God’s InvitationIMPFONDO, Northern Congo: God’s invitation to finish the job? INTRODUCTION The Oubangui River glides serpent-like from Bangui in the Central African Republic to join the Congo River on its way to the south Atlantic Ocean. The Oubangui and Congo rivers form the border between The Republic of Congo, known less formally as Congo-Brazzaville, and The Democratic Republic of Congo, known as Congo-Kinshasa. For much of the past decade the two rivers have floated away the bodies of slain soldiers, rebel armies, and refugees slain in the civil wars raging in both countries. Instead of highways to life, they have become rivers of blood. The war in Congo-Brazzaville (referred to simply as “Congo” in the remainder of this report) has been ending for four years and life is slowly returning to normal. In August, 1999, Joe and Becky Harvey, medical missionaries serving with Global Outreach Mission, left Bongolo where they had filled in for one year during [another missionary doctor’s] furlough to resume a ministry in Congo that was interrupted when the war forced them to flee Brazzaville. In 1956 the United World Mission established a mission at Impfondo that included a small dispensary. GOM began working in partnership with UWM at Impfondo in 1977, but the team remained small. By August, 1999 conditions in Impfondo were returning to normal, and when the missionaries already there urged the Harveys to join them and assured them that it was safe, the Harveys came. Six months after arriving back in Congo Joe Harvey wrote a formal appeal to the C&MA mission in the Congo to join with GOM to establish a major medical work in Impfondo that would reach people living in the five northern provinces. He sent me a copy of his appeal which I forwarded to Dennis Westlake. In his letter, he did not ask for funding but for the C&MA to provide key personnel for the project. The size of the five northern provinces, degree of spiritual poverty, large number of refugees, and poor health conditions pushed him to conclude that one mission organization could not possibly do the job alone. Dr. Harvey asked me to use my influence to get the C&MA to help. When I read in Joe’s letter that the wife of the president of the Congo had given GOM a former communist youth camp to turn into a Christian hospital, I began praying that God would allow me to visit Impfondo to see the situation myself. I had many questions about the need for such a hospital, the degree to which northern Congo has been evangelized, and the maturity of the evangelical church in northern Congo. If it was such a needy area, why were our C&MA missionaries not including it in their field strategy? In early May, God opened the door for me to go. Had it come one month later, I would have missed the Harveys, since they are leaving for a year of home assignment before the end of May, 2001. THE TRIP TO IMPFONDO I flew to Pointe Noire on May 4 and was met at the airport by Kevin McCabe. The McCabes and Hotalens invited me to dinner, and we spent several pleasant hours together before I had to catch my flight to Brazzaville. The team in Pointe Noire seemed only mildly interested in my mission and we mainly talked about our families, Bongolo, and the work in Pointe Noire. I was impressed at how normal life seemed in Pointe Noire, compared to what we had heard in Gabon about the country. Except for its recent history, the Republic of Congo is in many ways similar to Gabon, its neighbor to the north. The country’s 132,000 square miles are covered with swamps, grasslands, swollen rivers and vast stretches of tropical rainforest. The official language (at least in urban areas) is French, with Lingala seeming to reign in the provinces. I flew on a twin-engine Russian Antonov 24 with about 45 other passengers to Brazzaville. The flight lasted less than an hour and the service was simple but professional. BRAZZAVILLE Charles Koumba, a Congolese C&MA pastor, met me at the airport and took me to the SIL guest house. He spoke excellent English and seemed excited that I was going to visit the Harveys in Impfondo. Charles not only pastors a church but also runs the SIL guest house in Brazzaville with his wife Nellie, directs the C&MA Services projects in the country, and is a trained architect! Two weeks before I came he had visited Impfondo to help Joe develop a detailed plan to turn the 29 former youth camp buildings into a 55-bed hospital. Charles did not seem to know very much about the state of the evangelical church in the northern 2/3 of his country. He did not think that there were Swedish Evangelical missionaries living or working permanently in the north and that outside of the southern third of the country their presence is limited. This may just have been his impression. Charles and a Congolese doctor that I met the next day assured me that the war in Congo is over for good. They insisted that the people are no longer willing to die to uphold their leaders’ ambitions. I was surprised to see how normal Brazzaville appeared. The