Category Archives: Africa

Well it is beginning to get to the scary stage of travel.  For me the most nerve frazzling,  getting all the documents and tickets in order.  So this morning I sent off  my fortune for the tickets.  And I’ve got forms for one set of visa’s and am working on the other forms.  Shots are in order and passport photos are going to be next up on the schedule. 

This stuff is way harder on me than the thoughts of actually being in the Congo.  That’s just home and people I know.  But I hate the bureaucracy and all the details of getting there.

Even speaking at our church conference’s annual meeting next weekend will be a piece of cake compared to this paperwork!

provided we get our tickets and our visas.  A friend sent us this story.  It’s a bit long but I couldn’t get the link to work to just direct you to the original.  So here it is in full.  The river – that is how we first travelled into the heart of Congo ourselves.

Hopes and Tears of Congo Flow in Its Mythic River

April 21, 2004
 By SOMINI SENGUPTA

ON THE CONGO RIVER, Congo – The river is the life and
memory of this country.

On the muddy banks of Kisangani, the river releases a man
who risked cholera and crocodiles and spent three months on
a decrepit barge – all for a chance to travel a thousand
miles to sell, at long last, a sack of plastic ladies
shoes.

Outside Mbandaka, where the river trips over the Equator,
it glances up at the shell of a dictator’s unfinished
palace, now home to a pair of cows.

In a hidden creek in the hard-knocks capital, Kinshasa, the
river hears the screams of an unwanted girl. Her father
banished her to the water, believing that she was a witch.

Today, as this country tries to knit itself together after
a half-decade of war that ended last year, the river is
witness to Congo’s slow, aching rebirth.

It is both symbol and substance of the country’s
reunification, and the life it nurtures on its banks shows
the enormousness of the task.

A power-sharing government has been installed, but the
authority of the state has yet to reach old rebel fiefs.
There is no national army to speak of, only gunmen who
remain loyal to rival warlords.

Peace still eludes pockets of the nation, like the
mineral-rich Ituri region. Ethnic Hutu militias, some
responsible for the killing frenzy in neighboring Rwanda in
1994, squirrel away in the eastern Kivu hills.

Not least, most everything has stopped working. Schools,
hospitals and a functioning legal system are but a memory.
Roads, train tracks and turbines must be rebuilt. Today the
river, coursing 2,700 miles, is the country’s principal
highway.

Mighty and mythic, it carries everyone and everything:
hyacinths, memories, traders, the dead.

Once, people here called it the Nzere, or the river that
swallows all rivers. It could be called the river that
swallows all stories. A long legacy of greed and suffering
is inscribed on its back, from the brutal rubber empire of
a Belgian king in the late 19th century to Congo’s latest
war of partition and plunder.

That war killed an estimated 3.3 million people, mostly
through disease and starvation. It sliced the country into
pieces as three major factions, along with an array of
militias and foreign sponsors, scrambled for Congo’s
riches. And it broke the river, the country’s spinal
column, into bits.

Last July, on the heels of the peace accord, the river
reopened and the first commercial barge crawled up, loaded
with cement, fuel and hope. Villagers lined the shore. They
scrambled up the tributaries to have a look.

“I tell you, it was a grand welcome, like it was Jesus
coming!” recalled Antoine Bawe, 48, the captain of one of
those first barges.

This evening, as dusk darkened the river at Kisangani, Mr.
Bawe, fresh from his fifth journey upstream, sat slapping
mosquitoes on the long, flat back of his vessel. By this
hour, his barge had become a riverside saloon, buzzing with
the supple beats of Ndombolo and the clinking of brown
bottles of Primus.

Ndombolo and Primus. Music and beer. During the war, those
two things defied partition. They unified the Congolese,
all along the river.

A Slow Current

Today the barges that crawl up and down the Congo River,
between Kisangani and Kinshasa, are the most vivid symbols
of the country’s slow reawakening. For ordinary traders
like Gerald Mutuku, the shoe salesman, they represent a
long-awaited lifeline.

Even so, his journey upriver to Kisangani – a trip that
should ordinarily take a couple of weeks – went on for
nearly three months.

The tugboat engine broke down twice. The barge got banged
up on sand reefs. At least Mr. Mutuku, 63, was lucky not to
suffer the fate of so many others, on so many other
crumbling barges, that capsize and dump their passengers
into the mouths of crocodiles.

