainforest. To keep the pepper at heights easily reached with at most a short ladder, one keeps cutting off the host tree at about three meters, and that doesn’t kill it. The pepper vines and the trees have a symbiotic relationship.

Black pepper is harvested green, as you see it here. White pepper is simply left on the vine to ripen to a deep red, and then it is harvested. When that is milled, it is white.

I could go on with our agriculture, but there’s so much more to tell you with other areas of interest. We have a World Team missionary camp in the tiny village of Co, about three miles from the village of Mayos, where we work. However, I’ve been alone here since I arrived back in Cameroon last month. The Coleman couple and Ashley are in Yaoundé for an extended period, but I have no trouble being alone here in the rainforest.

Pastor Nestor has a small church of Baka believers in the village. I work primarily with the men in their 30-acre or so training center, which focuses on agriculture. We have a small bamboo church, and this past week we’ve worked on the roof so we would have it ready for Christmas. We have a lot of children in the church. Our average attendance is 35 or so.

Of course, the primary reason that I, and we are here is to lead people to Christ. It is my pleasure to work with Pastor Nestor and other missionaries that are called to Bible translation, literacy, evangelism, church planting, and more, in order to advance the kingdom here in Africa. We are all soldiers in the army of Christ.

You may be interested to see how logs are sawn here in the rainforest. Probably most chainsaws are owned by logging companies and, unsurprisingly, are used during daylight hours on weekdays. Crew chiefs take their saws home with them, and then on the side, they rent them out overnight and weekends for some pocket money.

It is not unusual at all to hear chainsawing in the forest all night, right up until dawn when the saws have to go back to the crew chiefs for the “legitimate” use. Here we see one man at work at dawn, not 500 feet from my home. He’d been cutting all night with an oil lamp. How he can handle that chainsaw to cut these planks nearly perfectly straight and even, is beyond me.

I am also involved with many other ministry projects here, including wells. One of the Baka missionaries lives in the tiny village of Bitsuman. She has a well by her house that is not deep. There is another well in the village that no longer works. Consequently, everybody comes and gets water from her well, and by the end of the day during the dry season, the water is gone. Imagine living without water, let alone running water.

With my well experience and my days previously here in Africa, I decided to take on this project. I work with a Cameroonian brother in the Lord who knows wells. I took him with me to Bitsuman to evaluate the situation. We had tools, and he pulled up the innards out of the non-working well. After pulling out the works, and cleaning the pump and plunger, making the necessary repairs, reassembling everything, and replacing it — success! Fresh, pure well water.

As you can see in the picture above, the children in the village were greatly interested in the work that the big white “baturate” — that’s Baka for a white man — that was working there. There was one tiny little boy named Appa that had always a huge smile on his face, and he hung around us while we worked.

Appa is horribly crippled. Look how his right foot is completely turned on itself. He has, however, adapted to his handicap, and you should see him scoop right along at nearly walking speed with his arms and good leg, working together to get him along. Unfortunately, this is in a cloud of dust.

I am familiar with club foot repair, but this is more than club foot. I want to see what can be done for little Appa. You may guess if good medical facilities are available in the area, but I will do my due diligence to see if somewhere bones cannot be broken and, over time, with casts, the situation can be corrected to any extent. You may pray for Appa to this end.