streets were well-paved, clean and bustling with traffic and commerce. Buildings were patched up and repainted and walls everywhere gleamed with fresh paint. If Charles had not taken me down to the riverfront to show me the still unrepaired Sofitel Hotel and some other seriously damaged government buildings, I could not have told you that a war had recently been fought there. It was his opinion that the French government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help rebuild the city. The city was cleaner, better groomed, and more orderly than Libreville, which has never endured a civil war. IMPFONDO My flight to Impfondo the following day was canceled due to bad weather, but the flight was rescheduled the next day. It took two hours on another Antonov 24 to get to Impfondo. Thirty minutes before we landed I was surprised to see a well-paved road snaking through the forest towards Impfondo for more than 80 kilometers. Later I learned that it continued beyond Impfondo for another 50 kilometers. The road was built by the Brazilians less than 10 years ago, but does not yet link up with the south or with the C.A.R. The terminal at Impfondo had been recently patched up and painted for a presidential visit just the month before. It was nicer and larger than the terminal in Pointe Noire. The Harveys met me with joyful hugs as I got off the airplane and took me to their home on the Impfondo Mission station less than a mile from the airport. A single, well-paved street ran through the center of town for about 3 miles and included sidewalks, but all the side streets were dirt. Dr. Harvey estimated that about 10,000 people live in Impfondo, not counting the refugees on the edge of town. He and the other missionaries estimated that the population of the Likouala Province, of which Impfondo is the capital, includes about 70,000 Congolese from the Boungou, Bamitaba, Banza and Bangombi tribes, 25,000 Pygmies, and an estimated 100,000 refugees from Congo-Kinshasa’s northern Provinces. THE MISSION CENTER A small team of missionaries from the United World Mission first came to Impfondo in 1956. They established a spiritual beachhead at Impfondo, moved deep into the northeast Likouala province along the many tributaries flowing into the Oubangui River, and expanded into the northwest province of Sangha. They eventually established a Bible School at Impfondo that trained pastors until the last missionary teacher left. Today the school is closed, despite a shortage of trained pastors. The UWM missionaries built three mission houses in the 1950’s and a small dispensary out of burnt brick on roughly half a hectare of land fifty yards from the Oubangui River. The grounds are mowed and clean with many fruit trees and shaded areas, and the atmosphere is restful. African visitors come and go freely, including many children. Because of the war, Impfondo has not had regular fuel deliveries for several years. Joe Harvey thought that deliveries by riverboat would probably resume later this year, making city electricity available as well. In the meantime, each Mission house is equipped with a well, a water pump, a small water tower, solar panels and batteries for 12-volt power, and a kerosene refrigerator. The missionaries on the station shore a single, 1987 Land Rover pick-up, one of less than ten functioning vehicles in Impfondo at the time of my visit. There were two bright spots in the church work in the northern provinces. The first was Paul and Diane Ohlin’s work with the Pygmies. Over the past nine or ten years, the Ohlins, who are with United World Mission, have planted 9 Pygmy churches with a total membership of around 300 believers. Treating the Pygmies as a separate ethnic group and using illustrated scriptures and the Pygmies own, written language, they successfully trained Pygmy leaders to serve as pastors and evangelists. Paul Ohlin had to spend months at a time each year away from his family living with the Pygmies in the forest in order to learn their language, gain their trust, disciple leaders and organize evangelistic outreach teams to other Pygmy groups. This summer the Ohlins will be leaving Impfondo to begin working with a related Pygmy group in southern Central African Republic. The second bright spot is the hunger of the village people outside of Impfondo to hear the Gospel and to be discipled in the Word. Several of the missionaries commented on this as an encouraging new development. THE IMPFONDO MISSION DISPENSARY The mission dispensary is a small, painted cement block building on the edge of the mission property close to the road that looks like it was built in the 1970s. The staff of three or four Congolese nurses consult and treat 35 to 40 patients a day. Dr. Harvey has been able to stock the dispensary with a good supply of medications purchased and shipped from the International Dispensary Association (IDA) in Holland. Because the local hospital is unable to successfully care for critically-ill patients, a few months ago Dr. Harvey tried to set