MORE GLOBE TROTTING
I Become an Elder at Redlands Community Church
At the time of nomination of elders and deacons
for our church, one of my friends submitted my name, and I was
elected a ruling elder for a 3-year term beginning in 1987. I had
previously served in that capacity in four other churches (First PC
(Presbyterian Church) of North Hollywood, Sixth PC of Washington,
Eastminster PC of Bladensburg (MD), and the church council of St.
James Church in Cape Town, South Africa). I had interested Andy
Silman ((the pastor) in a computer program to keep track of
attendance, much like the one I had provided St. James Church, and
had been posting the attendance for some months. In early 1987, I
suggested that we could use the computer in further tracking our
people’s involvement in the activities of the church. He was
quite enthusiastic about doing so, and I made the necessary additions
to the program. The problem was to find out what people were doing
what, and to motivate those not involved in anything to become
involved in the activities of their choice. I tried to set up a group
of volunteer "activity coordinators”, but it was hard to
get anyone to step forward. Finally Andy asked one of the leading
ladies of the congregation, the wife of an elder, to organize the
work. She needed income. Would the church pay her? Andy thought we
should, but the elders were 100% against it (the husband abstained).
I don’t know if this had anything to do with it, but three
months later Andy left us to accept a call from a large church in
Zachary LA.
The PCA rules of church order allow a man who
feels he has reached the age of retirement to request the status of
elder emeritus. I felt that this time had come for me, so when we had
good elder candidates for one more place on the session than there
were vacancies in the new year, I requested that status, allowing all
the candidates to be elected. My ulterior motive was that I wanted to
take a long trip to Australia and New Zealand, which became our
principal activity for 1988.
Four Months “Down Under”, Hawaii, USA (April 9-August 9,1988)
Mary Charlotte and I hadn’t been on a really long trip together
since 1960, our last and only visit to Australia and New Zealand.
Ever since that experience I had wanted to return and spend some
prime time in visiting the whole of each country. I also wanted to
visit mainland China, and thought the two areas could economically be
covered in one trip. Sure enough, several air lines offered “circle
the Pacific” special fares, but none of them reached all the
places Mary Charlotte and I wanted to go.
Fritz
and Anne Kalmey had been to mainland China in the spring of 1987, and
Bob and Peggy London had spent three months in
Australia in the middle of 1987 (I can’t say summer —
it’s winter there when we have summer!). Their travel
literature and what I could pick up from a travel agent gave me all
the planning material I needed. Redlands Church contributed to the
support of nearly 40 missionary families, and I thought it would be a
wonderful idea to visit those in the areas we were considering and
video-tape their life and work in their mission field. This included
mainland China, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and New Caledonia
(French islands off the coast of Brisbane, Australia). Also Mary
Charlotte wanted to go to Tahiti and Hawaii. None of the
circle-Pacific fares included all these places, so I tried making two
trans-Pacific trips — one northern Pacific and one southern
Pacific. This was possible, and hardly more expensive! After much
planning for the two-tour approach, I was faced with cancellation of
one after the other of five of the seven missionaries I wanted to
visit. We settled for the South Pacific only and added a 30-day USA
Greyhound bus tour at the end, to visit friends and relatives on the
way across the US from Los Angeles to Homestead. The final itinerary
was: Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, Papua New Guinea, more Australia
(including World Expo 88 in Brisbane), Hawaii, USA and Montreal,
Canada. We got half-price bus tickets in the US (as retired
military), and reduced fare bus, train and air tickets in Australia
and New Zealand by purchasing them before departure. I had purchased
a Sony 8mm Camcorder in November 1987, and practiced with it at home
and church. I took an ample supply of recording tape and was ready to
record up to 24 hours of events and scenes.
The visit to
Tahiti was a keen disappointment. The only really interesting part
was a ferry trip to the nearby island of Moorea, and a bus ride
around to the other side, where there was a lovely hotel, which we
would really have enjoyed as our main point of residence, if we had
only known of it. Trying to get back for the last ferry was an
exercise in frustration, as the scheduled bus failed to materialize,
and we wound up returning by taxi and plane.
The time in New
Zealand was quite the opposite — very worth while. On our
earlier visit (1960), we had concentrated on the tourist places in
North Island, so this time we concentrated on South Island. Our 8-day
transportation passes were good on buses, ferries and trains operated
by the government, and these permitted us to go wherever we wanted to
— from Christchurch to Mt. Cook, Queenstown, Milford Sound,
Invercargill, trans-Alpine express from Christchurch to and from
Greymouth, ferry to North Island, train to Auckland, and bus to
Kataia (northernmost town). From our travel agent we got $50 air
tickets from Auckland to Christchurch and return (the latter not used
since we came back by ferry and train), so had very little
transportation expense. In Christchurch we had the privilege of a
delicious Sunday dinner with a university professor and his wife, who
made a practice of entertaining overseas people that came to their
church Sundays.
