Student stories from 2011

Don Graham
IMB

“Laila” lies motionless in the sweltering heat of a remote medical clinic poised at the edge of the Sahara Desert.

Black flies swarm the young mother’s face, feasting on the yellow infection that oozes from her eyes. An IV impales one of her arms; the other drapes limply over her swollen belly.

Six-and-a-half months pregnant, Laila is suffering from a severe case of measles. Though she is likely to recover, the disease is a virtual death sentence for her baby.

“Jenny Byrd,” a nurse practitioner from Georgia, watches over her. Speaking broken Arabic, Byrd caresses the Muslim woman’s arm and tries to reassure Laila’s mother and husband who wait anxiously by her side. A simple vaccination would have prevented this tragedy, but Byrd knows the situation is now beyond medicine’s reach. She closes her eyes and silently asks God for a miracle — and the chance to explain why she came to North Africa.

Why go to North Africa?
Byrd is part of a team of Southern Baptist medical workers called TRUTH — Trailblazers Reaching the Unreached Through Healthcare. They’re tasked with sharing Christ in an Islamic country so hostile to the Gospel that its name can’t be printed without risking the team’s safety.

“Chuck Castle,” a family doctor from Texas, leads the TRUTH team. After volunteering on a handful of short-term trips, Castle knew God wanted him serving overseas field full time. By 1999, he and his wife, “Debbie,” were in North Africa, pioneering a medical ministry supported by IMB (International Mission Board).

The need was staggering. More than 17,000 people live within a 5-mile radius of the town where the Castles’ ministry is based. Jobs are scarce, so most families scrape by as farmers or nomads. Electricity and running water are luxuries, and with no sanitation, the town’s streets reek of animal waste and rotting garbage.

Corruption is rampant, even at the town’s only hospital. Locals know it as the place “where people go to die.” Castle tells horror stories of doctors turning away surgery patients until they can provide supplies for their own operations, or nurses charging extra to insert a patient’s IV and then charging again to remove it.

Spiritual poverty
But the town’s physical needs pale in comparison with its spiritual poverty.

When the Castles first arrived, there were no churches of any kind or any known Christians. Folk Islam, a blend of teachings from the Quran with animism and ancestor worship, dominates the religious landscape.

“These people live in fear,” Castle says. “They’re afraid of evil spirits, afraid of God. … It can be overwhelming to be the only beacon of hope in such a dark place.”

Castle remembers the day he discovered just how deep that darkness was. When his next-door neighbor died, his funeral was like a glimpse into hell, Castle recalls.

Women were sobbing, covering themselves with dirt and ripping out their hair. Some were beaten by their husbands because their tears didn’t “honor” Yusef’s death. One of Castle’s friends swallowed an amulet engraved with Quranic verses and collapsed in a seizure. Men rallied together to count the 99 names of Allah in hopes of giving Yusef an extra push toward heaven.

But Castle knew heaven wasn’t where his Muslim friend was going. Though he had talked with Yusef about God, Castle hadn’t yet asked him to accept Christ. He thought he had more time.

“From that point forward, God got my attention and said, ‘This is urgent. You can’t take for granted these people are going to be with you forever,’” he says.

Healing the sick
Back at the clinic, that sense of urgency is obvious as Castle hustles to treat the crowd of about 30 people who fill his waiting room.
On an average day he’ll see patients with anything from headaches to terminal cancer. He points to dirty drinking water and mosquitoes, which fuel diseases like dysentery and malaria, as the culprits behind many of the clinic’s visitors. Malnutrition is common; so is trauma — burns, cuts and broken bones.

Making matters worse, Castle says, is a stubborn reliance on traditional tribal medicine. He’s seen old men who drink kerosene to calm an upset stomach, mothers who burn their babies’ foreheads with hot coals to soothe colic and children with broken limbs that need amputation because they were splinted so tightly they became gangrenous.

Fortunately, Castle doesn’t handle all these patients alone. Besides Byrd, the TRUTH team includes two RNs, a nutritionist and a handful of national nurses and pharmacists. Working together, they saw more than 6,000 patients the first half of 2009, including some 3,000 children, and administered more than 1,000 vaccinations.

As a doctor, Castle admits it would be easy to lose himself in the town’s medical needs and neglect the real reason he came to North Africa. But he wants his patients to know their need for spiritual healing is just as important as their need for physical healing — and he makes it a priority to personally share that message.

“Here, you treat someone and they get well, and two weeks later they’re dying again of the exact same thing because their water’s bad,” Castle says. “Without an eternal solution to these problems, it’s futile.”
With the help of the TRUTH team’s national partners, the numbers have jumped from zero to more than 90 baptized believers and six house churches in less than 10 years.

