On the afternoon of December 31, 2016, several families from the village of Bukob went out to winnow and bag their rice. By the time the afternoon was over, two women would be dead and another injured. This is their story.
This is Harmattan season, the dry season and the time when many people set fire to the bush in hopes of catching various animals as they flee from the fire. These days the animals involved are generally bush rats or smaller game. Since everything in the bush is supposed to be for everyone, nobody watches these fires to contain them and they can burn for vast distances before going out. Each year crops and even houses are lost to these fires, and those losses can be devastating. But sometimes the cost is higher; sometimes these fires cost lives as well.
When the Bukob people went to winnow their rice, they could see a bush fire in the distance, but it was moving slowly and they thought they had plenty of time. If the fire consumed their rice, families might go hungry. But at some point the wind picked up and may have even shifted directions. Before anyone realized it, the fire was nearly upon them and now it was a race for life. Most of the people ran away at right angles to the fire and successfully escaped. One heroic man even scooped up several children, carried them to safety and then returned to carry his aged mother to safety as well. By the time he reached his mother, she had fallen and the skin on the back of her neck and arms was beginning to blister. For a little while it seemed that everyone was safe, but then the Bukob people realized that two ladies were missing. Perhaps these ladies delayed an extra – long time, intent on saving the last of the rice. We will never know. All we know is that they chose to run through the fire instead of away from it, and that choice cost them their lives.
When the two women were found, the younger one, who was pregnant and nearly ready to deliver, was already dead, her skin charred. The older woman, although hideously burned, lived to make the ambulance ride to our hospital, only to die within a few minutes of reaching us.
If this was all there were to the story, it would be tragic enough, but this is not the end, nor even the very worst part. For these women were not Christians, and unless they had an experience with Jesus in their last few moments, they may have run not only to their deaths, but also to a Christ-less eternity.
The Saboba area is a difficult one in which to work. Our villages are remote, and many of them, including Bukob, lack electricity or good drinking water. There are few churches outside the larger towns in our district, and staffing those churches can be a problem. Most Bible School graduates these days want to go to big rich areas in the South where they can live comfortably and get good schools for their children. Unfortunately, many local churches demand that each congregation should support its pastor without outside assistance. For pastors in these areas the situation is simple: go to farm or starve, because small congregations in deprived rural areas cannot properly support a pastor. Unfortunately also, pastors in these denominations suffer disdain from their fellow pastors in more prosperous areas, who seem to feel that these men and women are not following the call of God but are merely too stupid to go somewhere else.
So the problems persist. And meanwhile the village people continue to risk their lives to feed their families and also continue to sacrifice to fetishes and other demons in the hopes of appeasing them. And the questions remain: who will go to the villages such as Bukob? Jesus died for these people just as much as He did for people in suburban churches in the U.S. Who will go? Who will serve? For if nobody goes, these people will go to hell, never having heard the Gospel.
CHRISTIANS, WHAT SHALL WE DO? WHAT EXCUSES CAN WE POSSIBLY GIVE TO JESUS?
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