For a moment, on the glorious Sunday of Mr. Mutuku’s
arrival, it seemed almost worth it. No sooner had he
stepped ashore in Kisangani than he was mobbed. With
nothing coming in from Kinshasa for so long, the market
women descended on his wares, eagerly inspecting his sack
of pink and green plastic shoes as though it were Christmas
morning.

Early last century, men made ivory fortunes in this trading
town. Trucks rumbled into the market, ferrying potatoes and
rice from the interior. Trains departed from an elegant
riverside railroad station to get around the impassable
rapids upriver.

About the only way to bring goods to the river now is by
bicycle. They cut through the bush with sacks of rice on
the back, bananas on the handlebars, pedaled by porters who
drip sweat from their eyelids like giant raindrops on the
dry dirt paths.

The trains have long stopped in their tracks. At the old
station, ferns have forced their way into a first-class
cabin. The railroad chief, Emile S. Utshudi, has turned
engine parts into a grain mill. He says it is how he makes
a living. He has not been paid in six years.

“In the minds of the population, it should be a new start,
a new regime that’s just and prosperous,” Mr. Utshudi said.
“Me, I too hope it’s a new moment, but I have to tell you,
it’s the end of our sleep, but we haven’t yet woken up.”

Mr. Utshudi, ever the bureaucrat, keeps a desk, stacked
high with papers enumerating the needs of his beloved
railroad, inside the stately colonial-era post office.
Tucked away here, in a dank second-floor chamber, is a
memento of the country’s most famous postal worker. It is a
salmon-colored copy of an employee newsletter, L’Écho
Postal, edited by the man who became Congo’s anticolonial
leader and then in 1960, until his assassination a year
later, its first and only democratically elected prime
minister – Patrice E. Lumumba.

That such a thing exists at all, in a post office with no
glass panes in its windows nor any stamps, is nothing short
of astonishing – except that all that remains is its cover.
The pages are gone.

Like a sprawling memorial to greed, Kisangani today stands
on layers of splendor and ruin. The palaces of Mobutu Sese
Seko, the American-backed dictator who ruled for more than
30 years, still line the river, as relics of meglomania.
Policemen and their wives are squatting in one. Another,
farther down river, has been put to use as a barn.

Mr. Utshudi remembers the parade of rival armies that
pummeled his city. Mr. Mobutu’s soldiers battled – and lost
– to the rebel forces of Laurent Kabila in 1997. Rwandan
and Ugandan armies came in 1999 and 2000. One massacre
followed another. Once, Mr. Utshudi said, he saw the bodies
of 15 children floating in the river.

Today a new Congolese army is being cobbled together from
the remains of the old fighting factions. Under the
tutelage of soldiers from Belgium, the former colonial
ruler, ex-enemies are learning to pitch tents, hold riot
shields and march in unison.

A unified army is a centerpiece of the peace deal, and the
transitional government has divvied up top military posts
among leaders of the former factions. Yet the chain of
command is tenuous, at best, and critical questions remain:
where the soldiers will be deployed, how they will be paid,
fed and equipped, and whose command they will follow.

In recent months, gun battles have broken out between
loyalists of
the government in Kinshasa and the ex-rebel
army in the east. Military installations in the capital
have been attacked by assailants whose motives remain
unclear.

Each side has held onto its weapons. Each challenge is an
invitation to return to bloodletting. The war may be over,
but trust has yet to be won.

With demobilization largely a dream, soldiers still prowl
along the river, still with empty bellies. Downstream from
Kisangani, before the river touches the Equator, they
linger on in a village called Lolanga.

During the war, this was the rear base of government
forces. For years, with nothing coming in from Kinshasa,
villagers up in the hidden creeks had holed up in the
jungle, barefoot or, worse still, naked. Civilians
abandoned their fields and fled into the bush.

Today, cassava has been planted for the first time in
years. The market, the most reliable barometer of war and
peace across the continent, bustles with pigs and plastic
flip-flops.

But the gunmen – hungry, greedy, armed – still hover in
sufficient numbers to intimidate the villagers, extract
their hard-earned produce and keep them quiet. “If the
soldiers aren’t paid, they are going to find some other
way,” said one villager, Ambrose Makele.