In
Australia we divided the time into three segments: Sydney, Hobart (by
air), Melbourne (by bus and overnight ferry); 21-day bus tickets that
took us from Melbourne to Adelaide, Perth, Broome, Darwin, Alice
Springs, and Cairns (from where we flew to Papua New Guinea); and
regular fare bus from Cairns to Brisbane (and World Expo 88), and
Sydney — in all 41 days. In Sydney we visited Oliver (see
left) and Helen Claassen, church-planting missionaries of our
denomination who had visited our church several times, and then later
we visited churches planted by them in Perth and Brisbane. [Oliver
has recently become pastor at (our) Evangelical Presbyterian church!
Here is a recent photo of their large family (see right)]
The
real highlight of this part of the trip was our 15 days in Papua New
Guinea. Mary Charlotte had read a novel centered in Port Moresby
years earlier, and had wanted to visit the place ever since. Our
church supported a Wycliffe couple, Carl and Jody Campbell (see at
left their family in a much later picture), who lived in
Ukarumpa, the large Wycliffe center in Papua New Guinea. Their work
was in a mountain village that could be reached only by helicopter or
a 20-hour hike. At the time of our visit Carl and Jody were scheduled
to be at their village, which was neither accessible to us nor able
to accommodate us. So they arranged for us to visit Hauna Village, a
jungle place along the Sepic River where Marilyn Laszlo and her
sister Shirley Killosky (see right) had labored for 20 years
among the Sepic Iwam tribe to reduce their language to writing md
translate the New Testament into it.
Port Moresby was a keen
disappointment to Mary Charlotte. It was simply another port city,
wholly run by the Papuans. We stayed overnight in a mission
guesthouse (not cheap!), to await a Wycliffe flight to Ukarumpa the
day after our arrival. That flight took us over some of the most
rugged country in PNG, with passes up to 10,000 feet and peaks over
14,000. When we landed at the airport serving Ukarumpa, there were
Carl and Jody! It seems that the helicopter’s rotor coupling
had failed, and a locally repaired unit wouldn’t work. So the
plane was grounded for nearly three weeks waiting for a part to he
shipped in from the US. That part actually came on the same plane we
did. So we had three days with them before the part could be
installed and tested, and we video-taped their departure in the
copter early Monday morning (after our Friday arrival). The five days
in Ukarumpa, where we lived in the guest house, went very quickly,
being taken up with video-taping the various facilities and people
there, and in a lunch or dinner every day with one missionary family
or another, several of whom were affiliated with our denomination’s
missions organization MTW (Mission To the World).
The whole place exists for one
purpose only — to support the 200-plus teams of translators
working all over PNG and its surrounding islands. Most of the
translators (including Carl and Jody) own their own homes there,
which were all built by Wycliffe carpenters and electricians.
Wycliffe supplies all the facilities one expects in a modern town —
bank, schools, church, post office, stores, service station and
garage, and repair and construction facilities for buildings and
roads.
We left Ukarumpa Wednesday, June 11th, for Hauna
Village (via Wewak, a city on the north coast), four hours in a
4-seat Cessna, arriving a little after noon at a grass airstrip about
a 20-minute canoe trip from Hauna. Mary Charlotte was not at all
happy to think of the canoe trip, but it turned out all right and we
reached the “Hauna Hilton" without mishap. The compound
for Marilyn’s activities is built on the only high ground in
the village, which used to be the cemetery — the only reason
the village elders gave it to Marilyn 20 years earlier. There are now
three large buildings (main building, church and school) and several
smaller ones (workshops, store, clinic, and men’s dorm for
translators). All of these are built from local materials (except for
obvious things as nails, cement, door and window hardware, glass,
etc.) and largely by local labor.
After learning the language
herself Marilyn started her translation work by choosing a dozen or
so keen young boys (10-18) and training them in the art of Bible
translation. Today these men are in the 30-40 age bracket, able to
speak fluently in the trade language Pigdin, and to read and speak
somewhat in English. Many can type, use the computer, operate
electrical generators, power tools, motor boat engines, play soccer
and other modern sports, and teach Sunday School and lead church
services. As Mary Charlotte very aptly observed, “There isn’t
anything these men can’t learn to do.” When Marilyn first
arrived the village was truly stone-age. They had no clocks, no
calendars, didn’t wear clothes, knew almost nothing of the
outside world (a few of the men had been to Wewak), and were
completely self-sufficient. They had a democratic form of village
government, were monogamous, could handle huge logs weighing tons on
land or river, erected large community houses on stilts above the
summer high-water line, farmed high ground in the village vicinity,
and subsisted on fish and vegetables, sago paste (from palm trees),
and other forest products. Truly these people are every bit as
intelligent as any race in the modern world. Six of the translators
came to the United States with Marilyn for her year of furlough in
November 1988. We had the whole group in our home in Homestead in
February, and I took them around the area — to the Everglades,
air boat rides and crocodile farms. At the end of the year one of the
men stayed behind in Indiana to complete his high-school education in
English. I made over eight hours of video-tape of our stay in Hauna
village, and boiled that down to a 35-minute edited documentary,
which I would be glad to loan to anyone interested.
