October 1999

Dear Family and Friends,

The last year and a half of uncertainty has been a time of growth for me—personal exposure to God’s ways—mysterious but always for the good. If in May 1998 you had asked me what was good about the fact that I was being asked to leave India, I would have been hard pressed to find something. Leaving friendships and work half done was not good. It was not an easy time. And yet this time of uncertainty meant that I could spend time with my family—especially my father who died just after a family vacation we had all had together. We were all able to have some special time with him—often in the form of a game of chess or checkers. He died peacefully in his sleep a month later, and I was able to be there with my family.

While in India I had been trying hard to find time to finish a book that two colleagues and I were writing about how to run a community health and development project in slums in developing countries. But I had so little time to spend on it—especially a concentrated period of hours to "get into" the writing. And so it was always hovering over me, but never finished. But for several months of the last year I had the time to write, and last month I was able to send the manuscript off to Macmillan. In March, I went to Nepal. I couldn’t get to India, but my Indian colleague/co-author could come to Nepal and we spent a concentrated ten days working on the book.

Also, I have been able to use Nepal as a base to carry on the work as the regional health consultant for South Asia—but still living pretty much out of a suitcase. I have learned that I can actually survive like a turtle with my house on my back—of course aided and abetted by my sister and brother-in-law while in the United States—quite a nice turtle shell! And in Nepal I lived with a PC(USA) family of four, and after they went to the United States, I shared their house with others who needed a place for a few weeks.

Meanwhile PC(USA) and I were trying to work out a new assignment. Difficult because the countries of South Asia are particularly un-welcoming to Christian missionaries. In the last month or so, however, two possibilities came up: one, with World Relief, as its director of maternal child health, and the other to work with United Mission to Nepal as the planning and evaluation advisor to the Health Services Department. Well, it has been a very difficult decision. After much prayer, I have decided to go to Nepal. Partly, I guess, I’m not quite ready to re-enter the United States (with World Relief I would have been based in the United States) but I think most of all it’s that in Nepal I will be able to work closely with Nepalis—I’ll be studying Nepali for my first five months. Since the World Relief position was worldwide, it meant that most of the time I would be working primarily with program directors, many of whom are American. The language barriers would prevent interacting with nationals to any meaningful degree.

I am quite excited about the United Mission to Nepal (UMN) posting. UMN is an ecumenical mission agency formed in the mid-1950s when Nepal agreed to allow foreigners in for the first time. But the government did not want to deal with all the different mission agencies, so there are just a few mission agencies, which are generally made up of many sending bodies. PC(USA) is one of the founding bodies of UMN, which is now an organization of about 2000 employees, of which about 10 percent are foreign missionaries. (The number of foreign missionaries is intentionally being reduced.) In addition to support services, the organization has four departments: health services, rural development, education, and energy and industrial development. I’ll be working in the Health Services Department, which has four hospitals (two of them inaccessible by road), five community health programs (one urban and three rural), several thematic programs (AIDS, nutrition, oral health, and mental health), and some support projects (medical supplies and TB Net).

I will be helping UMN health services to develop long range plans. It is an important and exciting time as UMN plans how to gradually turn over the projects to Nepali management and ownership. Having experienced "turnover" in India in different ways and with different results, I hope to be able to share some of that experience so that we need not make every mistake we made in India! My experience over the past eight years with the Emmanuel Hospital Association (EHA) will be very helpful for me in this new position. EHA is an Indian mission association of 17 mission hospitals and 24 community health projects that is doing exciting and innovative work, and demonstrates that mission hospitals can survive after the Western missionaries leave.

Plans are a little vague (what else is new?). But it is hoped that I will be in Nepal by January, in time to start the language training with the January batch (there are four batches a year).

Dr. Beverley Booth

The 1999 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 147