Hazardous Conditions

Farther downriver, in the fishing
village of Bikaba, the women say they have grown accustomed
to giving soldiers a portion of their day’s catch, or a
basket of their day’s harvest of corn or sugar cane. At
least now, they hasten to add, they can plant a little corn
and cane.

During the war, they gathered roots to curb their hunger.
At least now, they say, they can row up to market and sell
cassava bread or smoked monkey. On a good week, the river
sends news of a barge coming.

But the terror has not stopped. Imbombo Boleki, 22,
described how only a few days before men in uniform arrived
in his village and ordered him to row their canoe upstream.

There was no pay involved, nor much choice. Had he refused,
he said, he would be beaten with a strip of hippopotamus
hide, called a chicotte. That is what happened to other men
who rebuffed the soldiers’ demands. That is what has
happened before.

At the turn of the last century, the rubber empire of King
Leopold II of Belgium also built itself on forced labor
along the riverbanks. Those who failed to meet the king’s
rubber quota were beaten with the same chicotte. Or they
had their hands cut off and tossed into the water. Adam
Hochschild records this history in his 1998 book, “King
Leopold’s Ghost.” The river, he writes, swallowed them,
too.

“My father took me to the river,” said Alfie, who is 7. “He
said I was a witch.” With that, she burst into tears.

Who knows whether her father, whom she described as a
soldier, wanted her dead or simply wanted to get rid of
her. All Alfie recalls is gasping for breath and being
scooped out of the river by a gang of street children –
outcasts like her – who lived on its banks in the capital,
Kinshasa, where the river winds toward its end.

The other children brought her to an orphanage run by Maguy
Makusudi, who held her in her arms and translated her shy,
halting words from Lingala to English.

Alfie is small for her age, frequently withdrawn, and
hardly unusual among Congolese of her generation. Anecdotes
from children’s advocates suggest that across the country,
more and more children are accused of sorcery, blamed for
the ills that befall their kin in what remains a time of
unfathomable hardship.

The grown-ups who care for them see it as a barometer of
national despair. When nothing else explains the gnawing
misery of daily life, the supernatural steps in. Sickness,
death, joblessness, hunger – all can be blamed on
witchcraft. Children, defenseless by definition, can be the
easiest scapegoats.

Difficult children can be the most vulnerable: the sickly,
the precocious, the retarded, the rebellious. Often, their
trouble starts when someone at home falls ill, or a mother
remarries, or a breadwinner walks out the door. Sometimes,
prayers are recited for the child witches. Sometimes, the
children are beaten, forced to swallow herbs or drink
gasoline. Finally, they are left to rot on the streets.

Ms. Makusudi’s orphanage, a row of rooms with flimsy foam
mattresses on the floors, is a gallery of cast-out girls.
There is a girl with tiny, shorn-off toes who remembers
watching her mother put poison in her dinner. There is a
rebellious teenager whose family turned to a revival
church, seeking her exorcism. There is Alfie, whose parents
cannot be found.

Struggling Upstream

It is impossible to tell how many children have been turned
out, only that they have swelled the ranks of kids who
sleep under the shop awnings of Kinshasa and pour into
orphanages like Ms. Makusudi’s. Rare in decades past, the
trend is attributed by social workers to the war’s economic
toll and the rise of revival churches that regard the
quotidian misery of Congolese life as the work of the
devil.

It does not hurt that accusing a child of sorcery helps to
get rid of an extra mouth to feed.

“For years, people don’t see any hope,” lamented a Catholic
priest named Zbigniew Orlikowski. “They don’t want to face
reality, because it doesn’t work.”

The challenges that lie ahead for Congo lap against the
riverbank.

When the ex-rebel leaders arrived in Kinshasa last year to
take part in the power-sharing government, they brought
hordes of soldiers – their own soldiers – and installed
their headquarters along the river, the city’s prime real
estate – and its best escape route.

Jean-Pierre Bemba, the leader of the faction called
Movement for Congolese Liberation and now one of Congo’s
four vice presidents, still keeps his private helicopter
parked in the back garden of his whitewashed mansion, just
in case. On a steamy afternoon not long ago, his soldiers
lounged under its shade.

