He Gave Us a Valley

Helen Roseveare

• Publisher: Christian Focus Publication
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781845509361

1

Laying Foundations

We chugged steadily across Lake Albert in the small steamer. The mosquitoes were ferocious, and yet unable to imprison me within the butter-muslin walls that surrounded the low bunk in my insufferably hot cabin. I leant on the bulwarks, gazing across the dark ripples, piercing through the night to get my first glimpse of the mountains of what was then the Belgian Congo.

A deep excitement surged through me as the earliest grey of dawn touched the peaks. Was it really possible, after all the years of training and planning and expecting, that at last the true adventure was to begin? I was twenty-eight, with a university degree in general medicine and surgery, from a good, happy home background, stepping out into a new beginning. It was 14 March 1953.

Eight years before, in my first year at university, I had met some Christian students whose quality of life had so challenged me that I was forced to face up to the demands of Christianity. After three months of listening and questioning and watching, various circumstances led to my spending a week at a houseparty in London during the Christmas vacation. I turned up at Mount Hermon College to join a gathering of keen Christian girls and young women, training as officers for young people’s camps and houseparties the following summer. I just didn’t fit: I didn’t talk their language. I couldn’t understand their spiritual jargon—but I could understand their happiness and friendliness.

I soon found that I enjoyed the orderly Bible study sessions, and I started to read avidly through Paul’s letter to the Christians at Rome. The truth began to penetrate my thick skull—it was true! It was no myth. It was no out-dated fairy-tale. This God was real, and true, and vital. He cared. He cared for me personally and wanted—fantastic realization!—my friendship. By the end of the week I had capitulated to the clear facts, the obvious reasonableness and the exciting challenge of the gospel. God loved me enough to die for me: would I say thank you? I would and I did. God loved me enough to have a job for me to do in His service: would I sign on? I would and I did. Perhaps it all seemed a bit of a gamble at the start. I knew so little; but I knew I wanted peace of heart and purpose for living—and no-one else had offered me both. No other religion or political group even hinted at a way of deliverance from sin, a fresh start with a clean slate, a new indwelling power to enable me to achieve the goal. A Christian leader at the houseparty wrote a verse in my newly-bought Bible: ‘That I may know Christ, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings’ (Phil. 3: 10). I went to read the verse in its setting that evening, and was tremendously challenged at Paul’s dramatic way of stating what I was beginning to feel:

But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ, and be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith: that I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death; if by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead.

Phil. 3: 7–11

A terrific gamble! What if it didn’t pay off? What if it was all an illusion, unreal and untrue? Wasn’t it almost too fantastic to believe anyway? Wouldn’t one be dubbed a religious fanatic?

Despite the crowding in of such thoughts, I was amazed at myself. Within minutes of a great personal transaction between myself and God, whereby I simply thanked Him for dying for me, believed Him for His forgiveness, and accepted His invitation to serve Him, I had already an ability to laugh at these apparently-specious arguments to put me off. I knew with an unshakable, assurance that God was real, that His salvation was true, that I was accepted by Him into His family and His service. God’s orderly array of facts in the Bible, plus the consistent witness of the unhypocritical, outright good lives of my new friends, plus now the new ingredient of the persuasiveness of His Spirit in my heart, won the day for me. A great sense of thrill, mingled with a growing sense of privilege, took possession of me.

It took six and a half years to get my medical degree, six months in a missionary training centre, six months in Belgium studying French and tropical medicine—and at last, the five week boat and train journey to East Africa and across half of the great continent to the border of Congo.

Then started eleven extraordinary years of hard work and happiness, mingled with heart-breaks and disillusionments, heights of apparent success alternating with sloughs of despair; yet the net result of all this, judged by the world’s standards, was not particularly impressive.

By August 1964 a small 14-acre plot of land in the great Ituri forest of the Congo basin had been turned into a 100-bed hospital and maternity complex with all the necessary ancillary buildings and services. Many of the actual buildings were already there before ever I arrived: many of our team of workmen had been trained by previous missionaries. Subtracting the inherited start from the visible finish, it might seem that we had done very little in those eleven years.

