YFC Mansoa

One of the fun things we got to be involved in these past couple of weeks was checking out some new land that our teammates are buying to establish a new YFC center in another city in Guinea-Bissau. Wade and Katie McHargue & Family have purchased land in Mansoa, which is about 30 miles east of Bissau. The vision for the land is to be developed into a base which will host a discipleship program (Wade) and an agricultural training program to help farmers improve methods and help improve overall health with more availability of nutricious foods (Katie).

I got a chance to use a new nerdish piece of gear for the first time. So, courtesy of the sweet little bluetooth gps module that talks to my smartphone, here are some GPS tracks to show the trip (overlayed on satellite photos thanks to Google Earth).

(Click on the pictures to see the bigger, more detailed versions.)

Here's the location of the two cities, Bissau is the lower left tack and Mansoa the upper right one. The red line connecting them is the road we take to get between them (about a 50 minute drive).


Here's a closer view of Mansoa. It has a village feel, but has about 8000 residents. The yellow area to the east of all of the houses is the land, and the tack is the first well which is being dug right now.

As they make more progress on the construction I'm sure they'll be keeping their blog updated with pictures. To check in on their progress, check out their blog. The first step is digging a pair of wells, and then when the block making machine gets here in the container in a few months, we'll start their house.



Mansoa is a decent sized city by G-B standards. It's the 9th largest city in the country, but is 1/3rd the size of the 2nd biggest (after Bissau, the rest of the top 10 are within the 7,000-22,000 range). It's at a major cross-road between several other major cities in G-B, so it's a great spot for a new YFC base!

We're really excited for them as they're able to start developing the land!