It's a real honor and privilege to be
able to speak to you this morning.
And I want, first of all, to thank
you, so many of you who prayed for
me and for Jane during this past six
weeks.
I left these shores on September the 22nd,
along with Brother Roger Raybuck from California, and
flew to Entebbe, Uganda, where we met up
with my son Steve, and from there made
our trip into the Congo.
Thank you very much for praying for us.
Jane probably wouldn't appreciate my mentioning what I'm
about to say, but I think it's quite
significant.
And Jane came to me the day I
was leaving, just as we were getting ready
to leave for the airport, in tears, and
asked me a question.
She said, What do you think I should
do if you don't come back?
How do you answer a question like that?
September 22nd, of course, was just 11 days
after the problems in New York City, and
we had really wondered if we were going
to be able to leave.
The airports were all shut down.
And when flights finally did resume, a lot
of them, a lot of flights had been
canceled as well.
But fortunately, ours was not canceled.
And in consulting with Roger Raybuck during those
days, we felt that if it was at
all possible, that we should continue with our
plans to make our visits to it.
I want just briefly to read a few
verses without too much comment on them.
You can turn to them if you like.
I'm just going to read them from a
sheet of paper that I have.
For as we have many members in one
body, but all the members do not have
the same function, so we being many are
one body in Christ and individually members of
one another.
Randy pointed out to us that all of
us who know the Lord Jesus as our
Savior are members of that body of Christ.
Each one of us, whether we be black
or white, whether we be Greek or Roman
or U.S. citizens or Canadian, because we
are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, we
are members of the body of Christ.
Of course, the body of Christ comprises all
believers around the world today, doesn't it?
We have especially felt that during these days
when our African brethren have suffered so much
in recent years.
Slipping on down in Romans 12-15, there
are some very practical verses in Romans 12
which speak to us how we are to
live our Christian lives.
There's a little phrase there that says, Rejoice
with those who rejoice, and weep with those
who weep.
Our interest in going to Africa at this
time was to meet with our brothers and
sisters who have been through so much in
the past few years, to sit down and
to listen to their story.
We did not go to preach.
I made that very clear when we arrived
in the Congo that we had not come
to preach to them.
We had come to sit down and listen
to them, to listen to their stories and
to bow and pray with them and to
pray with them about some of the trials
that they had been through.
They rejoiced that we were able to do
that at that time.
We also had the opportunity to rejoice with
many believers who were rejoicing because their lives
had been spared or lives of loved ones
had been spared.
There were others who had lost their lives,
some very dear friends of ours who had
lost their lives in some of the difficulties
that they had been through.
Looking at 1 Corinthians chapter 12 and verse
26 as well, speaking again about members of
the body of Christ, it says that if
one member suffers, all the members suffer with
it.
Is that true?
I trust it's true that when we are
aware that another member of the body of
Christ suffers, that we suffer along with that
one, that we sympathize with that one who
is suffering, and we do what we can
to alleviate the suffering that they're going through.
Or if one member is honored, all the
members rejoice with it.
And we rejoice, once again, with those that
rejoice, don't we?
Ephesians chapter 5 and verse 23, the second
part of that verse, do you remember that
that's speaking of husbands and wives, how the
husband is to love his wife as Christ
loved the church?
Ephesians chapter 5 verse 23 and the second
part of that verse reads, Christ is head
of the church, and he is the Savior
of the body.
And then skipping on down to verse 30,
we are members of his body, of his
flesh, and of his bones.
Let's never forget that marvelous truth that we
are members of the body of Christ.
And then one verse that I was reading
this morning in my devotions in 1 John
chapter 3, and a verse jumped out at
me in verse 17, Whoever has this world's
goods, and sees his brother in need, and
shuts up his heart from him, how does
the love of God abide in him?
I'm very grateful that a number of believers
shared their material resources as we made this
trip, and we were able to distribute to
many needy saints as we had opportunity in
this way, because there were those that had
shared with us that which we could share
with them.
We had some of this world's goods which
we were able to share with some of
our brothers and sisters in Christ.
I've made a couple of visits to the
Congo in recent years.