I suppose one hundred patients underwent surgery each year, some of whom would otherwise have died; one hundred young men and women were trained as hospital orderlies and assistant midwives, all of whom would otherwise have remained in relative ignorance; many thousands of babies were born, who would have been born anyway, but with a 50% increase in the chance of survival; many tens of thousands of sick were treated, scores of whom would certainly have died without our help. But there were moments when I was tempted to ask if this was enough to warrant the enormous outlay of energy and strength.

Individually, and as a team, the medical group involved in the project had learnt a lot over the years. But would that accumulated knowledge justify the expenditure involved and make the whole thing worth while?

The first of many missionary-lessons were taught and learnt right at the start in 1953 at Ibambi. Starting with nothing but an upturned tea-chest, a camp table and a stool, a primus stove and a saucepan, I discovered what it was to be fenced in with difficulties. With no helper, black or white, so much that should have been done to maintain medical standards just proved impossible. Good training told me that a patient with a high fever and chills, painful eyes and profuse sweating was probably suffering from malaria. Treatment in those early days was quinine in a suitable dose according to the weight of the patient, but only after the diagnosis had been confirmed by the laboratory, by seeing the parasite in a blood-smear in the microscope. This microscopic procedure, even in an adequately equipped laboratory, would take a well trained technician at least five minutes. With fifty or more patients daily showing symptoms of malaria, this would have added over fours hours to the day’s work. With no electricity, these four hours would have to be worked into the programme during daylight. Yet besides these fifty malarial patients, there were probably fifty others with chest complaints, fifty more with abdominal pain and diarrhoea, and countless more with ulcers and sores. Chest patients needed ten minutes each for history taking, examination and diagnosis, even without laboratory examination of sputum or radiological examination of lungs. Yet they probably received a cursory glance. Each abdominal sufferer needed careful stool examination besides all other routines, possibly some fifteen minutes each…

The day simply wasn’t long enough. And so malarial symptoms prompted treatment with quinine, with a quick estimate of weight and no laboratory confirmation. I actually asked God to give me a gift of discernment so that I could pick out the one or two really sick patients with pneumonia or tuberculosis from the line of people with coughs and colds. Similarly, one built up through experience an almost uncanny sense which sorted out the roundworm sufferers from the hookworms, and the amoebic dysentery sufferers from those with bacillary infection—and God overruled.

When I began to realize that over 200 patients were being treated daily, and record cards showed that probably 75% or more were responding immediately to the initial treatment given, I began to see that it was not necessarily a lowering of standards to treat malarial symptoms without laboratory confirmation: rather it was a necessary adaptation to circumstances, with a change of method to achieve the same goal, and with somewhat more realistic hopes of success. These same 200 patients daily, having received something that aided their physical pain to subside, were then much more open to listen to the preaching of the gospel.

Then the first students came. What a motley crew they were! Yokana and Mangadima both from seventh or eighth standard (the equivalent of first or second year at an English secondary school); Mapuno and Bakiogomu and two other lads probably from fourth-grade primary schools, and non-achievers at that; and then Elizabeth Naganimi with no formal education at all, but a bright, keen spirit and a desire to learn and serve. So my second round of difficulties started. I was not a trained teacher, I had no course material; I was going to try to lecture in a mixture of two ‘foreign’ languages, French and Swahili, neither of which was the first language of student or teacher, and lastly, I was not myself a nurse, and therefore did not know the subject-matter that I hoped to teach.

Again God came to my rescue, and slowly we learnt to overcome this second hurdle. For the first eighteen months of our new training school, we wended our way day by day, with moment-by-moment improvisations to meet each immediate need. God taught me to teach as the need arose. There were huge and hideous ulcers every day in the clinic, so I taught how to cleanse them, curette them, treat them and bandage them. A patient came in with burning fever, and so we launched into a lecture on how to use, read and understand a thermometer. In the ward, a post-natal mother developed a high temperature, so we taught the dangers and causes of infection, and how we could prevent as well as treat them. A baby was brought in with broncho-pneumonia, and I demonstrated the use of the stethoscope and how to arrive at a diagnosis. An endless stream of patients, with a seemingly limitless supply of abdominal symptoms, provided us with material to discover the use of the microscope and to learn to recognize every possible species of intestinal parasite.

