Hudson Taylor, famed missionary to China said, “There are three indispensable requirements for a missionary: 1. Patience 2. Patience 3. Patience.” The long-term results of mission efforts should be celebrated. For over 40 years, FEC has been planting churches in West Africa. Over time, that labor has resulted in helping to establish the Evangelical Mennonite Church (EMC) of Burkina Faso and, recently, a partnership with them to plant churches among the Yalunka.

For 10 years, FEC missionaries Steve and Pat Nelson worked in West Africa, reaching out to the Yalunka people of Mali. The Yalunka comprise a group of 214, 500 people living in four countries: Guinea, Sierra Leone, Senegal, and Mali (Peoplegroups.org). Because of the mountainous terrain and distance between villages, groups of Yalunka speak different dialects. When the Nelsons connected the believers in the southwest villages of Mali with church leaders in Burkina Faso, they discovered that the two groups shared a trade language. The trade language allows communication in a way that would not otherwise have been easy or even possible. 

The church leaders in Burkina Faso are now leading the outreach to the Yalunka people in Mali, and they have sent a pastor to plant new churches in the region, Yaya Bengali, and his wife, Medina. About the mission effort, Siaka Traore`, a long-time leader in the Burkina Faso EMC, said, “35 years ago we were the Yalunka.”