up a three-bed ward in his dispensary. He had to abandon the effort after only a few months because night after night patients bypassed the nurse on call to knock on his door or tap on his bedroom window. Women in labor, patients with acute surgical disease or trauma, life-threatening infections, or anyone needing hospitalization can only be referred to the government hospital in the center of Impfondo. I will talk more about these other medical facilities later. THE EGLISE EVANGELIQUE CHRETIENNE DU CONGO (E.E.C.C.) Across the paved street from the Impfondo Mission sits a handsome, brick church able to seat 300 or more people. Additional buildings are visible behind the church where the Bible school used to be before it closed in 1986 for lack of teachers. On an average Sunday about 200 people attend the church. The major church activity of the lay people of the Impfondo church appears to be singing in church choirs, of which there are eight. The Harveys reported that the laity had no TEE programs or Sunday School, and minimal involvement in regular evangelistic outreach. This could be partly due to the wars and lack of cars. I met a young “evangelist” supported by the church who talked about going out to villages to preach, but there did not seem to be any kind of a plan or overall strategy, despite reports of a new receptiveness among village people. The E.E.C.C. church president serves as the pastor of a church of about 100 in Doungou, 50 kilometers to the north at the end of the paved road. Dr. Harvey drove me to meet the church leaders the second day I was there. I explained to the President that Dr. Harvey had asked the C&MA to come and help his mission establish a major medical work in Impfondo as part of a larger project to evangelize northern Congo, and that I was gathering information for a report that I would send to my mission leaders. The church president was anxious to communicate that his church needed help to reach all of the people in the north with the gospel and plant new churches. He explained that the E.E.C.C. had only 7 ordained pastors, one of whom led a church plant in Brazzaville that was going well, and 30 “cell groups” in the north with untrained lay leaders. Three bible school students were studying at the C&MA Theological Institute in Brazzaville and two others were at the seminary in Bangui. In answer to my question about the E.E.C.C.’s success in evangelizing the north, the President replied that the church is not growing in the north. This confirmed what the missionaries told me. The President blamed this on the huge disruptions caused during the war years and the lack of pastor training. In a separate meeting, an educated C&MA Christian in Brazzaville who was from the town of Ouesso in the Sangha province told me that the evangelical church in his town was shrinking. Like the missionaries I talked to in Impfondo, he believed that less than 25% of the people attending evangelical churches in the north were committed and discipled believers. This may well reflect the lack of any systematic lay training, such as EE or TEE, a shortage of trained pastors, and a lack of vision on the part of a discouraged church. After some prodding, the church leaders and missionaries I talked with estimated that there may be fewer than 2,500 committed Christians in all of northern Congo. Even if you double that figure, it represents less than 1% of a population estimated at 650,000, not including 100,000 refugees. This is wildly divergent from current encyclopedias and certain world mission resource books that list between 20% and 40% of Congo’s population as “Christian.” I came away from my meeting with the church leaders convinced that the E.E.C.C. leadership is godly, committed, and under siege. Barring a great and unusual moving of the Holy Spirit in this church, I cannot see it evangelizing 650,000 people in the five northern provinces of Likouala, Sangha, Cuvette Ouest, Cuvette ande Plateau. Even worse, none of the missionaries, church leaders or educated Christians I talked to in Brazzaville or Impfondo saw any other Congolese or mission group--such as the Eglise Evangélique founded by the Swedish mission or the Alliance Chrétienne--moving ahead to do the job. In fact, unless other missions join GOM and UWM to help establish a strong, viable evangelical church in northern Congo, the Harveys will soon be the only permanently stationed evangelical missionaries in five northern provinces, an area a third larger than England. VISIT TO THE IMPFONDO PROVINCIAL HOSPITAL Because I always seem to be thinking about sick people, I wanted to find out all that I could about the health care services in Impfondo and the north. What I learned confirmed what I had already discovered about these five provinces: except for their wild animals they are almost completely forgotten by the world community. The Impfondo Provincial Hospital was built by the French out of burned brick and galvanized tin roofing before Congo’s independence in 1960. The building that