December 10, 2003

Dear Friends,

We are currently on home assignment and have found it to be a joy. We are getting to meet the members of congregations who support our health ministry in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to put a face on names, and to allow you all to put a face on our names. More than just getting to know faces, we are getting to know each other, and for that we are blessed with joy and wish to say thanks to all of you. We will depart again for the Congo in February, having been reappointed to a five-year term. We are grateful for this continued opportunity to serve all of you as well as our brothers and sisters in the Congo.

In this newsletter we wished to share with you a story of one of our dear friends in Tshikaji, our neighbor Mamu (“mother”) Helene Mukendi. Mamu Helene is literally our neighbor and is married to Tatu (“father”) Marcel Mukendi. (The use of titles, Mamu and Tatu, is culturally respectful when addressing an adult or speaking of them whether they are parents of children or simply adults.)

There is no public education available in this impoverished country; families that can afford any schooling for their children must choose between their children usually send the elder sons to school in hopes that they might be able to find a job that pays some money to help support the family and to provide them support in their elder years. Girls rarely attend school beyond grammar school. Marcel, Helene’s husband, did receive higher education, becoming a nurse and eventually rising to be the interim director of the school of nursing associated with the Good Shepherd Hospital. He receives a salary of $70 a month. They have nine children. Although this is a good salary by Congo standards, the cost of store-bought food is not terribly different from the prices in the United States. Given that reality these lovely people are still very poor by our standards.

However, with the little they have, they are models of Jesus’s teaching on charity. For example, women identified as having a “high risk” pregnancy requiring cesarean section and who need to live near the hospital awaiting labor are often taken in by this couple. Orphans and widows are also recipients of their gifts. Since Mamu Helene has only nine children (leaving her a lot of free time), she also is the key figure in a women’s development project in which she organizes and assists in teaching literacy courses, micro-enterprise development, and cooking classes to educate village women in how to improve the nutrition of the food eaten by their children. Mamu Helene is boundless in her energy and her love toward her neighbor, giving the little that she has materially from the wealth of love that she has in her heart.

We feel truly blessed to know her and to call her neighbor and friend. We are even more blessed that she calls us neighbor and friend, seeing and treating us in the same way as she does her Congolese neighbors. We never believed that we could be accepted, except as missionaries and benefactors, in this different world and culture, but Mamu Helene has made us believe otherwise.

With God and with love, all things are possible. Mamu Helene may never be recognized by the rest of the world, canonized as a saint with her picture known to all, but we present you with her picture as she truly is a saint.

May God’s Peace be felt by all of you. Merry Christmas and have a blessed 2004!

Mike and Nancy

The 2003 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 31