We do production for the 2009 National Congress for North African Christians in France.
Two days after getting back from a speaking trip to Canada, Marjorie and I left to direct a CNA production team in Vichy, France for the 2009 edition of the National Congress of North African Christians. In French this is the Rencontre Nationale des Chrétiens Nord-Africains, or, as we referred to is, RN09. Although we struggled with jet lag and some fatigue, we were looking forward to being a part of this years congress and had some good memories of the 2007 congress.
In fact, the 2007 congress marked the beginning of a great involvement on our part with CNA, and some of the products of that weekend were some testimonies that have touched 1000's of people, some good friendships with North Africans living in France, and a DVD, MP3 CD and subsequent program that we hope will someday be aired on CNA.
The one sad note for us was that Jon & Sharon Thiessen, good friends (and fellow mennonites!), who had participated with us in 2007, were no longer on the field. But happily, our good friend Greg Davis from Proclaim! International was there to help with the live sound. Greg brought his son Jacob with him as kind of a father and son bonding time, but I think Jacob really outdid everyone's expectations, as he ended up doing a considerable amount of camera work.
We also had Tony & Karis with us. They are considering moving to France and helping CNA in this formative time. We had a good time sharing with them and trying to convince them that their next move should be to France to work with CNA. ;-)
Another new member to the CNA production team was Nicolas Maré. We know Nicolas through his sister Elise who has participated with a lot of our music projects, and sung on several of the worship albums we've done. Nicolas also took part in the audio training session we conducted. Nicolas said afterwards that the audio training session was a bit of an epiphany for him, and convinced him that he wanted to do audio engineering and music fulltime. Unfortunately he hasn't been able to afford to go to a professional audio school. He is eager to learn though, and we are hoping he could help CNA and Proclaim with some of our audio projects. So we invited him to be a part of this project as a kind of learning exercise.
In spite of our hard-working crew, it was a very busy weekend. Marjorie and I both suffered from jet lag which was rather annoying because we would be very tired during the day, but then when we finally got to bed around midnight each night we weren't able to sleep. We ended up only getting about 4 hours of sleep each night.
The weekend was designed to be a time of encouragement and teaching, with lots of (very enthusiastic) worship, quality bible teaching, and times set aside for people to discuss issues and dialog together. It was a special time for the North African Christian community to get together.
We use three cameras and a switcher to record the plenary sessions, and recorded all the worship times to a multi-track project that we can mix later. A lot of the worship was done in the tribal languages of North Africa, like Kabyle. As far as we know these recordings of worship times in the North African tribal languages is the best of its kind in the world. It's a special feeling to know that what your involved with is something that is unique on a world-wide scale.
We also were able to do some video interviews with some of the people who were there, just as we did in 2007, where we captured, among others, the testimonies of Salim Bouali and Brahim Drougard. These testimonies will be edited and incorporated into a television series that will be broadcast on CNA sometime in the future.
All in all it was a great, although very busy, weekend, and we're hoping for much fruit in the future from everything that happened.
News 