Bittersweet miracle
Against the odds, Laila, the pregnant mother Byrd treated for measles, delivered her baby alive at seven months. He lived for about a week — a miracle, Byrd says, given Laila’s illness and the lack of neonatal care. Byrd was invited to Laila’s house to meet the child the day after he was born.

“I was able to pray with the family and tell them what a miracle their son was and Who gave them this gift,” Byrd says. “It’s not a fairy-tale ending, but Laila got to spend a week with a child that should have been stillborn.

“We have to trust God and His sovereignty. Maybe He allowed this to happen so we could have the opportunity to tell her about Jesus and show her His love.”

Names in quotation marks have been changed.

Engage

• E-mail the writer at don.graham3@gmail.com.
• E-mail the photographer at publicmailbox@boldlittlelamb.com.
• Read Preach and Heal, a book that explores the question: Which is more important: relieving sufferering and meeting physical needs or proclaiming the life-transforming message of the Gospel?
• Learn how volunteer healthcare professionals can partner with IMB medical missionaries through the Global Medical Alliance to go to “the ends of the earth” to minister to the sick and dying, to teach health promotion and to show God’s love for all peoples. The GMA sponsors a medical missions mobilization summit annually in July. To learn more e-mail Rebekah Naylor.

Erich Bridges
IMB

My son wants to go to school next year in New York City.

In midtown Manhattan, no less — the Big Apple, the belly of the beast, the postmodern Babylon.

“Are you crazy?” a few friends asked (or implied) when I told them we would be visiting a school located there. No, I’m not crazy, although I had a few second thoughts driving through the Lincoln Tunnel into New York’s frantic traffic.

If my son ventures there, the big, bad city will present quite a challenge for him — more challenge than I could have handled at his age. But I envy him. He will attend an exciting Christian college that prepares young minds to confront the world as it is.

And he will experience the world as it is rapidly becoming: urban.

Five cities in two years
Over the past two years, I’ve had the opportunity to visit and profile five great cities on four continents: Buenos Aires, London, Nairobi, Mumbai and Jakarta (combined population: up to 70 million people). The purpose of the project was to grapple with the realities of declaring the Christian Gospel to a global population that is now more than 50 percent urban for the first time in history.

To review some of the numbers:

* A projected 88 percent of population growth over the next generation will occur in cities in the developing world. Half of India’s billion-plus people will live in cities by 2020.

* Urban dwellers will double to 6.4 billion by mid-century — 70 percent of humanity — according to United Nations forecasts.

* Nearly 80 percent of South America’s 380 million people live in cities. A third of Argentina’s population, for instance, lives in greater Buenos Aires.

Whether cities fit into the fast-multiplying category of 500,000 to 1 million people, “mega” size (1 million or more) or “super-mega” (above 10 million), they tend to share common characteristics. They attract the young, the rich, the poor, students, job seekers, minorities, immigrants, refugees. Cities speak many languages and encompass many cultures and religions. Sometimes different people groups within cities mix and meld. Sometimes they form distinct, exclusive communities — cities within cities.

Each city unique
In London, called “a world in one city,” you can hear more than 300 languages spoken. The city is home to at least 50 non-indigenous communities of 10,000 or more people each. Mumbai, approaching 20 million people, plays host to India’s Bollywood movie stars, its richest business tycoons — and Dharavi, reputedly Asia’s largest slum. Hindus dominate Mumbai, but 2 million Muslims live there, as well as members of nearly every caste, religion and people group in India. Nairobi is a hub and magnet for all of east Africa, attracting immigrants and refugees from every major people in the region. One area of the city, “Little Mogadishu,” functions as a kind of capital in exile for Somalia, Kenya’s anarchic neighbor.

Cities are aggressively secular — and zealously religious.

“Secularism is the predominant ‘religion’ of the city, but every other ‘ism’ is here in strong force,” says a Southern Baptist missionary in London. “The largest Sikh and Hindu temples outside of India are in west London. London is the Islamic capital of Europe. Satanism and all kinds of mystic practices are also alive and well.”

Cities are hectic, fragmented and violent. Despite their large numbers, city dwellers often live in isolation and fear. They are hard to reach — physically and spiritually — in their locked offices and high-rise apartments guarded by vigilant doormen.

People disconnected
“In a big city, the spiritual strongholds are loneliness and fear,” says missionary Randy Whittall, Southern Baptist team leader for Buenos Aires. “It may seem crazy to think about being lonely when you’re surrounded by 13 million people, but they are.”

How are Christians responding to the challenge of postmodern cities? Not very well, at least so far.

Responding with fear
Local churches in the cities I visited tend to be tradition-bound, fearful of reaching beyond their comfort zones, overly dependent on buildings and property (prohibitively expensive in major cities). Mission organizations and other Christian ministries talk about “reaching the cities,” but struggle to find effective ways to do it. Missionaries in many countries have focused for generations on reaching rural regions untouched by the Gospel. While they have toiled in the hinterlands, cities have mushroomed.