housed the surgical suites appeared to have been built later. The grounds were overgrown and the buildings run-down. A glance in the wards revealed pot-holed cement floors, broken windows, absent ceilings, and a few patients sitting on rusting beds, some without mattresses. There were no lights, electricity, running water, or toilet facilities in evidence, and probably about 50 usable beds. A separate leprosy ward was in better condition, thanks to renovations paid for a few years ago by a leprosy mission in the U.S. The surgical suites were a shock even to me. A surgical nurse dressed in a worn and stained uniform appeared to be in charge (the surgeon was in Brazzaville for a few weeks). He greeted Dr. Harvey warmly and took us around. In the first room--a grimy examining room--a woman lay moaning on a table with some kind of gynecological problem. The tile floors in the building were so stained and dirty I thought to myself it would take an army of scrubbers working with brushes for a week to clean them to my satisfaction. Leaks from the roof streaked down walls that were topped by a cobwebbed ceiling. The second room we saw was designed for washing surgical linens. I was amazed to find two giant commercial washing machines gathering dust. The nurse explained that they had been installed 10 years ago but never used (no water? no electricity? wrong kind of soap? no instructions?). In the next room we discovered two huge, inoperative autoclaves and one small modern looking one. The nurse explained that they could not use the small new sterilizer because they did not have distilled water. He was delighted when I suggested that he collect rain water with a plastic sheet and use it in place of distilled water. To sterilize their instruments, the nurses were using an electric oven--when the generator for the hospital had fuel and they had a battery to start it. That wouldn’t take care of sterilizing gowns and gloves, and it didn’t appear to me that they had electricity often. I wondered (but was too polite to ask) if they were even sterilizing their instruments for the few operations the nurse was doing. My guess is that they were doing what they could, but probably weren’t. The operating room was stained and grimy. Four glass windows were painted over with bright blue paint. Had not one of the windows been broken and gaping open, the room would have been only dimly visible. The O.R. table and light looked to be only three or four years old, and a relatively new air conditioner poked through the wall. There were no counters, tables, cupboards, anesthesia machines, or surgical supplies in the room that I could see. Dr. Harvey later described a case several months before involving a young boy who came to the Impfondo dispensary with acute appendicitis. Joe took the boy to the surgeon at the hospital, who agreed to do the operation and then presented him with a long list of supplies he would need to buy at a nearby private pharmacy. The list included gloves, suture, compresses, IV’s, IV tubing, anesthesia, among other things, and ended with a requirement for 10 liters of diesel fuel and a car battery to start the generator! The hospital couldn’t supply these things for patients in part because the government didn’t adequately supply the hospital and in part because the nurses regularly took the medicines and supplies to their homes so they consult and treat patients privately for a fee. After Dr. Harvey provided everything requested, the operation went forward. Had he not paid for the boy, he probably would not have had the surgery. It is difficult for Westerners to understand why such hospitals fail to function. In a recent prayer letter, Dr. Harvey related a story that describes the problem to perfection: “Shaquina was two years old. A beautiful child, on the top of his growth curve. The joy of his mother’s heart. Born during the war to refugee parents, Shaquina represented hope for the future. His parents sacrificed to feed and clothe him. A picture of health arising out of a background of poverty and despair. “When they heard that a measure of peace and stability had returned to their region of Democratic Congo, which is now under rebel control, Shaquina and his parents climbed onto a barge in Brazzaville to return to their homeland, to raise their precious son. “It is dry season now. The waters have receded. River’ travel is taking longer than planned. Shaquina and his parents had already spent six weeks camping out under a plastic tarp, on top of a barge among a mass of humanity, merchandise, and animals, being pushed by ‘le Pacifique’ riverboat into the heart of darkness. “When Shaquina got sick five days ago, his mom bought what little medicine was available from other passengers. When his diarrhea and fever continued, she began hoping against hope that they would arrive in Impfondo without any more delays. A large town like Impfondo would have the facilities needed to treat her son, or so she thought. “When the boat anchored on the banks of the Oubangui River in Impfondo,