Farther along the river, the
rebel-chief-turned-vice-president Azarias Ruberwa, of
another former militia, Rally for Congolese Democracy, also
sits under the protection of his loyalists.

Joseph Kabila Jr., an ex-major general in his late father
Laurent’s rebel army and now the elusive thirtysomething
president of the transitional government, remains
cloistered among his own.

Troops loyal to all three men stand accused of a horrifying
list of abuses, from mutilation to mass killings,
cannibalism to widespread rape. Whether and how justice
will be sought for these crimes remains among Congo’s
principal challenges.

The courts do not yet function. No truth and reconciliation
process is under way. There is talk of an inquiry by the
new Hague-based International Criminal Court, but
trepidation, too, about whether it would upset the delicate
balance of peace. Besides, all three men are potential
contenders in the next presidential elections.

Under the peace deal, those elections are supposed to be
held in 2005, but one would be hard pressed to find any
hint of preparations. Nationality laws have yet to be
negotiated, a potentially prickly matter in such a vast and
diverse country. There has been no effort to count eligible
voters, let alone educate citizens about their rights and
obligations. Few Congolese can remember ever going to the
polls; the last elections were held in 1960.

On the shores of K
isangani, in the riverside saloon of Mr.
Bawe’s barge, a young man named Coco Bombenga wondered
aloud whether his country’s leaders were even interested in
the business of democracy. As Ndombolo and Primus flowed,
Mr. Bombenga hectored a foreign journalist to remind the
world of his wishes.

Sure, he said, peace had reopened the river, and people
could now buy and sell fish. But what about his hunger to
elect his own rulers, he demanded.

“If we can only live to eat, that’s not enough,” he said.
“We are not animals.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/21/international/africa/21CONG.html?ex=1083532765&ei=1&en=21569c2c6338e5dc

I always laugh at my old high school chemistry teacher when I tell the story of how he blew up his experiment.  In my head I recall a loud explosion and glass flying past one of the students unfortunate enough to sit in the front row of lab benches.   I have no idea what he was trying to teach us.  Woke us up though.

Sometimes the unexpected happens.

Last night, when I told Leo that I was trying to put some of my old Congo memories down in writing, he asked me if I remembered the incident with the hydrogen peroxide. 

Yeah, I do. 

Hydrogen peroxide is a good medication to use in the treatment of mouth infections.  It is also cheap.  And I knew that in a place where antibiotics were scarce, this could be a good way to treat some infections.  We use this medication in infections where the infecting bacteria prefer to live and grow in an absence of oxygen.  That is because, the medication when applied to infected tissue, gives off oxygen in a mass of tiny bubbles.  The bacteria are killed then by the exposure to the oxygen. 

But H₂O₂ was difficult to find in Kinshasa. 

That should have been a clue.

We searched till we found two large bottles of this seemingly scarce liquid.  It came in large brown GLASS bottles.  I was happy and we found a place to store them – up on the top shelf of the closet, out of Eric’s reach.  We didn’t want him accidentally breaking those bottles! 

As you can imagine, it gets warm in Kinshasa in the mid-afternoon.  And heat rises – right?  Now, I knew that but I did not think about what effect the heat might be having on my closed bottles of hydrogen peroxide.  As H2O2 is heated, it also deteriorates into its component parts -oxygen and water.  And it expands.  Boy how it expands!!!!

We were staying at the Protestant guest house – CAP(Centre d’Acqueille Protestante).  The accommodations were small independent units.  Two sleeping rooms with a shared bathroom between.  Not much room.  A crib too and lots of stuff – all the belongings we had brought from Belgium and things we had picked up in Kinshasa for our work up at Karawa.  The afternoon heat had driven us out of doors.  Fortunately.

I have done some really stupid things in my life.  Usually with perfectly good intentions.  By the time I am finished doing them, I am either rolling my eyes at myself or someone dear to me is laughing – in which case I am likely not.

I learned a few lessons that day. 

One – Hydrogen peroxide is explosive! 

Two God has unique ways of cluing us northern missionaries in to the facts of life in the tropics. 

Three We may provide God with a good laugh every now and then but he still takes care to protect us. 

By the time we had picked up the broken glass and tiny bubbles everywhere, we were laughing too.

We never bothered to buy that stuff again!