“We still have the mindset of rural missions,” observes Whittall. “But the mission of the 21st century, however much we don’t like it, is going to be in the Beijings, the New Delhis, the massive, polluted, crowded urban areas where billions of people live.”

The secret to success
What works in such places varies, but smaller tends to be better.

The effective urban Christian workers I met cultivate global prayer networks and pursue city-spanning “seed-sowing” (Gospel distribution), to be sure. But they follow up with focused community ministries among specific people groups, winning hearts and minds for the Gospel — as in Jakarta, London and Nairobi. They start small cell groups and house or apartment churches that multiply over time, as in Buenos Aires and Jakarta. They intensively train committed local believers to make disciples, who in turn train others, as in Nairobi.

In Mumbai, the faithful discipleship of just two Muslim-background followers of Christ by a Southern Baptist worker has sparked the beginning of many worship groups among Muslims in the city.

“I wouldn’t say so much that we’re failing [in the cities] as that we’ve never tried,” says the worker in Mumbai. “We can talk about the problems, the poverty and corruption and politicians. But it all goes back to the darkness they live in. They need Jesus Christ.”

Whatever it takes, it’s time to try.

View coverage in the five cities:
Jakarta
Mumbai
Nairobi
London
Buenos Aires

Race against time

Susan Fogg
International Mission Board

The work will be too hard. There won’t be enough time to complete it. It’s a God-sized task under harsh conditions.

That’s what veteran missionaries told me they said as they sent young OneStory teams out to create recorded Bible stories for unreached people groups in Mali, West Africa, the country fifth from the bottom on the U.N. Human Development index.

OneStory teams of two to three journeymen learn the language and culture of an unreached people group by living in their village and building relationships. Journeymen, usually recent college graduates, serve two to three years with the International Mission Board. Once the team has a basic understanding of the language and culture, they work with a story crafter to translate a set of 30 to 60 Bible stories into the heart language of that people group.

I learned that 80 percent of unreached people are oral learners. Even if they had a Bible translated into their language, they couldn’t read it. Using a laptop and simple digital recording equipment, OneStory teams record the stories and share them with their village, air them on the radio and distribute them on cassette.

Could these young adults actually survive being thrown into a new culture and achieve this “God-sized” task in two or three years, I wondered.

What I saw visiting the One Story teams across West Africa said yes. Come along with me to visit one of the teams.

Monica and Krystal: The old man tree
We drive for a few hours to meet Monica and Krystal, working with the Senufo Supyire people in Sikasso. Sitting on some large rocks under the shade of the “old man tree” we meet Anson. Not only is he the team’s tribal brother, he’s the first believer among this people group. Anson asked to be baptized after hearing the story of the Ethiopian eunuch. “When [Monica and Krystal] told me, spoke God’s words to me, I knew that those words were true, that they were God’s words,” Anson says. “It’s important to know God and to know God’s words because Jesus is God’s Son.”

The chief asks us to pray for rain for his village because the well is nearly dry. As Judy begins to pray, a slight breeze blows across our faces, and thunder rumbles in the distance. It’s confirmation that God is with us in this place and that He cares for these people. At the end of the prayer the men smile and we see they’ve felt God’s power through the thunder.
That evening we experience an answer to the prayer. A huge rain moves across the whole area. At Monica and Krystal’s town house, we rush to close the metal shades and to bring in tents from the yard. The rain wets the concrete floor and nearly blows down the index cards representing Bible stories hanging on yarn from the ceiling, charting the team’s progress. We talk about the village and how they are getting this blessing of rain from God, and I know I’m witnessing God at work.

Solar panels on the roof, hooked to car batteries, provide electricity to power Monica’s and Krystal’s computer equipment and lights. They don’t have running water in their town home, so I take my first bucket bath in the dark bathroom. I must flush the toilet by adding cups of water to the bowl. This isn’t a problem for one night, but I wonder if I could do this every day.

The next morning we talk to Monica and Krystal about their experiences when they first came to Mali. “It was like being thrown into a place where everything that you knew all of the sudden was gone. I got really good at playing charades and acting things out because we couldn’t communicate, couldn’t understand each other,” Monica, a former engineer explains. “But the village, the people here were amazing. They just took us in, and they showed us the ropes. And they started teaching us the language, and they fed us every meal.”

What’s it like to have the first believer? “Well it means the Senafo Supyire are coming, and they will be around the throne. And it breaks my heart when I think that some of the ones I love most might not be there. But they are going to be there, and the Lord is going to use the Supyire here, He’s going to use them much more, far better than He could have used us. … [Anson] has told us I don’t know how many times that when he’s the old man, that his family will be Christian,” says Krystal.