it was “In desperation, Shaquina and his parents left the regional hospital and found their way to our house. Too late. Shaquina died today at my back door. “We know we are not the only ones that sense the urgent need for a Christian Hospital in Congo where people will be received and treated in Jesus’ name no matter who they are, where they come from, what time it is. “We know we couldn’t be here without support from back home, but sometimes we feel like we are all alone. Sometimes (like today) we ask ourselves, ‘where are the other nine?’” There are three smaller government “hospitals” in the Likouala province in the towns of Epena, Dongou, and Betou, each with 10 to 25 beds. They have even less than the Impfondo Hospital. Like Impfondo they sometimes have a doctor. The UNHCR is providing some funds to the Catholic church for a medical project to the 100,000 refugees in the province. Under this project, a single, Congolese doctor supervises 19 dispensary “nurses”. The one refugee dispensary that Dr. Harvey and I visited was a one-room, mud-wattle thatched hut that was six foot square. It had no medicines, equipment or supplies, and contained a single bamboo bed for the nurse. Unfortunately, he was sick with AIDS and in no condition to help anybody. In Brazzaville, I talked with the Congolese doctor serving in this project to help the Rwandan and DRC refugees. He is a young Christian named William Itoua-Nganongo, and he and Joe Harvey have become close friends. Dr. Harvey is hoping that Dr. Nganongo will decide to train in surgery at the training program in Bongolo under the PACCS and return to work with him in Impfondo. Dr. Nganongo told me that the medical problems that the refugees face are overwhelming. He was doing all he could with what he had, but it sounded like a drop in the bucket. I would have to agree. As for the medical services in the other four northern provinces, neither the missionary nor the Congolese doctors seemed to know much about them, including a Christian who is from the province of Sengha, the other northernmost province. When, I suggested that the other provincial hospitals would likely be similar to the hospital in Impfondo, they all agreed that was likely. HALF A DONATED HOSPITAL Several months ago the Harveys began praying about an abandoned Communist youth camp built in 1987 on the northern edge of Impfondo. The camp had never been used for youth but had housed Rwandan refugees for several years. A year or two ago the refugees built their own houses a mile out of town to escape police harassment, leaving the camp empty. The property is flat and about 200 meters x 300 meters. A handsome brick wall and fence surrounds the entire property. Twenty-nine cement block buildings--not counting buildings that contain showers and waterless toilet--are scattered over the huge property, all of them usable. Two, well-built residences are on the grounds, one currently lived in by a government official. The other residence is empty. It has three bedrooms, each with a bathroom, ceramic tile throughout and security bars on all the windows. Underground electrical cables link all the buildings on the property, and there is a well and water tower with some plumbing already available. The best soccer field in town lies within the grounds and was being used by an enthusiastic crowd the day we toured the property. The Harveys explained that as they prayed about the medical and spiritual needs of Impfondo and northern Congo, God repeatedly turned their thoughts towards this piece of property. Dr. Harvey began to dream about turning the former youth camp into a hospital that would serve all of northern Congo. In April, 2001, the President of the Republic of Congo visited Impfondo for several days. Dr. Harvey tried to see him in .person but could not get an audience. Instead, he was allowed to speak with the President’s wife, Mme. Nguesso. It turned out that she was the one who had planned for the youth camp to be built in the first place. When Dr. Harvey requested the property to build Congo’s first Christian hospital she agreed. Dr. Harvey is now trying to get the agreement in writing and signed by the President. All of the buildings on the property are still solid and have been designed for a variety of camp uses that make them easy to adapt for patients. A carpenter hired by the Harveys to replace missing doors had already sealed a number of buildings so they could be closed up during their year of furlough. The workmen clearing the 8-ft high grass with machetes had at least a month of work ahead of them. In spite of the weeds and grass, the unkempt buildings and the graffiti on every painted surface, it was not hard for me to picture Congo’s first Christian hospital. Like the Harveys in my mind’s eye I could see all 29 buildings cleaned up, renovated and filled with patients being cared for by Christian doctors, nurses, chaplains, and technicians. I could see at first hundreds, then thousands of people coming in dugout canoes