Returning
to Cairns, where we had earlier visited the Great Barrier Reef, we
took the overnight bus to Brisbane, to visit the new PCA churches
there, and to spend three days at World Expo 88. After Epcot, that
left something to be desired, but some of the entertainment was
really top-notch, in particular an aquacade which I video-taped in
its entirety. From Brisbane, another overnight bus ride brought us to
Sydney, for a day’s rest and an overnight flight to
Honolulu.
Mary Charlotte thinks Hawaii is the closest place on
earth to heaven, but my 15 months there in World War II have left me
with a sour taste in my mouth for the place. We split our two weeks
there between Maui (where we had a rental car to tour the island) and
Waikiki (where we took tours and walked around a lot). On arrival
from Sydney at the airport in Honolulu, I mistakenly look someone
else’s bag, and had the ill luck not to have it examined at
customs or even touch it myself again until arrival at our hotel in
Waikiki. Mary Charlotte called my attention to the fact it was not
our bag, but it sure looked like it. I assumed the transporter people
had mixed up the bags, and called the airporter control at the
airport, where I was told to give the bag to the driver of our
limousine when he came for it. I did this without giving much thought
to it, being more concerned for our bag, which had all our souvenirs
und gifts in it. The next day we went to Maui and I didn’t get
back to chasing down our bag until ten days later. The airporter
people had turned the bag I gave them over to the airline, but mine
hadn’t shown up. They suggested I call the airline. When I did
so, they had my bag! On contacting Bob London upon our arrival in Los
Angeles, he said he had been called by an Australian couple who said
I had taken their bag, and gave me a US number to contact them. When
I did so, I heard a long tale of calamity — the bag had
contained $8,000 worth of expensive dresses the woman had bought to
bring to the US for two weddings. The airport limousine driver had
stolen their bag and substituted another for it. The woman’s
trip was ruined and she was very unhappy with me. Three months later
I was notified by a lawyer in San Francisco that she intended to sue
unless I paid her the $8,000. My Homestead lawyer whittled her down
to $600 (the airline’s maximum liability for undeclared
baggage) which I paid a few months ago. Now I really don’t like
Hawaii!
We
had purchased 30-day passes on the US Greyhound Bus System. Thus we
were able to visit many friends and relatives as we made our way from
Los Angeles to Homestead. Particularly rewarding were the visits with
Lew and Fran McCune (see left) in Los Angeles and with Lance
and Cora Bowen (see right) in Visalia (CA). These were our
closest friends from the many we had at the church in North
Hollywood. Fran arranged a surprise party for us to which many of
these friends were invited, and it was such a joy to see them all
again. Cora and Lance took us to Yosemite National Park, where we saw
the General Grant and General Sherman trees — two of the
largest and oldest living things on earth.
We routed ourselves
through Las Vegas, where Walter (Scotty) and Audrey Scott now live,
on our way to Denver. The Scotts took us to Boulder Dam, which I had
never really seen before and enjoyed immensely. In Denver we had a
brief visit with Mary Francis and Paul, though it was somewhat
painful. I also had a chat with the two girls, Nikki and Alicia, but
young Paul (Indie) was away. Mary Jo and Clyde met us in Jackson (Ml)
for a week in their Michigan summer home, where we showed them our
videotapes of our “down under” odyssey. From there we
spent a long day on three buses to reach Will’s home in
Evansville for a week-end visit with Will, Judy, Mark, and
Emily.
The
final portion of the bus trip included a 36-hour ride to Montreal for
two days with Austen and Elizabeth Dundas and their son Matthew,
friends from our South African days. Elizabeth was doing research on
her doctorate at McGill University, where Bobby Caruthers had done
his doctoral studies. Before returning to England and South Africa,
they spent a few days in our home in Homestead the following
December. Our final stopover on the long way home was Epcot, where
Mary Charlotte fulfilled her long-standing desire to see the
hydroponics exhibit (which we went through twice). As our bus finally
pulled into the station in Homestead, we were amazed to see over a
dozen of our Homestead friends there to greet us with a banner saying
‘Welcome Home!”. It was good to be home, after 20,000 air
miles and more than 20,000 bus miles.