Ten years ago, I can remember listening in horror as the genocide began to play out in Rwanda.  The phone conversation of a woman who had been involved in human rights as she heard the mobs approaching, the sights of slaughter. 

Ten years ago today.  Thanks for the news link, Jordon

Today Leo got notification that the book he ordered by Dallaire J’ai Serré la Main du Diable was ready to be picked up.  I wonder how difficult this will be for me to attempt to read in French.  I might just give it a try – or buy it in English.

Birthdays are a good time to bring out the memories.  They seem to pop out of nowhere in fact.  Just sitting around the table with kids and grandchild seems to have that effect on the conversation.

Kieran was sitting in the highchair at the restaurant tonight.  Crackers were scattered all around – tray, seat and floor.  And Grandpa was trying to slip him a few sips of pop that he is NOT ALLOWED to have at his young age.  Grandpa(Leo) began to reminiss about Eric sitting and covering himself with chocolate in his highchair when we lived for a year in Belgium. 

And then the conversation turned to another time – a few years later – and chocolate, and Kieran’s dad (David).

We were on “home assignment” – a euphenism for a good old fashioned furlough from the mission field.  Furlough – the required return to North America after a four year stint on “the field” – in our case Zaire.  It was our first.  Home assignments were so named to give a certain idea that while we were back in North America we were not just lazing around.  Our first was also a time of recovery for Leo as he had contracted TB.  So we were allowed to do regular work instead of travelling around the country in Canada and the US speaking. 

Towards the spring, we were invited to make a trip down to the USA to speak in a few churches in California.  When you have just spent six months in a cold Saskatchewan winter after three years in the tropics, it is not hard to feel the call to go south to speak.  So just before Easter we flew off southward, speaking in several churches which supported our family. 

While we were in the San Francisco area, we made a trip out to Turlock to visit another missionary family.  They had a pool and we were excited about seeing them again too.  On the way, I picked up a bag of those tiny little chocolate bars.  I thought they would be nice for treats for the kids and since they were small, the boys wouldn’t overdo it by having one now and then.  The boys liked chocolate and so it was a real treat for them and a good way to bribe them when they needed it.

That evening David found the bag.  He found it and sat down and ate every last one of those little chocolate bars.  That evening and night he was sick – stuff coming out of both ends! 

We got home a few days later to begin the Easter holidays with our families.  This was the first time the boys had been around to be indulged by the grandparents with Easter candy.  And of course chocolate.  They both got very large chocolate Easter bunnies.  Eric thouroughly enjoyed the attention and the surprise.  David – two at the time – had learned a lesson.  Chocolate makes you sick.  It was several years before time erased those memories of his and he was willing to try chocolate again. 

Tonight we had chocolate cake for my birthday.  I think he is cured but he still remembers the year he refused the chocolate bunny. 

We got the news last night that a good friend of ours and a nurse that worked with Leo for most of the years he did Leprosy work, died yesterday morning in the Congo. 

Kalanda was one of those trustworthy guys that put all he could into doing his work well.  He got to be so good at diagnosing leprosy that he could be driving through a village and spot someone on the side of the road with the disease – early cases, not old burnt out ones with deformities.  Leo trusted his diagnoses and most were confirmed as positive by biopsy. 

Kalanda also cared enough to do a fantastic job of supervising the care and treatment of the leprosy and tuberculosis patients.  The drugs have to be taken consistently over a long period of time and often Kalanda would track patients down to make sure they kept at the treatment till they were cured.

Kalanda succumbed to one of the diseases he helped to treat for so many years – extrapulmonary tuberculosis.  I guess he gave his all.  He leaves behind memories of a man of God doing his best at his work.  Now he has his rest and peace. 

We think nothing of our children trucking off into the woods; building forts with their friends.  Maybe it is part of the North American genetic code, following in the footsteps of our pioneer ancestors.

My children raised in the Congo also had this inclination – from the oldest to the youngest of our biological children.  Our Congolese children seem to have a different pattern – more relationship builders than fort builders. 

Randall’s response to a comment on his photo of dawn breaking, reminded me of an incident involving fort building and my children.

Our oldest son had a strong fort building instinct.  There were a variety of structures; some in trees; some at ground level; some close to home and some far off in locations secret  from me.  Fort building materials were everywhere – grass and sticks and vines and sometimes odd pieces of cast off lumber, screen and nails. 

