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“Everything is Just Spoiled” A firsthand account of SIM missionaries during the Doe/Taylor conflict |
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"I can't remember not wanting to be a missionary.
With me it was like, 'Lord, can I? Will you let me?''' That straight-ahead, no-nonsense approach to her call
is typical of Barb Hartwig. The second of four children, her father farms
and, on the side, has a tree moving business. A person who knows what direction
she wants to go and goes there, you can see an attitude in her that must have
come, in part, from watching her father move trees. Physically unassuming,
her energy and enthusiasm make you aware of her almost instantly. I met Barb, and most of the other members of her team
on a break neck trip to Tahn in 1987. Sheryl and I were in Liberia to
candidate at ICM and Jim McLellan, church chairman at the time, had decided
we needed to see a little of Liberia outside Monrovia. His wife, Bunny, had
arranged for us to accompany Ron and Pauline Sonius on one of their regular
visits to this part of their far-flung church planting network. We walked into Ben and Monie Motis' home in time for a
late lunch of stroganoff over country rice, and by the time we left three
hours later, we knew Barb well enough to be certain that we'd enjoy sharing
the country with her. I overheard a conversation in Monrovia between Barb
and a medical student, newly arrived for a four week, short-term stay. She
was planning a trip into a remote village to do inoculations. The student
would accompany her on the three to four hour trek through the bush. "Have you ever given shots before?'' Barb asked
the newcomer. "No,'' was the brief, slightly embarrassed
answer. "Well, you'd better learn before Friday. I'm not
carrying you all that way if you aren't going to pull your weight.'' Barb
smiled when she said it, and she said it in good humor, but the message was
plain, nevertheless. She is feisty and good natured, lively, industrious,
and called. Listening as she describes her work, you sense this call is a
thing both sacred and compelling, but not at all mysterious. She might say,
if asked, that the overwhelming need is call enough. Long before she became a
nurse, in fact long before she graduated from high school, the need was
driven home for her by missionaries she met in her home church. It was an unlikely influence that got her "into
Africa.'' In the mid 60's a new and deadly virus, named Lassa fever for the
village in eastern Nigeria where it first appeared, was discovered at SIM's
Evangel Hospital in Jos. She remembers how, as an eager ten year old, she'd
joined her church in praying for people stricken by the mysterious malady and
how, when a missionary doctor from Evangel Hospital visited her church, his
report stirred her. Years later, after graduation from nursing school and
what she describes as a "golden year'' at Columbia Bible College, Barb
was ready to leave for Africa and a career in community health. She joined SIM in 1982, but was disappointed to find
there were no community health workers on the current needs list. Knowing
Barb, it comes as no surprise that she persisted, needs list or not. Finally
the international personnel director radioed Liberia. Joy Crombie, a thirty
year veteran of health work in Africa, was doing community health work, and
might need a helper. It wasn't on the needs list, but the need was there.
By 1983, she was in Liberia, learning the ropes from Joy. There probably weren't
many who would have been better suited to the task than this seasoned New
Zealander. Speaking of her apprenticeship, Barb said, "Dear
Joy. She really taught me to love the Liberian people. She taught me how to
be with them, how to stay overnight in their villages, to be a guest. I'm
forever grateful to her for the good start she gave me. She was really one
with the people.'' A missionary book written on the Ethiopian civil war
might have devoted a chapter to Joy. Transplanted to Liberia after her clinic,
house, and personal possessions were seized in 1977, she left Ethiopia as
something of a quiet legend. When people who served in Ethiopia talk about
Joy Crombie, they think of her as a "soldier,'' a woman for whom nothing
was too hard. It was never an imposition for her to sleep on a dirt floor or
trek anywhere there was a need. One colleague remembers Joy sitting on a dirt
floor, a patient's head on her lap, performing some facial surgery by
flashlight. There was nothing she wouldn't do, except maybe ride a
mule. Her pairing with Barb was providential. Both energetic
and disciplined, Joy was ideally suited to the one-on-one mentoring she gave
Barb. In the two years they worked together, they visited villages throughout
the Gola territory. Joy's presence lent credibility to a missionary nurse new
to Africa and Joy's example taught her to live among the people,
accommodating community health principles to cultural requirements. In '84, Barb's father suffered a heart attack, and she
returned to the states to be with him. When she returned, Joy had transferred
to Kolahun and the apprenticeship was over. From that point, Barb and Marianne Atzbach, from
Atzbach Germany, worked together. Teaching community health to village health
workers became one of their essential responsibilities. In March of 1990, they took their class to Jawajei,
"New Town'' in Gola. Without knowing it, this would be their last
opportunity for Barb and Marianne to teach a course for traditional midwives
and village health workers before being driven from the country by war. This was no western style medical workshop in a
sterile chrome and Formica lecture room. Their classroom was a room in the
home of one of the Jawajei midwives. Women came from all over the district to
join them, carrying their own chairs. Every morning around 8:30, they arrived
at the house, chairs in hand, and arranged themselves in a circle for their
first session. Barb and Marianne carried in their chairs and joined the
circle. There was no teacher's desk, no notes, no text books.