Students and lecturer learnt together and language very soon ceased to bother us. We created our own course material (aided eventually by the notes of a senior missionary health officer) and went at our own pace. The day of reckoning lay ahead, when we went together for the State final examinations. I for one was intensely nervous, and feared the ditch beyond the hurdle would be our undoing. But the students, in blissful ignorance of what was involved, confident that they knew what I had taught them, and assuming that this must be sufficient, went through with their heads high. By dint of interpreting French questions and Swahili answers, the examiners were eventually convinced that all but one of our group would do good rather than harm, if let loose in a rural dispensary; and we went home rejoicing with six Government stamped and signed certificates, and six ‘medical evangelists’ were launched into our new medical service.

There were other difficulties too, on a more personal level, regarding my relationships with my fellow-missionaries. Early on these problems led to loneliness and a sense of insecurity, of not being wanted or welcomed or quite trusted by the fellowship. This, combined with the work-load and consequent inability to take a night off-duty, or to go away for a week-end, brought out in me an irritability and shortness of temper that often caused me considerable loss of sleep. I’d always had a hasty temper, but this had largely been under control for the previous eight years, since my conversion to Christ. Now the hot and angry word would burst out again, before I could control it, and to my shame. Patients who came to the dining-room window while we were at the midday meal would get a sharp word from me to ‘go to the dispensary, and not bring your germs to our home’—and a sad look would come to the faces of senior missionaries, who treated every visitor to their home with kindliness and respect.

Evangelist Danga, in charge of the catechists’ training course and the workmen’s programme at Ibambi, took me to task for this un-Christlike behaviour. ‘Don’t excuse yourself. Call sin sin, and temper temper. Then face up to the fact that your white skin makes you no different to the rest of us. You need His cleansing and forgiveness, His infilling and indwelling, the same as we do. If you can only show us Doctor Helen, you might as well go home: the people need to see Jesus.’

During my eighteen months at Ibambi I was enormously helped by Danga and the student catechists, by Bakimani and the Bible School students, and by Pastor Ndugu and teams of church elders from various areas of the Ibambi church, to put up two large wards and outbuildings around our dispensary. They taught me to use an axe; to choose the right tree to resist termites and rotting; to select good clean grass and durable fibres for thatching. I learnt how to plan the layout of the building with regard for the prevailing wind, the slope of the roof with regard for the tropical rainfall. I knew how to dig out lime from the right forest streams, and to make whitewash for the walls, not only for its aesthetic look but for its disinfectant value. Together they taught me in the evenings, around the fires, to slice well-dried bamboo and to bind it correctly to make strong, resilient beds, and to weave palm-fronds for roofing and grasses for mats.

Then in 1955, following the graduation day of our first class of students, the medical team was asked to move from Ibambi to Nebobongo, seven miles north. We were asked to take over the care of the maternity and leprosy centres, with the associated orphanage, that Edith Moules had started fifteen years before. Here there were 14 acres of land, sloping down one way or another from a half-mile-long central strip of plateau. Available for immediate use were two brick-built, thatched bungalows for missionaries, similar buildings for maternity care and midwives to the north, and for orphans and widows to the south. A large, unfinished dispensary building half a mile to the west was almost all that was left of the previous thriving colony for the care of leprosy patients, nearly one thousand of whom had been transferred to a Government camp eight miles to the north, or else returned to their forest villages.

So we moved and restarted our medical centre, this time with the outpatients’ clinic in the sitting-room, the pharmacy in the dining-room, and the night nurses’ room in the guest-room of my new bungalow home. We became instantly aware of our urgent need of other arrangements! The smell and the noise by day, the disturbed hours and the ease of theft by night, made life almost intolerable. New buildings were a must. But how? There was no Bible School with its students, no catechists’ school with its workmen, and we did not even have our own church pastor with his team of elders. So who would put up our needed buildings?