Our children’s school year was arranged in eight to ten week blocks of time so that in the two week breaks between terms children could travel home to visit parents.  Our children had no where to go – they were at home, but now they were free.  A thirteen year old boy has to make his own entertainment in the Congo so, during the school breaks, life consisted of soccer, hunting and fishing, and sometimes building places to hang out with his two inseparable friends – Massa and Yaunde.  Dad’s motorcycle gave him an additional measure of freedom.

On one of these two week breaks in the year that he was thirteen,  our oldest son provoked a major criminal investigation. 

He was off with his friends, back and forth between home and Zulu for fishing, soccer and who knows what all.  He was safe.  He would let us know where he was going and then he would be gone.  We had our own busy work schedules to keep up with.  This particular vacation he and his friends worked on building a fort in one of the large mango trees in our front yard.  They also spent time hanging out in another fort that they were building up at the far end of the airstrip, on the road to Zulu.

Around this time, there were a string of deaths among elderly women of the area.  People were uptight not knowing why these women had died.  In that culture, there are no accidental deaths or deaths from “natural” causes.  They could have been murders – in any case everyone looked on them as highly unusual.  The police began to investigate.

By the time school was back in full swing, rumors began to fly.  One of the grass fires had burned the area around the airstrip and someone had stumbled on “the murderers lair”.  A large defunct termite hill had been dug out with steps and a ledge to sit around the edge.  Steps led up to the top of the mound.  Sardine cans were scattered around.  The investigators were sure that this was a hideout; the steps to the top of the mound being a lookout over the airfield. 

Eric’s friends were very aware of all the hullabaloo going on.  They were terrified.  This murder’s hideout was none other than their fort.  They came in fear to Eric and in turn to us.  We were sort of amused but aware of the possibility for wild rumors to become out of control.  We knew something had to be done before the whole thing got out of hand – and it was doing that rapidly.

There was some official function coming up and when Leo went to it the military lieutenant in charge of the investigation was present.  Leo felt he had better inform this fellow of the real story behind the existence of the fort.  The lieutenant was upset at first that Leo was discussing this “top secret” military matter till Leo explained it all to him.  Leo and the boys had to go down to the local military headquarters and make statements.  If you can imagine the efficiency of that!  Leo supplied the paper for the clerk to use to take the statements.  Several pages of one fingered peck and find typing later, the boys were free to go. 

The lieutenant was somehow amazed at the  kids “military” knowledge.  He was never convinced that all little kids in North America are inclined to build forts given a stand of trees and some available stuff to build with.  A contingent of several officers came up to our yard to gaze with amazement at the tree house in the mango tree. 

The murderer?  If there ever was one – was never caught.

Have I ever told you how I decided to go into Dentistry?  I get questioned about this a lot and find it hard to explain.  So, usually, I say It’s a long story” and leave it at that. 

The question arose again, a couple of weeks ago, as I was once again the patient and I told my partner’s assistant how bad a dental patient I was when I was a kid.  I was a dentist’s nightmare, hating needles” as much as anyone, neglecting to look after my teeth, and being a worse patient than most.   So once again I said, It’s a long story.” 

How do I tell someone who only has a superficial understanding of God, that God told me to do this, that He called” me to this career, without sounding completely loony? That this is my ministry, my vocation?  That a voice spoke?  That I did actually follow God in this a career choice that was way out of my range of choices?  Heck, there is hardly any way to tell this to anyone non-Christians will think I’m weird and Christians may think I’m arrogant.

But the fact is; it is true.  This was one of the times when God did speak to me, fairly directly, in a way that I knew it was specific to me and specifically about what I should do.  It was maybe the third time in my life that I heard Him so plainly.  The first time I was four He called me to be His child.  The second time I was thirteen and He called me to go wherever He sent me.  Hearing Him call me to choose a specific career was not at all something I had been searching for but there He was anyway speaking to me.   

I was working at camp for the summer as a cook or a counselor that part of the memory is fuzzy and doesn’t really matter.  The missionary speaker for the camp was Harvey Widman a huge man with a bald head full of stories that he told with his own wild sense of humor.  He was easy to listen to.  So there I was listening, engrossed in his stories.  Hearing him tell how God wanted us to consider missions as an option.  Then he listed off the various careers that God might use us in.  When he said dentist” it was spoken to me.  God had somehow singled me out and planted his wish right in the middle of my mind. 