It’s hard to leave these girls because being with them is being where God is working. They will soon be done with their work and go home. I know they’ll complete the race against time to translate a set of stories and leave them behind for their people to hear. Their lives and the lives of the people they have met will never be the same. Neither will mine. I wish I could stay and run the race with them to the end.

For a fuller account of Susan’s visit with the OneStory teams in Mali, click on Menu in the window above.

Act

• See how you might serve on or support the OneStory teams.
• Find more information on the Journeyman program.
• Learn more about the people groups in West Africa.
• Learn more about reaching oral learners.
• Learn more about chronological Bible storying.

(Printable version)

Pulling Dandora from the dump

Erich Bridges
International Mission Board

You smell it long before you see it, but you’ve got to see it to believe it.

The municipal dump at Dandora, just south of Nairobi proper, stretches 30 acres. Thirty acres of smoking, untreated garbage, snaking like a miniature mountain range through the public housing and shantytowns where some 600,000 people live.

2,000 tons a day
Every day, scores of ragtag trucks arrive to dump another 2,000 tons of refuse onto the stinking pile — city trash, industrial and agricultural waste, you name it. A witch’s brew of chemicals, poison and pollution seep into the surrounding soil, air and water, spreading disease and dangers — particularly among Dandora’s children.

The sicknesses include intestinal parasites, skin rashes, eye infections and tuberculosis. Recent tests on 328 children and adolescents living near the dump showed 154 of them were suffering from respiratory problems.

“This is where Nairobi throws its trash,” says Kenyan Baptist leader Shem Okello, standing on the edge of the dumpsite.

Scavengers
Okello watches a woman weigh plastic containers, scavenged from the pile, on a scale mounted to a makeshift wooden frame. Several thousand Dandora residents — mostly poor women — survive by selling anything of value they can find in the dump.

The city government periodically promises to close the dump, but it’s still there. The scavengers and jackleg garbage haulers who make a living off it hope it stays put.

“We pray it will not go,” says the woman at the scale, bargaining with a buyer for her plastic.

They must be the only ones who want it. It’s a curse on everyone else.

Raw deal
The dump symbolizes how the more affluent precincts of Nairobi deal with places like Dandora — out of sight (or smell), out of mind.

“Around here, people get a raw deal,” says Billy Oyugi, associate pastor of Dandora Baptist Church. “The main challenge we face here is poverty. A subset of that is the challenge of seeing bright young people who, because of poverty, cannot further their education.”

The typical Dandora family, Oyugi says, consists of a mother, a father (often absent) and five children living in two rooms. There’s little access to medical care; you get sick, you pray to get better. Few jobs. Bad, dangerous schools. Hunger, crime, drugs, alcoholism, prostitution.

Oyugi knows the score: He grew up in Dandora. His father was an alcoholic he rarely saw. Oyugi got into drugs, gambling and the other trouble slum youths easily find. But his mother was a strong Christian. She enlisted him in a Christian child sponsorship program that helped him get an education — and learn that another, ever-present Father loved him.

“One day my sponsor sent me a lovely Christmas card, the first I’d ever received in my life,” he remembers. “When I opened it, I knew somebody cared about me. I knew that day there was hope in my life.”

Beacon of light
Today, Oyugi and others at Dandora Baptist share hope with their neighbors — especially children and young people, who constitute more than 60 percent of Dandora’s population. The church, which sits on a dusty square in the area, is a beacon of light in the smoky miasma of Dandora.

It operates a medical clinic, helps HIV/AIDS patients, teaches job skills to young people and heads of households, sponsors a school and child development center for hundreds of needy children. “Our teachers are missionaries,” Oyugi stresses.

The congregation also sponsors home churches in each district of Dandora and runs a “Jesus Training Center” that offers a six-month course for believers.

“We have done missions all over Kenya,” Oyugi reports. “Our purpose is not just to reach the lost but to teach our members to do evangelism and discipleship. We rejoice when we see one of them discovering what God intends for them to do and just getting on with it.”

‘I want to be an example’
Especially young people. Like Catherine, now 20, a daughter of Dandora. She grew up on a tough street, burdened by constant violence. She was expected to follow the pattern — young, single motherhood, drugs and other self-destructive behaviors.

Instead, she broke the pattern with the help of God and Dandora Baptist Church. Now she aspires to be a lawyer. She belongs to “Groups of Hope,” a band of young Christian adults who encourage each other and reach out to youth in local schools.

“I want to be an example to other girls in the community,” she says. “How can I motivate them?”

You already are, Catherine.

(Printable version)

See more stories and photos on Nairobi:

Overview: Healing Africa’s wounded urban heart

WorldView: The next Nairobi

Believers tell stories of hope in Nairobi’s hopeless slums

Risky business: Christians quietly penetrate Nairobi’s executive class

Answered prayers open hearts among South Asians in Nairobi

Cruising ‘Litttle Mogadishu’: crossing barriers to Gospel among Somalis