98. Rice

98.

Rice

And about missionaries themselves; well, over the days I stay I met several so what can I say about the Lutheran missionaries in Liberia?

Brother Joe is one and he is certainly a man of faith, courage and vocation.

Every time he goes out into the countryside in his carryall it is jammed with children and old people going his way with all the stuff they would otherwise have had to carry on foot.

He has helped build shelters and has dug wells and has provided electric generators and pumps for water that have certainly improved the quality of life for many of the people.

He showed some of the natives in the jungle their first motion pictures using a portable generator and an old 8-millimeter projector my parents sent him.

He and everyone in his family have learned to speak fluent Loma, the language of the people he ministers to. And serving a jungle congregation in Liberia is certainly not as safe a place to live and raise a family as in rural Nebraska for example, and serving a Lutheran church there--though this life is certainly more entertaining for an adventurous young couple!

I met a young Lutheran medical missionary living as simple a life of self-sacrifice as any Schweitzer. I was by his side as he fought for the life of a young woman dying from complications of a baby delivery in the bush—and saw him win the battle.

He begged me to go to Japan and learn how to grow rice and return to teach the natives how to do it because he had saved the lives of so many babies that were now grown children and adolescents that they were now in danger of starvation as adults!

...