In 1997, Jane and I had actually gone
out to have a little family reunion with
our daughter, Chris and Dale Hamilton and their
family, and also our son Steve and his
wife Debbie and their children.
We had a little time of vacation.
And then at the end of that time,
I was able to go along with my
son Steve and some other missionaries making a
trip by road into the Congo to see
believers after the war of revolution where Laurent
Kabila had overthrown the Mobutu government.
And then in 1998, very shortly thereafter, after
Kabila had taken control of the country, a
rebellion was sparked by the little countries of
Rwanda and Uganda, which both had very well
-trained and very strong military forces.
There was a rebellion which was backed by
these two countries against Kabila, and the eastern
part of the Congo fell through those forces
and still is controlled by those forces.
There's still a very strong presence of both
Rwandan and Ugandan soldiers in the eastern part
of the Congo.
It's been estimated that between two and three
million people have lost their lives in the
Congo as a result of the wars of
the last three or four years.
Most of these have not been victims of
gunshot wounds.
Most of these people have died of disease
or starvation, really being forced back into areas
of the forest where they could no longer
support themselves.
Many, many people have died.
The war in the Congo, which has continued,
has been called Africa World War I.
I've mentioned Uganda and Rwanda, which have backed
the rebellion in the eastern part of the
country.
Zimbabwe, Angola, and Namibia have come in on
the government side and helped them to retain
possession of the western half of the country.
The area which we visited is a relatively
small area of the country of Congo.
Congo is a country about the size of
the United States east of the Mississippi River.
We confined our visit to an area roughly
approximately the size of the state of New
Jersey, from north to south, and probably a
little bit narrower strip than even the New
Jersey is in the area in which we
travel.
I mentioned my son, Steve.
Steve was born at Yonkundi in 1958.
As you heard, we went out in 1956.
We already had two children by that time.
Our daughter, Chris, was two years old when
we first went to the field.
You're going to wonder how old I was
when I got married.
So I'll tell you, I was 19 and
Jane was 18, and Chris was born in
the year following.
So we had our family early, and then
we have our son, Alan, and Steve.
Steve is a fellow who has a great
understanding of the African people, of African culture,
and of the countries in East Africa.
He knows eastern Congo well, the countries of
Uganda and Kenya and Rwanda.
He's traveled quite extensively in those countries, particularly
in the times of war, helping to organize
medical relief into the Congo, into eastern Congo.
He's met a lot of people during that
time and had the opportunity of praying with
some of the leaders, Laurent Kabila, as he
took power back in 1997.
Steve had the opportunity of meeting him in
the city of Goma and asking if he
could pray with him, and had the opportunity
of praying with him at that time.
Just as we were finishing up our trip
this time, Steve learned that a new man
had taken power in our part of the
Congo, a man by the name of Mbusa
Nyamwisi, and this man was over in Kampala
for a conference to meet with President Museveni
of the Congo.
Steve found out where he was and asked
for an audience with him.
It was granted that audience, and along with
a Congolese pastor, he was able to go
in and pray with this man as well.
So Steve is very well acquainted with African
politics, with government people, with business leaders.
He speaks French and Swahili and Lingala, the
language of the Congo army, very fluently.
He is currently working on the Luganda language,
which is the language which is spoken by
the Baganda people in the southern part of
the country of Uganda, and is doing quite
well.
Both he and his wife Debbie are doing
very well with that language at the present
time.
Steve and his family are now working in
fishing camps in the Sese Islands, which are
a group of islands in Lake Victoria where
there are a lot of fishing camps, and
they have started doing some evangelistic work in
some of the islands, particularly one island about
two hours away by boat from the shore
where they live at Entebbe in Uganda.
Lake Victoria, some people have wondered how large
Lake Victoria is.
Lake Victoria is 420 times the size of
the Sea of Galilee.
That's a little over three times the size
of the state of New Jersey.
It's a very large lake.
It's the second largest freshwater lake in the
world after Lake Superior.
And there are literally hundreds of islands dotted
with fishing camps.
There is a tremendous amount of fish that
comes out of that lake.
A lot of it is frozen and shipped
to markets in Europe.