Church Treasurer
When we returned from the
Down-Under trip, we found that the church search committee had
selected a former missionary to Jamaica, Mike Kennison, to be our new
pastor, and he had been installed on July 1st. Mike was very
different from Andy Silman in some respects, but like him a good
Bible teacher and preacher. He had been married only a few months
when he started his pastorate with us. Mike had been plunged into a
church discipline crisis, in that the wife of one of the leading
elders had made a formal charge against him of infidelity, and Mike
had to act as moderator of the session to exercise the session’s
responsibility as an ecclesiastical court. This took many hours of
the session’s time, and Mike’s as well, and prevented him
from having the normal period of adjustment to a new situation. The
crisis was resolved. The man did accept church discipline and the
marriage was saved, but the cost was high in delaying Mike’s
ability to take hold of the affairs of our church. We were in the
process of building the first unit of our planned church facility —
a multi-purpose building that would be used as sanctuary for a few
years but would eventually be a church hall for social and
recreational activities. The building was dedicated on January 1,
1989.
I was asked in October to serve as treasurer starting
that same date, and spent much of my time setting up individual
giving and church fund records on my computer. I essentially
performed a detailed audit of the church books for 1988 in
preparation for keeping them in 1989. The lack of anyone seeking to
fill the vacancies on the Session made me feel that I should give up
my emeritus status and accept election as a ruling elder, as Mike was
having many problems coping with a growing church with no previous
experience as pastor. In addition to the responsibilities as
treasurer, I once again became involved in the direction of the
church’s spiritual life. I loved it! It gave me a real
satisfaction to feel that I could contribute something worthwhile,
and it kept me busy — that and the preparation for the next
trip described below.
Missionary Video-Taping Trip 1989
Our remarkable experiences in the “Down-Under” trip of
1988 made me want to expand my video-taping to missionaries in other
parts of the world. That we were both well into the seventies didn’t
bother me, considering the fact that neither one of us had a sick day
in the whole four months of the earlier trip. This time I had in mind
eight missionary families, four in Africa and four in Asia (including
three we had not been able to include in our 1988 trip). Mary
Charlotte decided that she wouldn’t try to go with me this
time, but she was interested in a return to South Africa. John de
Kock sparked that possibility by writing to me that a Christian
travel agency in Holland was offering a special around-the-world fare
from South Africa through Asia, North America, Europe and back to
South Africa; and gave me the telephone number of their branch office
in Chicago. I got in touch with them, and arranged my transportation
and Mary Charlotte’s on a special-fare basis.
A
second objective for my trip was to deliver a desktop computer system
(for publishing newsletters and the like) to a black Christian
organization in Nairobi, Kenya. In August 1987, I had been given the
assignment of meeting a black African Christian leader at the airport
in Miami, and taking care of him through the week-end so that he
could bring our Sunday message at the church. His name is Dr.
Tokunboh Adeyemo (see left), general secretary of the
Association of Evangelicals of Africa and Madagascar (AEAM). This is
an umbrella organization of evangelical church and parachurch groups
operating in the continent of Africa (the Madagascar Christians
demanded special recognition which has since been withdrawn and the
organization’s name shortened to AEA), a total of 50,000,000 or
so persons. This man really wowed our congregation, keeping them
nearly an hour overtime that Sunday morning, and they really loved
it! During my Saturday with him, the subject of computers came up,
and he expressed the strong desire to have one for desktop publishing
in his organization, but the high cost was beyond their slender
budget. I expressed an interest in helping him through our church but
couldn’t do so at the time, having shot my wad, so to speak,
for the Down-Under trip. When this new trip became more than just a
fancy, I wrote to Dr. Adeyemo, and asked him if he had gotten his
computer yet. His reply was “No”, and the need was even
greater than before. Discussing this adventure with my session
members at Redlands Church, they agreed to sponsor me for both the
cost of the computer and the trip, by sending me as the church’s
representative, at my expense.