and riverboats from up and down the Congo and Oubangui Rivers, from both sides of the border to be treated. I could imagine them being touched by Christ’s love, and then meeting Jesus Christ in person. I could hear them being discipled in churches where TEE and Sunday school are taught not just by pastors but by lay people and where evangelism to family, friends, colleagues and neighbors and distant villages and towns is a way of life. I could see a nursing school where Congolese Christians learn to become nurses, midwives, lab techs, and X-ray techs. They would staff Impfondo’s Christian hospital and then government hospitals, fanning out to change the way health care is delivered in health centers and dispensaries throughout the north and the south. Joe Harvey’s vision sees even more. He dreams of eventually building a hospital ship that will motor up and down on the serpentine backs of the Oubangui and Congo Rivers throughout the length of the country and into neighboring CAR to proclaim the love of Jesus. The rivers of blood will become rivers of life. CONCLUSION My visit to The Republic of Congo lasted only a week. Nevertheless, I came away understanding that for two decades while the rest of Africa crashed into the 21ist century, a dying Communist bureaucracy held the nation of Congo in limbo. Once free of Communism, the country nearly tore itself to pieces in a civil war that was part of what some are calling Africa’s “first world war.” Today the war is over, but poverty, sickness, and non-existent communication systems have resumed their pre-eminence, isolating the north and its’ 650,000 people. After what I have seen and heard, it is hard for me NOT to conclude that this very heart of central Africa has been for the most part crossed off the map by Mission organizations, relief organizations, national governments, and the rest of the world. There are those in the missions community who will dismiss this charge by arguing that 20 to 40% of Congolese are Christians. But is this true? Was this determined by someone who motored up and down the hundreds of miles of rivers, slogged through the swamps, and trekked across the plains and forests? Those who have done this are saying something quite different. Has anyone in the last 10 years gone to the provincial capitals, sous-prefectures, towns and villages in the region to determine if there are Biblical churches in each of them where believers are being discipled and the unreached are being led to faith in Christ? Or is the entire evangelical missions community operating on the basis of an oft-repeated, educated guess? What I saw and heard leads me to believe that fewer than 1% of northern Congolese know Christ. In fact, not a single church leader, missionary, or Congolese Christian that I talked to in either Brazzaville, Impfondo, or Doungou (home of the E.E.C church president) thought that the five northern provinces had EVER been systematically introduced to the teachings of Jesus Christ. It disturbs me just as deeply to know what really happens when the people of northern Congo become ill or are injured. Young women cannot go into labor without the fear that one out of every 20 of them will die in childbirth. Once they become mothers, they aren’t likely to find a place where they’re little ones can be vaccinated or effectively treated for malaria and dysentery to prevent every fourth one of them from dying. Not a single, medically-effective (forget about anti-virals) treatment center exists for tens of thousands of people dying from AIDS. I did not hear of a single hospital where nurses will get up at night to save the children of the poor, where hospitalized patients are not required to go and buy their own medicines and bandages, where Pygmies are treated as human beings, or where patients without money who need life-saving surgery are taken to the operating room. During the past few years C&MA missionaries around the world and especially in Africa have planned and discussed at great length about what we must do to transition OUT of fields of service. What has made this exercise difficult for many has been the limited and sometimes non-existent discussion of what new fields we are planning to transition INTO. Perhaps its because when God calls us to join Him by moving INTO a new ministry we get frightened by what it will cost. Is not our God the Lord of Wall Street too? Our Lord has made us so that we respond with excitement to great vision. Taking down the scaffolding of decades of missionary effort is necessary but is not what excites God’s people. The stuff that gets missionary hearts racing is planning Spirit-led offensives into enemy territory. Wrestling with the risks and the faith needed to move ahead creates sense out of the confusion of leaving one place where our work may be ending. It frees us to leave those we love to go to those who are lost and are crying out for our help. Dr. David Thompson REFERENCES
Congo Area | jayandcrystal.com
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