I don't know how much makes it here.
Nile, perch, and tilapia are the main fish.
Roger Raybuck, who went along with me, is
a very good friend.
I've enjoyed very much the fellowship of Roger
over the years.
Roger was a machinist by trade.
He was saved through the ministry of Fairhaven
Bible Chapel in San Leandro, California, and then
attended the discipleship intern training program, which was
run by that assembly for many years.
Discipled by Gene Gibson and Bill McDowell and
others.
In 1984, he went to the Congo, and
when we went back to the Congo in
1985, we found Roger and Janita and their
children living at Yonkundi.
They shortly left for Loiwa and worked at
the station of Loiwa until 1996, when the
events of the rebellion of Kabila forced many
of our missionaries to leave.
Since that time, Roger's been full-time with
the Fairhaven Assembly at San Leandro.
It's a large assembly, about 450 people in
fellowship there, and Roger is one of the
five elders.
And recently, because of Gene Gibson's failing health,
has assumed much of Gene's responsibilities there.
In our visits in Africa, we had a
good time going out with Steve and Debbie
to the island of Chitobo out there in
Lake Victoria to see what was happening on
that island.
It was interesting to see that there are
some believers among those people, people who have
recently come to the Lord Jesus.
A couple of them, or one of them
at least, is fairly advanced with AIDS, and
we noticed there are a number of HIV
-infected people there on the island, which is
the case in many of the islands.
They're usually immoral places.
Young men go out to these fishing camps
to make money, and the prostitutes soon follow
the men, and so sexually transmitted diseases are
quite rampant there in the islands of Lake
Victoria.
We had an unexpected bonus to our trip.
On the first weekend that we were there,
we were able to go to Kenya, where
Steve and Debbie's children are enrolled at Rift
Valley Academy.
We had a Sunday in Nairobi with our
sister, Peb Green, and she was doing very
well.
She's a very busy lady managing the Mayfield
Missionary Guesthouse there, but doing very well and
has a real ministry to many people at
that place.
As we went into the Congo, we went
by road using Steve's four-wheel drive Toyota
Land Cruiser.
The only way that you can get around
in the Congo anymore, the roads are absolutely
horrendous.
I wish that I could describe them to
you.
They're just unbelievable.
What used to be roads, when we left
there in 1992, we thought that the roads
were bad in 1992 and couldn't get any
worse.
Well, they got worse, and they are just
terrible.
We were able to visit Revi Station, which
was an African mission station, where our children
had gone to school in previous years, the
school for missionary children.
Revi Academy was located at a place called
Revi.
From there, we went down to Bunia, which
is the main city in northeastern Congo.
It's the administrative capital for the Ituri region.
It's also the place where missionaries have done
all of their shopping over the years.
The city, because of refugees, has grown tremendously.
I was told that the population of Bunia
is today 250,000.
I could hardly believe that, because it was
a city of about 25 or 30,000
the last that I knew.
But a lot of refugees from the tribal
wars particularly have come to that place.
We were able to visit, or I should
say Roger was able to spend a week
out at Loewa, where he had worked before,
and found that Loewa is not in very
good condition.
In fact, to get there, he had to
ride a bicycle for six hours.
What used to be the Trans-Africa Highway,
East-West Highway, no longer exists.
It ends where the forest begins, where the
tropical rainforest begins.
Only bicycle traffic and small motorcycles, light motorcycles,
are getting through on that road at all.
Roger said that he had to actually, on
a bicycle, brush the elephant grass out of
his face as he was riding along on
the bicycle.
It used to take us, it's a distance
of about 40 miles from Yankundi to Loewa,
which we could do in a little over
an hour at one point.
Today, the first half of that journey was
made in about an hour and a half
in the car, and then six hours by
bicycle.
The station of Loewa was badly looted in
both 1997, when Mobutu's forces retreated through there
and stripped everything of any value.
Then elements of the local population came in
and stripped the houses even further, to the
point where Roger found that his house was
not even livable by African people anymore.
They actually punched holes in the walls of
the house to find where Roger had hidden
his money.
There are holes in the walls, and the
windows are all gone, the doors are broken,
and so forth.