That fall (1988), I had a South
African friend in computer sales, Arthur Hughes, visit me in
Homestead, so I wrote to him about buying the AEAM computer in Cape
Town. He assured me that they could match US prices (since both
countries got their hardware from Taiwan or Korea), and I set it up
to pick up the computer hardware on our visit to Cape Town. Mary
Charlotte would stay on after I left, and return to Homestead via
London and the Emerys while I went to Nairobi and then to my eight
missionary families. The tickets were all bought, visas obtained, and
I had written confirmatory letters to everyone I was to visit, when I
got a call from Dr. Adeyemo to the effect that I must buy the
computer in the US and leave it in England to be shipped later. The
reason was to permit exemption from the Kenyan computer duty of 125%
of retail price. The purchase in South Africa would be repugnant to
the Kenyan authorities, and the leaving in London was for the purpose
of combining it with two small computers AEA was buying that would be
on the same Kenyan exemption certificate with my computer. I had no
choice but to comply, so called my friend in South Africa and
canceled the deal with him (he had not bought anything yet), and then
frantically searched for good buys in the US for the needed hardware
and software. A firm in Arizona seemed to have the best all-around
deal, so I ordered it 13 days before our departure. When it failed to
show up in the four days promised, I called the company who said it
had been shipped on time. Another four days went by before the
company agreed to send me another computer by UPS air (the first one
never was heard from by us), which arrived two days before my
departure. This computer had only half its specified memory and
couldn’t accommodate my software. Once again delivery of the
memory chips was promised by UPS air, and they did arrive the morning
of my departure. When I tried to put them in myself, the computer
refused to start up. A panic call indicated that I must have bent the
pins on one or more chips and they had to be removed and reinserted.
I got Bob London to help me, and we got enough chips inserted
correctly to accommodate the software but not the full complement.
With two hours to spare I hurriedly packed the equipment and headed
for the airport. British Airways took our seven items of baggage (we
were allowed only four free), and charged only $140 excess baggage to
London. However, at the London airport, the customs people wouldn’t
allow me to take the computer cartons to the freight forwarder near
the airport, saying they could come and get it but I couldn’t
take it to them, as had been arranged. A phone call revealed that the
man I had made arrangements with was out that day, and no one else
could come. After I put the customs agent on the phone, they finally
agreed that the computer would go into customs hold and the
forwarding people would get it the following week (this was on
Friday). The upshot of it was that the stuff stayed in England for
nearly two months before Dr. Adeyemo could get his exemption
certificate, and then the British wanted import duty paid on my
computer. The equipment finally got to Nairobi in September, six
months after I had left it, and I never did find out whether or not
the British customs had to be paid.
South Africa
We
had a beautiful time in South Africa, which I utilized to learn as
much as I could about the desktop publishing program Ventura, which
was available in Cape Town. We also enjoyed renewing fellowship with
our many friends there, particularly Leslie and Radie Goatham with
Laura Haas in the middle (see leftmost picture) and Cedric and
Tyree Harris (see second picture on right) with their daughter
and her husband in the center. We also enjoyed the services and
particularly the inspired preaching of Frank Retief at St. James
Church (see right, below).
We
had been loaned a VW pickup truck with rear canopy by Austen Dundas
(see left, with wife Elizabeth), who had a construction
business in Cape Town. He was the man we had visited in Montreal, and
from whom we had purchased our present Olds Delta 88. When it was
time for me to leave for Nairobi, I delivered the truck to the place
from which I had borrowed it, but had a mechanical problem which
delayed me in making the delivery. This man had to take me to the
airport in his own car. When I got my bags out of the back of the
truck I hit my forehead on the corner of its door, nearly knocking
myself out. We got to the airport in plenty of time (I thought).
However, I thought my flight number was 310 and departure time was
3:40, whereas the flight number was 340 and departure time 3:10! When
I checked in at 3:05, I was told I was too late. My friend said I had
to catch a connecting international flight in Jo’burg, so they
reluctantly held the flight long enough for me to get on it. How
Satan delights in giving one a hard time when on the Lord’s
business!
Nairobi, Kenya
I spent a week
in Nairobi teaching Dr. Adeyemo’s wife Ireti and secretary Mary
Kumasi how to use the Ventura program. They had attended a
three-months computer course, so knew something about how to use the
machines. Since neither of them expected to be the final users of the
computer, their interest while high in the beginning dropped off
quickly when we got down to the nitty gritty of setting up a
publication. We had to use a borrowed computer, since the computer I
had bought for them was still in England, awaiting the issuance of an
exemption certification from the government of Kenya, to avoid the
125% import duty on computers. It finally reached Nairobi in
September.
Ivory Coast
My schedule called for me to go to Abidjan for my first missionary
family. That’s a six-hour flight plus stopping time, and the
only airline to fly between the two cities is the Ethiopian Air Line,
going from Nairobi 800 miles north to Addis Ababa before heading
west. I crossed the equator three times each way going to and from
Abidjan! Arriving in Abidjan I was harassed by a customs officer (who
must have wanted a bribe) who delayed me an hour in getting to the
airport building lobby. A phone call revealed that my contact John
Weed had not expected me to arrive for several hours (old schedule).