I often felt very frustrated by the church arrangements, by which Nebobongo was only an outpost from Ibambi and not a church in its own right. This greatly aggravated the difficulties with regard to buildings. For anything we needed, or for permission to do anything we planned, we had first to apply to Ibambi, which involved a cycle-ride of seven miles of switchback road in all weathers. This became a constant irritant. The danger of a hot, unguarded retort when asked to do a medical trip to some distant outlying place for one of the missionaries, when I felt (possibly unjustly) that they were unwilling to see our need of help at the medical centre, became more and more real.

We were such a small, insignificant team, yet we were asked to carry such a huge and important burden. At first there were only Florence Stebbing and myself as the missionaries involved, with Agoya our evangelist and his wife Taadi, a group of paramedical auxiliary students, pupil midwives, and a handful of men, discharged from treatment in the leprosy care centre during the previous years. None of us had talents or training as builders, plumbers, electricians or mechanics. We learnt by trial and error to make bricks and to fire a kiln: I went to Ibambi to copy in diagram-form their beehive kiln, and then to a local rubber plantation where the Belgian agent had a large, six-firing-hole wet-brick kiln. We discussed the various possibilities, the amounts of firewood necessary for each type, the ease of construction, and, in addition, how to fill in the Government forms needed to authorize the construction as well as to pay the taxes for the firing.

Later again, between clinics and classes, we learnt painfully and slowly the difference between cement and concrete, and how to make each to a consistent quality; how to lay foundations and footings, do corners and bonding, set doors and windows; how to prepare roofing timber and to hoist the triangles and fix the trusses; how to square the corners of the asbestos sheeting and bore the holes for fastening it with nails; how to fix a ridge so that the building did not leak, and the guttering to take advantage of the rainfall.

But it all took time and money; it involved sore hands and blisters; it needed tact and wisdom in handling unskilled labour on nominal wages. And sometimes it was truly hard to see if it was really worth the effort. Through it all, the unskilled labour became at least semi-qualified, to the standard to which the teacher had been able to be taught! This did something for general self-respect and morale, but it also did something in regard to desire and demand for higher wages!

During these years there was the continual problem of responsibilities beyond my training. If the ease with which I responded to the missionary call to service overseas was due in part to my own inherent dread of professional criticism and competition, and the realization that in the heart of the Ituri forest this was unlikely to exist, now there was the horror of responsibility. True, in the medical missionary’s life there is unlikely to be much pressure in the rat-race for promotion. On arrival at Nebobongo I became immediately, in the eyes of the national population and the missionary personnel, if not in my own estimation, the senior consultant surgeon, physician, paediatrician and obstetrician. But there was no comrade, no colleague, with whom to discuss cases or to share problems. Always I had to make the decisions of life and death by myself: and I knew only too well how inadequate was my training for this vast responsibility.

In particular, the burden of care for white colleagues weighed on me. Not that I ever wished to treat white any differently from black: far from it! But my African patients did not know enough to be critical.They trusted me unquestioningly and loved me unreservedly. They knew instinctively that by God’s grace I would do for them the very best in my limited power, and that this was better for them than no care, or even than witch-doctor care. European patients, however, knew what they wanted, and what they expected: they had home standards with which to compare our frail and insignificant service.

Then these same Europeans stopped coming to me. Missionaries and tradesmen alike started to make the long, tiresome journey northeast to Dr Kleinsmidt, or the even longer journey south to Dr Becker. And I allowed jealousy to creep in and increase my frustration. How perverse can one be? I feared them when they came, and was hurt when they didn’t come! I felt vaguely humiliated by my failure to provide the service that they wanted: and I felt even more wrapped up in a medical loneliness and weariness.