The Africans there had actually fixed up one
room in one of the houses where Roger
could stay, and he had gone through two
or three nights and noticed that he was
getting little bites all over his body.
It took him about three nights to discover
that it was bedbugs that were bothering him
there.
While Roger was out at Loewa, I was
able to do some visits around Yankundi, visiting
a place called Soka, visiting one of the
old chiefs that I had known.
I'll tell you about that a little more
in a little bit later on.
And then from there we went to Ngulang
Zaba, where the Bible school that Arne and
Sarah Glenhartson and then Stan and Rhonda Sharpe
had been involved with in years gone by,
and found that that place had been quite
badly damaged as well.
And then when Roger got back to Ngulang
Zaba, we made the trip up the mountain
to a place called Aveba.
I don't know if I mentioned before already
that our average speed, we calculated, the average
speed of traveling around in a convoy, we
estimated about eight miles per hour in the
Toyota Land Cruiser, the roads are so bad.
And then from Aveba we went up to
Chabu to visit our sister Pearl Winterburn.
And speaking of missionaries, I want to talk
a little bit about them.
Marion Baisley is up in years.
She's a very remarkable woman.
Marion arrived in the Congo in 1960, just
at the time that the Congo got its
independence from Belgium, and almost immediately had to
evacuate in the first and second evacuations there,
and then again in 1964 in the Simba
Rebellion, had to evacuate again, going to East
Africa and then back into the Congo.
She's been on furlough one time in 41
years.
She came to the U.S. and Canada,
I don't even remember what year it was,
but she had such a difficult time getting
back to the Congo that she vowed she
would never leave again.
And in fact, she mostly just stays at
Yonkundi.
She doesn't really go anywhere.
She doesn't have a vehicle, but she has
a remarkable ministry to a lot of people.
The Africans affectionately call her Tsongazi, which means
auntie.
That's her name, Tsongazi.
They all know her as that.
And people are coming in and out of
her house all day long, asking for advice,
commenting on different things, asking for prayer.
And she just has a tremendous ministry.
And a lot of young people, she has
a fairly large enclosed front porch, which the
young people from the assembly meet at on
Sunday mornings during the preaching service at the
chapel.
And there's always a good group of young
people who are there, and Marian is there
to see that they're well cared for.
I asked Marian if she, once she would
consider coming back to North America, and her
response to me was, well, would they really
accept me barefoot back in North America?
Marian doesn't wear shoes very often.
Consequently, her feet have very heavy calluses, just
like the Africans, and she digs a garden
very much just like the Africans do.
There's another missionary at Yom Kippur, a young
woman by the name of Brooke Ford, who
has been out for about a year now.
She went out to Itande and was with
the Pecks there at Itande, Jonathan and June
Peck.
But when the Pecks came on furlough, she
felt it wise not to stay there at
Itande.
There are some real difficulties at Itande, and
I'll talk about that if I can keep
moving here.
So Brooke has come to Yom Kippur there
to be near Marian.
She has been studying Swahili, and I asked
her to pray for Brooke.
She's not getting the language very well.
She's finding it difficult.
In a year's time, most missionaries have the
language pretty well under their belts and are
able to converse in it quite readily, but
she is having a hard time.
There's another young couple, Gilles and Miriam Bonvalatte,
Swiss, from Swiss Assemblies, and they are there
working at the Evangelical Medical Center.
Gilles is a, what I call a, I
was going to say, I was going to
use a Swahili word, fundi, which means an
expert.
He's an expert with computers, and he keeps
the computers going at the Evangelical Medical Center.
Gilles and Miriam are very interested in the
young people's work and work closely with Marian
Daisley in the young people's work, so that's
been a real help and encouragement to Marian
as well.
Visiting Pearl Winterburn at Shabby, we found that
Shabby has become a very remote place.
It's very difficult to get to these days.
It used to be only a 15-minute
flight by MAF plane from Yonkundi to Shabby,
and it was an easy place to get
to and from.
But today, with no flights going, Pearl finds
herself in a very solitary position.
When we first arrived there at Shabby, I
asked Pearl how she was doing.