On top of that his wife Ruthie had just gotten home from the hospital
and could not take care of me in their home. I had to stay at the
Wycliffe guest house several miles away. In spite of these
difficulties, however, I had a good visit with John and Ruthie Weed
and their 8-year-old son Jonathan and 5-year-old daughter Valerie.
John was engaged in church planting among Muslims in Abidjan with two
other missionary families of our denomination. They had a new church
with over forty attending. They baptized eight Muslim men the
week-end after my visit. 
John
drove me on Friday about 200 kilometers into the interior to meet
John and Liz Steketee, Wycliffe missionaries in a town called Mayo
among the Bete people of the interior. I had five days in their home
and played uncle to their three: 10-year-old Barbara, 7-year-old Paul
(with two front teeth missing) and 5-year-old Mary Beth. There was a
big political gathering in the town while I was there and the drums
beat night and day for three days! John took me on a 150km tour of
the villages where he worked as a literacy specialist, a previous
Wycliffe worker having translated the New Testament into the Bete
language.
Back in Nairobi
My
return flight to Nairobi on Wednesday was canceled due to an
attempted coup in Addis Ababa the previous day, grounding the entire
air line. I had no other way to get back there, and was contemplating
giving up and returning directly to the US on a once-a-week flight on
Friday, when the Ethiopian Air Lines announced a flight for Nairobi
for Thursday. This flight, however, went through Addis Ababa, and got
me to Nairobi too late on Friday to see Dr. Adeyemo. When it was
evident that Sunday was the earliest I could see him, I had to cancel
my Saturday flight to Uganda, where I was scheduled to vist Dan
Herron and his family. I did see Tokunboh (see left), and was glad I
canceled the other flight, because air line schedule changes would
have fouled up the connection with my next missionary, Dale Williams,
who was to pick me up at the Kenya-Tanzania border the following
Tuesday. For the second Sunday, I attended the huge Nairobi
Pentecostal Church and was a guest for dinner in the Adeyemo home
(without Tokunboh the first time). He had led an all-night prayer
meeting Friday night in his church that had over 500 participants!
Benson, his chauffeur, had taken me to and from the airport several
times, had picked me up at the Methodist Guest House where I stayed
every morning and afternoon, and had driven me around the city
including an afternoon at the Game Park and Culture Center. He was a
dear soul, and I became quite fond of him. He had a 6-months-old
daughter that he seldom saw, and a patient wife who put up with his
10-12 hours a day in his car. Each of the three times I left the
country, I gave him all the Kenyan money I had left.
Tanzania
Benson drove me to the Tanzanian
border where Dale Williams was waiting for me, and Dale and I headed
for his home in the highlands of north-central Tanzania, where he
managed a farm. Dale came from a Homestead family, well-known to a
number of my friends there, and had spoken in our church just a few
months before this occasion. He had recently married another Campus
Crusade for Christ worker (Lee, formerly African editor in Nairobi
for the CCC newsletter), and they had a 6-months-old daughter Beth
Ann. The time on his farm was a rugged one, as the temperatures in
May (equivalent to our November) often dropped near freezing in the
early morning. Also the air was thin at 7,000-plus feet altitude.
Being the rainy season, mud was everywhere, and much time was needed
to clean shoes and sometimes hands when coming in from a ride or
walk. The only electricity was from solar panels, used for dim tube
light in the early evening, and to heat water for baths. On cloudy
days, this didn’t work very well. Dale had no tractor, so his
men had to cultivate their 98 acres of corn and 7 acres of coffee
trees by hand. His ministry was largely performed on week-ends when
he took the “Jesus" film, with Swahili soundtrack, to
neighboring towns, villages, and schools. I went with him the
week-end I was there. On our last day we took a half-holiday to visit
the Ngora-Ngora game park, whose entrance was only five miles away
from the farm, and which was located in the crater of a huge extinct
volcano. We didn’t have time or money to take the tour of the
crater, but visited the big lodge built on the crater rim, from which
you could see elephant, flamingo, rhino, and other game animals
through a 20-power telescope. They didn’t even show in my
3-power Camcorder zoom lens.
India
Benson was waiting for me at the
border when Dale delivered me there at the appointed time, and I
returned to Nairobi for a last visit with Dr. Adeyemo before leaving
at 3:30am on a flight for Delhi (India) via Sana (Yemen) and Karachi
(Pakistan). I took the very early morning flight out of Delhi for
nearby Dehra Dun, where David and Eleanor Fiol have a ministry with a
seminary. They had previously served over 20 years with a children’s
home founded by a German mission a half century ago for children of
lepers in India. David was born in Dehra Dun of missionary parents,
and really liked living there. When we visited a nearby “holy
city”, I felt as if I were at the very gates of hell, and had a
powerful urge to get out of the car and run away as fast as I could!