Many of these were older women, "old mahs'' who had never learned to
read, and for whom the use of books was foreign. The two young teachers took
pains to protect these village leaders from any hint of condescension as
together they worked through the problem of seeing babies safely into the
world. This March, there were five health workers and ten
midwives. With Barb and Marianne there were seventeen women gathered each
morning for five weeks, and they began each day with Bible and devotions. For
Barb, it was pleasant to be together even though the room was small. They
alternated the leading devotions, built around a book of brightly colored
illustrations that took their little group from creation through the final
sacrifice: the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ. Some of the health workers were Christians, but most
of the midwives were Muslims. And they soaked it in. After devotions, they divided into two groups.
Marianne took the health workers to their room across town and Barb stayed
with the midwives. The day's lesson always began with review of the day
before. Half the morning was given over to the message of scripture, and the
other half to review. Then, after a short lunch break, the new lesson would
begin. The new lesson came with discussion and demonstration.
Barb seized the opportunity to examine all the pregnant women in the village.
While Barb was evaluating all these women she was also demonstrating how to
recognize when a pregnancy was progressing normally, how to identify problems
that would make a midwife refuse a home delivery in favor of attention at
more advanced medical facilities. The specter of tetanus hangs over every birth in
Liberia, and they talked about the importance of immunizations for it.
Earlier in the year Barb and Marianne had been in Jawajei giving tetanus
booster, but during the session they discovered that few of the women had
come. Without hesitation they brought vaccine from Tahn to correct that
situation. An immunized mother can share this immunity with their babies. The midwives had seen too many babies lost to the
"jerking sickness,'' and understood its importance. They scoured Jawajei
and herded all its women, pregnant or not, into the classroom for
immunizations. Their enthusiasm for the project was born in the patient hours
Barb had spent asking and discussing. "What do you think can cause the jerking
sickness?'' Barb would ask. "Somebody witched the baby,'' one would suggest. "The mother ate a certain meat,'' from another. Barb had compiled a long list of "causes'' for
jerking sickness, lost with her other belongings in the war, but none of them
mention bacillus tetani. West Africa is a place where all misfortune has a
cause. It may be juju, some unintended violation of tabu, or the spirit
of a dead relative offended by an inadequate burial. The invisible powers of
microorganisms can seem like just another kind of spirit business to be dealt
with by another kind of powerful juju. So Barb talked about germs. She let her pupils look
through a microscope at the hostile life teeming in a drop of river water.
Then she suggested that something like this might cause the "jerking
sickness'' and what they might do to keep it from taking their children. With
their marvelous new knowledge it was easy to see how they might save a new
life by cutting the umbilical cord with a sterile razor blade and cleaning a
baby's navel every day with an alcohol swab. Each graduate of Barb's school of midwifery got her
own bush doctor's kit, a plastic bucket filled with simple items that,
together, might save lives. Each contained a jar of alcohol with ties for the
umbilical cord, clean razor blades, hand towels, and soap with a nail brush.