She said, Oh, I'm doing fine.
I'm enjoying my solitude.
So, she has not had any fellowship with
English-speaking people for some time, but she
did enjoy the fact that we were able
to come and spend a little bit of
time with her.
Also at Yonkundi are a couple of Americans,
well, an American and a Canadian doctor, Dr.
Ted Sugimoto, who's a Japanese-American surgeon, and
his wife, Colleen, and Dr. Phil Wood from
the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade, who are both there,
hopefully, for a longer period of time.
Dr. Wood, at one point, was the medical
director of the Evangelical Medical Center, but in
more recent years has been the Canadian director
of Worldwide Evangelization Crusade.
He's since resigned from that and is spending
time at Yonkundi, and both he and Ted
Sugimoto are helping to train African nurses to
do simple surgery, something which has been really
blessed of the Lord.
There are a few nurses now.
I think of the one at Aveva, with
whom I was very impressed, who had been
trained in that way, doing caesarean sections, appendix
operations, hernia repair, simple surgeries like that.
It's been a tremendous help in the work.
Another couple that we had fellowship with, I
think it was four nights on a couple
of different occasions.
We were in the town of Boonea, and
we stayed overnight with Greg and Karen Lewis.
Greg Lewis is from Fairlawn, New Jersey.
They're AIM missionaries, and Greg is acquainted with—he
was a very good friend of Jimmy Miller,
Bob Miller's son.
The two of them, during high school, were
very good friends.
Also, Greg had Les Campbell as a teacher
in the Fairlawn school system at one time.
Conway's infrastructure, we talked about that a little
bit.
The infrastructure of the country is really in
a shambles.
The roads are terrible.
What used to take us 40, 45 minutes
to drive the 25 miles from Yonkundi to
Boonea to do our shopping today takes at
least two-and-a-half hours, three or
three-and-a-half hours if it's been
raining and there's a lot of mud.
The trip from Yonkundi to Reddy used to
take us about five hours to do the
125 miles when we were taking our children
back to school.
From Boonea, which is a shorter distance, only
about 100 miles, when we came into the
country it took us eight-and-a-half
hours to do that 100 miles.
Going back out of the country because of
very, very heavy mud, it took us 14
hours to drive from Boonea up to Reddy.
The civil service is pretty much nonexistent except
for policemen and soldiers and so forth who
have road barriers every so often.
They want to examine all of your papers,
make sure that everything is in order, and
they can always find something wrong so that
they can fine you for something.
So we had a few experiences.
I won't go into all of those experiences
with some of these people.
All that to say that there really is
no continuing stable government.
Joseph Kabila, Juan Kabila's son, controls the western
part of the country, and there's a struggle
in the northeastern portion where we were between
a couple of people from two different tribes.
The real power brokers, of course, are President
Museveni of Uganda and President Kagame of Rwanda,
who have a real strong military presence in
the country.
We passed by several times Ugandan encampments of
soldiers.
One thing I will say is that the
Ugandan soldiers are much better behaved than the
Congolese soldiers.
The Ugandan soldiers do receive a salary month
by month, whereas the Congolese soldiers don't get
anything from their government and so have to
resort to extortion and bribery in order to
exist.
Tribalism has been a real destructive factor in
the country, particularly in the last year.
In January, there was some very strong fighting
between the Lendu and the Hema peoples in
the northeastern part of the country.
In traveling from the Congo border to the
city of Bunyan, we passed through long areas
where, at one point, there were village after
village.
Another friend of ours, a young man by
the name of Phil Stan, was on his
way with a group of other people to
a prayer meeting one day.
They were having a big prayer meeting at
a place across from Yankundi, about three or
four miles away.
He was on the back of a pickup
along with a number of his other people.
As they came down to the bottom of
the hill, they met a force of Barbera
tribesmen armed with spears and machetes and bows
and arrows.
They pulled the Walendu people off the truck,
hacked a number of them to death.
Along with them, Phil Stan, he was speared
in the abdomen.
Dr. Ted Sugimoto, who sewed him up later,
told me that the spear had just missed
his heart.
He was shot with an arrow in the
side and hacked across the face and leg
and arms with machetes and left for dead.