The traffic on the roads was so hectic and death defying, that I felt
that I would have a nervous breakdown if I had to drive around in it
just one more day! I got a lot of interviews with nationals involved
both with the children’s school and the seminary, and returned
to Delhi two days later.
Java, Indonesia
At Delhi I had a 16-hour wait at
the airport for my flight to Jakarta via Bangkok. It was a boring
time, but I did get letters written to all of my hosts and family
members. Eating was not too good, but I managed to get by. Eventually
the Thai Air Lines plane arrived and I was on my way to Jakarta. John
Fain met me at the airport and we left almost immediately on a flight
to Jogjakarta, where John had served as a professor at an evangelical
seminary, the Evangelical Theological Seminary of Indonesia (ETSI).
We spent two days there video-taping interviews with students and
faculty members, including the president Dr. Maratika. One of these
students was the number two man in a 250,000-member denomination
which has as its goal for members for each to win one person to
Christ every year. Then we had a 10-hour train ride to Cirebon, where
John now lives and works, and I became a guest in his house with his
wife Dawn and their children Marie (4) and David (2).
John is
now assisting at a mini-seminary in this Muslim city among the highly
Muslim Sundanese people of Indonesia (30,000,000 of them!), to train
Christian Indonesians in elementary seminary subjects and techniques
of church planting. ETSI has a vision of planting ONE church in each
ONE of the 50,000 villages of Indonesia in ONE generation (by the
year 2020). They call this the One-in-One-in-One plan, and have
started 13 mini-seminaries like this one in Cirebon. They expect to
found over 1,000 such before the project is finished. Incidentally,
each graduate of ETSI must have planted a thriving church before he
can get his degree! Over 425 churches have been planted. John picked
up a flu bug two days before I was to leave, so he had to put me on a
train to Jakarta by myself. I took a cab from the train station to
Dawn’s parents’ house (they were on furlough), and a very
early cab the next morning for the airport to get an 8am departure
for Ambon, 1,500 miles to the east of Jakarta.
Ambon, Indonesia
Rosemary Bolton met me at the
airport for Ambon, and took me to the Wycliffe center for my first
night there. The next morning at 4am we left in a cab for the ferry
dock to take a 4-hour ferry ride to the island of Seram. Here we took
another cab for an hour’s ride over one of the roughest roads I
have ever traveled to the village of Rouhua, where Rosemary is
learning the language and beginning the translation of the Gospel of
Mark. This tiny tribe, numbering less than 1,000, is spread over
several villages on both the north and south coasts of the island,
and Rosemary is the first white person to learn the language. An
Australian couple came with us as chaperons, as they had never
visited a primitive village in their 30 years with Wycliffe (they
were not translators). Rosemary had me video-tape her as she went
through her usual routine of recording something from the chief,
working out a rough translation, and then polishing that translation
through several sessions with her language helpers. The chief has
informally adopted her as his daughter, which not only gives her
tribal status but protects her from tribal Romeos. We stayed
overnight, sleeping on the raised platform in a one-room hut. The
tribe has a taboo on breaking the ground, so toilets are outside the
village in the woods, along certain paths. The only water is a pair
of taps, one in each of the two communal bathing facilities (men and
women). We returned the next day, and I had a chance to get
acquainted with Rosemary’s two girl roommates, and a family
living nearby that opened their home to me for sleeping. [These homes
and most of Ambon, including the church we attended there, have been
destroyed by fire by militant Muslims over the past year. Rosemary
lost all her furniture, her computer equipment, all her work with the
primitive language she was developing script for, her PhD studies and
her Bible translation notes. The Indonesian government has done
nothing to protect Christians in that country, now being
systematically driven out by these relatively few militant Muslims.]
More video-taping of her work at home and at the Wycliffe center
completed the week, and I enplaned for Sentani, near Jayapura on
Irian Jaya (the other half of the island of New Guinea). In fact,
Jayapura is only 100 miles from Wewak, so I was very close to Hauna
Village.
Sentani, Indonesia
In Sentani, Jim Akovenko is
director of aviation services for the Wycliffe translators on the
island, some 27 teams. He operates five aircraft (and pilots one of
them), which have to supply the translating teams with everything
they need to live in the jungle — food, mail, medicines,
dishes, clothing, furniture, fuel, equipment, etc., etc. Jim’s
wife Sue also works in the Aviation Department as a general secretary
and to run the computer, used for keeping records, for billing of
transportation charges, hours usage for maintenance on all aircraft
assemblies, and other items. Their two boys Jason and Joshua are in
high and elementary school, respectively, and are really sharp kids.