In deference to the threat of AIDS, Barb added rubber gloves. To provide a
sanitary surface for delivery, there was a plastic sheet, to be washed in
Clorox after every use. Barb describes that class as a "real, real super
class. That was the best. I felt a really good rapport, and I think we
probably accomplished a fair bit. Between teaching midwives and using tetanus
toxoid I think we're pretty effective saving babies' lives.'' There was a sober footnote to that class. A mother who
had not been vaccinated gave birth in Jawajie during the class. Her baby died
of the "jerking sickness.'' At Tahn, Barb offered moral support and some behind
the scenes assistance to the government clinic. The clinic building is concrete block, roofed with
zinc and painted a dark green on the bottom and yellow on top, inside and
out. It boasts some jalousie windows with glass while some openings are
covered with nothing but screens. All the windows are protected with rogue
bars, usually pieces of steel reinforcing rod welded together to form a small
mesh and set into the concrete walls. Most serious rogues are undeterred by
these. They will pry the bars out of the concrete with a long, sturdy pole or
an automobile jack, but they are effective against casual thievery. In front
there is a lawn of carpet grass with benches, at the back a latrine. Inside there's a spacious waiting room and
registration area, a room with a hospital bed for the occasional overnight
patient, a storeroom for medicine, and Abraham Ware's office. Abraham is a
Christian man trained as a physician's assistant at John F. Kennedy hospital
in Monrovia. The government put up the building, and pays his
salary, but without Steve Befus and the Christian Health Association of
Liberia (CHAL), a Canadian ministry, there would be no medical supplies. In 1987 Barb and Marianne, working through Steve, got
a small grant from CHAL, enough to buy an initial supply of medicine for the
clinic. They set up a simple bookkeeping system and an account with the
pharmacy at ELWA hospital. When an adult registered for clinic, they paid a flat
rate fee of twenty five cents. Those fees were credited to a fund that
provides maintenance and small capitol
improvements. Medicine purchases went into another account to restock the
small pharmacy. In western countries with massive hospitals and even
more massive health plans, that clinic seems a small thing, but the people of
Tahn were proud and grateful to have it. Along with her medical duties, Barb doubled as a Bible
teacher in the Tahn junior high school. Tuesday mornings at the school she
taught seventh and eighth graders. Wednesday morning she was back to teach
Freshmen. The school at Tahn was, by Liberian standards, well
built and well equipped. The floors were of unfinished concrete and the
windows merely openings in the block walls. Most rooms had a table and chair
for the teacher and a blackboard. The upper grades had chairs with a writing
surface attached. Barb took her own chalk. Because the school was built with large rooms, they
held two classes, back to back, with two teachers at opposite ends of the
room. In Liberia, where tangible resources are limited, group recitation is a
common teaching technique. The noise was a problem when both classes were
called on to recite at the same time. In 1989, just seven years after the school was built,
the government finally put a pump on the well between the school and the
clinic. With that improvement, the kids could get water during their morning
break. Barb called on Heinz Jentsch, an old Africa hand
gifted with Teutonic ingenuity, to make one further improvement. Large blue
or gray plastic barrels arrive in Liberia by the hundreds. When emptied of
the pig's feet they contain, they are in great demand for water storage.
Heinz fitted one of them with a faucet and set it up by the well as a water
fountain for the boys and girls of Tahn Elementary and Junior High School. Building on that "golden year'' at Columbia, Barb
constructed a curriculum that took her students through the Bible in three
years. Working together, Marianne, who taught fourth through sixth grade, and
Barb made certain that the children they taught would receive as much Bible
as they could give them. But the classroom work was probably not the most
important thing they did there. Very few of the children had Bibles of their
own, so Barb made up a paper with the heading: "How to earn a Bible.''
For twenty verses, the Ten Commandments, and the books of the Bible
memorized, she agreed to buy a Bible. Several of the students braved the work for the
reward. For that, they had to visit Barb at her house in the afternoon to
recite. They usually stayed to question and to talk. A real chance to
witness, Barb called it. They had a sheet of paper to record their memory work,
and, in the rips, the smudges, and the water stains, their after school misadventures.
Sometimes they became illegible with handling, and sometimes they were lost
altogether, but Barb was understanding. "I wanted them to earn it, but I
wanted them to have a Bible so bad I wasn't too hard on them.'' Between the church, the school, the clinic, and the
village health work, Barb and Marianne were, as Barb puts it, "quite
involved. Our life was full. We were real busy and sure enjoyed our ministry
there.'' "We
only had school a short time in 1990, you know. It started up in March, the
beginning of their school year, and then by May we had to close down because
of the war.'' |