When the Red Cross came down later to
bury the victims of this fighting, they found
some signs of life in Phil Stan and
took him to the hospital where Ted Sugimoto
and his team of nurses were able to
save Phil Stan's life.
He was one of the first people that
I met there at the beginning of October
when I made a trip through the Evangelical
Medical Center.
There was Phil Stan in crutches, and I
said, What in the world happened to you?
And he explained what had happened.
A couple of weeks later, when we were
coming down from Chave to Yankundi, we found
Phil Stan up in the hills.
He'd gone up there to visit relatives and
wanted to come back to the medical center.
It was time to have the cast off
his arm and his leg where he had
been hacked.
As we were coming along the way, we
picked him up and brought him along the
way.
As we were coming along the way, he
suddenly pointed to a man and said, There's
the man that speared me.
This man is just walking around the country,
indicative of the lack of security and difficulties
for people.
It's interesting that we as white people, as
missionaries, have no problems going around the country.
I felt no fear in going from one
place to another, but Africans who were with
me showed great fear when we went through
territory belonging to another tribe.
It's an interesting situation when we as strangers
or foreigners can go into the country and
move about freely, and yet the people whose
country it is are unable to move around.
Yankundi has been badly damaged by all of
this fighting.
On October the 13th, Roger was still out
at Lowa, and I was staying in a
little guest house there at Yankundi.
I had just taken my shower about 9
.30 in the evening.
I was getting ready to go to bed
when the night watchman knocked on the door,
and he said, There are houses burning down
in the village.
So I slipped on some slippers and went
outside, and I could see the flames from
four houses that had been torched that evening.
So it isn't over yet.
This is a message from one tribe to
people of another tribe that they're not welcome
at Yankundi, and that they should get moving
and move out of there.
Consequently, the population of Yankundi has dropped from
something like 25,000 people.
I'm not sure where it would be between
10,000 and 15,000 today.
The population has dropped drastically.
Schools are operating at 30 percent of what
the students that they had last year.
A lot of these people have fled to
other places, to Abeba up in the hills
where we had most recently worked.
Others have gone to the town of Bunya
and other areas where they feel safe.
The press at Yankundi is closed.
School offices for the whole community of assemblies,
which have primary and secondary schools, that office
has had to move to Bunya because of
the insecurity of the office personnel there at
Yankundi.
So Yankundi has really suffered a great deal.
There's grass growing, high elephant grass growing in
the yards of a number of what were
missionary houses.
The Evangelical Medical Center is having difficulties because
of low attendance at their clinics, and very
few of the beds are occupied at the
hospital because people are just afraid to come
to Yankundi.
So you can pray about that, this fear
that they will get over it.
The assembly at Yankundi is functioning at probably
about a third of their capacity as well.
It's a very large assembly.
The building will hold 1,000 to 1
,200 people.
The highest attendance that we saw when we
were there was 338.
Normally that attendance would be around 1,000
people or more every Sunday morning.
A lot of people ask, well, that big
assembly, why don't they hive off?
They have hived off.
There are five or six other assemblies within
a radius of two miles from Yankundi.
So there's a high population of Christians in
the area, people who come to the meetings.
Some of those smaller assemblies have been decimated
as well.
I know of at least three of those
assemblies within a couple of miles that are
closed completely.
The people have fled to other areas that
are more secure.
I had the opportunity of visiting with three
different tribal chiefs.
Chief Bulamuzi, who was the chief of the
Barbera people at Yankundi, a man that we've
known for a number of years.
He's been chief since about 1984, 83, 84,
something like that.
He's been a bit of a rascal over
the years.
He's a professing Christian.
Along with my son Steve, while Roger was
out at Lolo, we were able to spend
several hours with Bulamuzi.
We went to see him at 1.30
in the afternoon, and he talked nonstop until
4.30, before we could even get a
word in edgewise.
But we could see from what he was
saying that he was regretting very much his
part in stirring up his people to burn
houses and to kill people.
No real repentance that we could see.
It seemed to be more the thought that
he's lost a great portion of his tax
base.