Then in all this whirlwind of activity—construction of new and repair of old buildings; teaching of students and preparing their course material; caring for patients, surgical, medical and obstetric; leading the spiritual as well as the physical life of our family of workmen, students, pupils and children; organizing and supervising some forty-eight rural clinics; ordering and preparing our drugs and medical stores; supervising the work in the small laboratory and down in the leprosy-care centre—in all this the Lord graciously visited our Nebobongo work with revival.

For four years the revival fires had been burning brightly in all the surrounding area, from some 700 or 800 miles south to 100 miles north, from 200 miles west to 100 miles east. Possibly about 100,000 forest villagers had been touched by the fervency of the Christian church in those days. Church services were alive and exciting: no longer slow, monotonous hymns and short, uninteresting sermons. Now everyone sang from their hearts with their faces alight with joy: everyone listened to the preaching of the Word with interest and expectancy. Lives were changed, and ordinary folk lived out what they believed in. Hypocrisy and insincerity were hardly known any longer, especially among the older members of the congregations.

In an ever-changing congregation like ours at Nebobongo, where patients came and went and the student body changed every two years, we needed continuous waves of revival to keep us alight. Joseph Adzanese from the Ibambi Bible School, with his wife Mary, and another couple came to spend ten days with us. Much prayer had been made before and during the convention, and the Lord graciously worked in our hearts. Pupil midwives were first touched: sins were confessed, hearts were cleansed and then filled with joy. Next the blessing spread to the workmen and their families; and finally to the paramedical auxiliary students.

Through the ministry of that convention, and a further ten day visit to Pastor Ndugu’s village, twenty miles away to the east, I also was deeply blessed by the fires of the Holy Spirit. In particular, the Lord revealed to me the sin of criticism of others, pride in my own achievements, failure to trust Him in my own inabilities, almost glorying in my frustrations. He showed me again the dangers of over-busyness, much doing, tireless activity, if it wasn’t backed up by prayer. How easily it would all lead to spiritual bankruptcy, and work for work’s sake, with no goal of spiritual fruit. In a prolonged period of time apart, alone with God, He filled me again with an intense joy and the deep peace of His abiding presence.

Shortly afterwards, I went home to England for furlough and much needed rest and refreshment, and a period of further medical and surgical practice so as to be better able to cope with the tasks of the future.

Back to Nebobongo in June 1960, as the great day of Congo’s Independence dawned. John Mangadima was appointed as Administrative Director of our medical centre, in accordance with the practice of the hour. John had been one of the first group of students who arrived for training in July 1953 and qualified in October 1955. Since then, he had followed two years of training at the Bible School at Ibambi, where he qualified at the close of 1957 as an evangelist and Bible teacher. He returned to Nebobongo at the beginning of 1958 and worked alongside Dr John Harris, another missionary doctor who was in charge at Nebobongo during my period of furlough. Mangadima was proving himself a very able medical auxiliary, a conscientious surgical assistant, a keen and willing administrator: but more important still, from my point of view, a real companion and friend.

Four troubled years of strains and tensions shook the new, young Republic, during which time we sought to consolidate the work of the medical service and to prepare national workers, such as John, for the task of leadership and responsibility. For this, above all else, we required Government recognition for our training programme, and legal certificates in the hands of our qualified workers.

Ever since the inception of the training school for paramedical workers at Nebobongo, we had been applying for this recognition. It was true that, before Independence, our applications had been made with no very great fervour. It had not seemed so essential then, and we had known that the all-Roman Catholic Government was hardly likely to favour a Protestant medical s...

Table of contents

• Title
• Indicia
• Contents
• Apologies
• Brief Historical Resume
• 1. Laying Foundations
• 2. Am I Willing To Return?
• 3. Back In Harness
• 4. How Could I Be So Foolhardy?
• 5. You Build, I Teach!
• 6. So We Were Launched
• 7. Extra-Curricular Activities
• 8. Seeking Recognition
• 9. Recognition At Last!
• 10. Apparent Rejection
• 11. Was It All Worthwhile?
• About the Author
• Christian Focus