Jim took me on one of his flights to a village in the mountainous
interior, so I could have both personal and video-tape recollections
of my visit to Irian Jaya.
Wycliffe had been served notice by
the Indonesian government that they did not intend to renew their
contract in April 1991, when the current one expires. This could mean
shutting down all the work in Ambon, Irian Jaya and other places in
the country where Wycliffe teams are working. Negotiations are
continuing to permit some kind of continuance for the more important
of these tasks, and prayer is sought that God will bring that
about.
Leaving Sentani on June 23rd, I flew to Biak where I
had to wait 10 hours for my flight (from Jakarta) to Honolulu and Los
Angeles. There I was met by Mary Charlotte and Lew McCune, with whom
we stayed a few days. Although I did not know it then, it was to be
our last visit with him, as he died suddenly in 1989. We also visited
the Bowens in Visalia (by bus). They drove us to Lake Tahoe and
Yosemite National Park for the Fourth of July holiday week end. We
then returned to Los Angeles and our flight to Miami, gratis from
Continental on the basis of our Down-Under flights the year before.
We Move to Cape Coral
Ever since Mary Jo and Clyde
began living in Alameda Isles north of Englewood (FL), we had enjoyed
visits with them, at our house or theirs. But the 4-1/2 hour drive
made it too far to do this very often, and we found our get-togethers
to be on the order of one or two per year. When Margaret moved there
three years later, this distance seemed accentuated. So Mary
Charlotte and I had in the backs of our minds eventually moving
closer, so that we could get together much more frequently. After
all, we didn’t have many more years for family fellowship, and
we wanted to increase our togetherness. This desire was suddenly
sharpened by the situation in the church when we returned from our
latest trip. Mike Kennison was not my choice for pastor, and though I
had offered to help him in any way I could, I think he felt
threatened by me more than helped, and gave me very little
encouragement that I could have a deeper involvement than I already
had. Also the chairman of the missions committee was a strong minded
individual who insisted on his own way in everything, and I couldn’t
go along with some of his policies. He had a mania for bringing in
new missionaries for the church to support. We already had twice as
many as we could properly relate to, and our support was spread so
thin that we really weren’t much help to any of them. This man
wanted to bring in two or three new ones every year! Mary Charlotte
had her purse snatched as she was about to enter her doctor’s
office, and this had shaken her up. It was evident that Homestead was
deteriorating and the steady influx of Cubans, Haitians, other
Latins, as well as blacks was slowly changing the complexion of the
society from the kind we were used to. The crime level was steadily
increasing, as Miami was recognized nationally as the drug capital of
the US. All of these ideas seemed to come to a head in August, and we
decided to start looking on the west coast of Florida. Mary Charlotte
had a friend that had recently settled in Cape Coral, and she had
heard good reports about it from others, so that was at the top of
our list. We did look at the huge development of Sun City Center,
near Tampa, but it didn’t appeal to either of us. We wanted to
be near a PCA church, but that was not a limitation, as there are
many on the west coast.
We
visited our friends from our church in Maryland, Harry and Libby
Shafer (see left), in Cape Coral on our way to Englewood to
visit Mary Jo and Clyde, and decided to look at houses on our return.
The very first one we looked at greatly appealed to both of us, and
before we left we made a deposit on it. Our offer was $4500 less than
asking and we wanted a 3-month closing date, which we thought would
allow us time to sell our Homestead house. The owners accepted our
time but compromised on the price and we had a deal by early
September. I began to get our house prettied up for showing, and
placed it with a realtor in mid-September. The very first people that
looked at it made us an offer. We agreed on a price, but they wanted
a 4-month escrow, as the wife was expecting in late December. Also
they were buying under VA rules, which required us to pay the
“points” (3% of selling price), and they were making only
a $1,000 down payment. If the VA appraiser didn’t like the
price, he could void the deal. I didn’t think we should tie up
the house for so long with so many uncertainties, so we turned down
the offer. That was the last offer for nearly six months! We had to
borrow the full price of our new house at 13% interest, using our
stock as collateral. But move we did on December 11, 1989, to 4008 SE
Second Avenue, Cape Coral FL 33904.
I must confess that I have
agonized over the question of God’s approval. Was I running out
on a situation in the church, just because I didn’t like some
of the set-up? Was our desire to be closer to my sisters the major
reason, or was it a smokescreen? We had real problems in the
following year, and I wondered if they were indications of God’s
displeasure. It is difficult to know the answers to problems like
these, as our God does not communicate as on a long-distance
telephone. I have achieved peace of mind about these matters, for the
reason that we have been able to cope. God does not promise to spare
those of us that believe in Him from the usual problems of this life,
but He does promise to enable us to cope with them, and we have.
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