A lot of his people have left, and
we trust that he has seen the error
of his ways and will do something to
try to reestablish relationships with people of other
tribes in the area.
Then I had a great opportunity of visiting
a 96-year-old former chief, Chief Bagota
of the Bahama people, a man that I've
known ever since I first went to the
Congo.
He's bedridden and blind, but he's very coherent.
He hears very well.
He knew me when I came from my
voice, and he asked me many questions about
all of the early missionaries.
He asked me about people like Dr. Woodhams
and Jordan Searle, Robert Deans, Bill Deans' father,
and about Bill Deans, of course, and many
others, Carl Johnson, and a number of the
earlier missionaries.
Dr. Harlow, he asked me about Ed Harlow
as well.
He remembers these early missionaries very well.
I had a good time with him.
His nephew, who is the current chief, was
also there, so we had an opportunity to
speak with him as well.
And then when we went up into the
Ngiti country, into the higher country near Aveba
where we had worked, we took the occasion
to go and visit the tribal chief from
there, Chief Okobi, who has been a personal
friend for many years and a great help
to us in the work at Aveba.
He is a genuine believer.
Really, he and his wife really love the
Lord and seek to serve him.
Chief Okobi really risked his own life after
the killings had taken place at Yonkundi of
his people.
There were a group of young warriors who
wanted to take revenge upon the Babira people.
Okobi went and personally intervened between the two
groups of people and managed to restrain the
young men from going to torch Babira houses
and to wreak vengeance on their enemies.
We have a great deal of respect for
Chief Okobi.
The Congolese people, after having said what I've
said, the Congolese people generally are very friendly
people.
When we went into the visa office in
Bunia to get our visas for staying in
the country for a month, we were very
warmly welcomed by the officials there.
Every office that we went into, the road
tax office, the car insurance office in Bunia
that we went into, warmly received by these
people who urged us to stay in the
country, to return to the country, to invite
other missionaries to come to the country.
So there really is no anti-white or
anti-missionary feeling in the country.
There is an open door for a special
kind of people.
For a person to be a missionary in
Africa today, in that part of Africa at
least, needs to be a very special person,
a patient person, someone who can endure a
lot of misunderstanding and government pressures and all
kinds of difficulties, someone who would not be
easily frustrated, and someone who is able to
live in an insecure environment, and someone who
would be willing to live a restricted life.
I think that people like Pearl Winterburn and
Marion Baisley were pretty much restricted to staying
in one locality at this time, not able
to travel around much, and that would be
the case for most missionaries who would go
to the Congo in these days.
There are many needs in the country, of
course.
Many have lost everything in their tribal wars.
Their houses have been burned and pillaged.
Their gardens have been pillaged as well, food
stolen from their gardens and so forth.
It's good to see some Christians demonstrating an
attitude of forgiveness.
For instance, the young man who had been
left for dead alongside the road.
As he pointed out, the man who had
tried to kill him to us, I said
immediately to him, I said, You've forgiven him,
haven't you?
And he said, Yes, I have.
And that attitude has been demonstrated on the
part of many of our Christians as well,
as they've had things taken from them.
Food is plentiful.
There has not been a dry season for
three years, which is very unusually.
Usually the dry season begins about now and
runs through the month of March.
But for three years there's been constant rain,
so they've had plenty of food, which has
been a good thing.
In closing, let me just ask you to
pray for a certain thing.
We need godly leadership in the assemblies, men
and women that can see beyond their own
clan and tribe and put the kingdom of
God first.
We need godly leaders, men who can see
beyond their tribe.
Pray for that.
Our missionaries need wisdom and understanding and patience.
You can pray for Pearl and for Marian
and for our other missionaries as well.
Pray, too, for the leaders of the Christian
community.
There's going to be a change come the
first of the year in the community with
a new group of men taking responsibility.
Actually, we had a request from the fellow
who is going to be the new legal
representative for some of the older missionaries to
come out in 2002 and to sit with
those leaders and to review where they may
have strayed from our assembly principles.
That would be a good opportunity if this
request still holds true.
So, once again, we thank you for your
care for us and for your prayers for
us as we have gone.
Thank you very much.