I began to prepare.  My dentist must have been amazed at my sudden change in attitude towards his profession.  He was a Christian so I wonder what he heard from God or saw in me to make the necessary recommendations to the college.  Before I knew it I was in pre-dent and although I was not a brilliant student, I obtained one of ten spots in the new college at the U. of  Saskatchewan.  That in itself was incredible.  I was extremely shy and reserved.  Maybe they were looking for women who were not rabid feminists someone they could tolerate who knows, but we, the two women in the class, were both daughters of the clergy.  Maybe it was the great manual dexterity on the DAT (as if!!!).  Or the recommendation.  Or maybe…  I knew that if I was accepted that it was definitely God. 

And it was.  And for the past thirty two years it has been(for the most part) a fantastic time of letting my hands be His hands at work, in a profession I thoroughly enjoy.  Half of my career has been spent as a dentist in the Congo and most of the other half in Prince Albert.  Time off has been scarce one year as a non-resident alien in the USA, a few weeks off before and after the babies were born and a few months here and there moving or adjusting to moves and evacuations.  It’s been a good career and I still have a few years left, I think.  My profession and any ability I have to do it well has been His gift to me. 

And now…well, He seems to be calling again to go back.  That was one of the things I heard from Him at the weekend retreat.  Back to people and a place that I learned to love.  Back to practicing and teaching dentistry at Karawa for a couple of weeks.  Back a little more mature physically and spiritually.  It will be such a short visit but I think it will be good.

As I am getting ready to return to the Congo for my first time since we had to evacuate in 1991, I am remembering.  Some of the memories are funny, some sad, some just, well, remembrances.  Over the next few months till I go I will share some of the memories.  Not every day but maybe once in awhile.  So here goes…

 

A Little Calcium for the … Egg Shells

 

Songo and I had worked together for a number of years.  Because I had taught him dentistry, we were pretty close in how we diagnosed dental disease a must for carrying out a WHO (World Health Organization) survey.  We had been in the village for about three days and since the survey for the WHO study was pretty much finished, we thanked the village by attending to some of the communities dental needs.  This meant extractions since we were working under the trees, in the open air with the sun for light. 

 

Songo was my first real dental student.  He finished secondary school but failed to pass the difficult state exams and did not have the financial resources to either go back and repeat another year of school, pay to take the exams again or bribe anyone to improve his marks.  So as many guys in his situation, he had begun to teach school himself because teachers were always in demand.   I had asked around about a promising new grad who might be interested in learning dentistry by studying and by apprenticeship.  He had been interested and over the years as we studied and learned together, I passed on to him all I ever knew.  And he in turn taught me some valuable lessons mostly about patience and tact and trust.  He was a God send.

 

Extracting teeth has a range of difficulty from very simple to extremely hard.  Most require a bit of effort and a lot of technique. Working in a place without access to x-rays can result in some surprises but most of the time you develop a feel for the tooth and sense when it is going to move or resist all efforts to get it out.  So a tooth that resisted all our efforts to get it to move with an elevator would most likely get sent away to the hospital where we would have more tools to attack it with.

 

So Songo and I lined up our patients and began to work there in our portable chairs with our boiling pot of water for sterilization in between.  Natural lighting, natural air conditioning and free entertainment the rest of the village, cats, dogs, goats and chickens watched and cheered on the poor patients. 

 

Now we know that calcium is necessary for strong bones and teeth and egg shells.  In the center of the Congo far from pulverized seashells and other sources of the mineral, one collects and dries the old shells from the eggs and feeds them back to the flock.  And I am sure that chickens pick up the odd bone that has been carelessly left uneaten by a human.  On this particular day, a new source of calcium showed up teeth. 

 

As I proceeded to lever the tooth of one patient from side to side, the root suddenly let go.  The tooth shot out of my forceps, flew through the air and almost landed on the ground among the crowd.  Almost.  But it never hit the ground.  A scrawny chicken looking for that coveted bit of calcium must have been eyeing what we were up to.  It caught that tooth in mid air and, as fast as it had reacted to catch it, disappeared into the grass surrounding the village.  Now that to me is an amazing bit of recycling!