NO ROOM AT THE INN

Travelling on to the west, we passed through Griqualand, and Griquatown. This was in the area where Livingston had centered much of his work. He met and later marrried Mary Moffat the daughter of the missionary living at the near by mission. I would later preach and teach in this same area and once camped under the trees that surround the Moffat mission.

The area is filled with limestone and asbestos deposits. The result is clearly shown by the many blind Africans who are blinded by the lime dust, and others suffering from breathing problems from breathing asbestos dust. I learned there that "Tiger's Eye," semi-precious stones, are really asbestos ore. A beautiful polished gem that can cause serious lung cancer if you breathe the dust from cutting and polishing it. Water being scarce, the uneducated resident Africans often neglect proper protection and sanitary practices. The result is that they end their lives blind or suffering from lung cancer.

Farther to the west, a mountain of iron ore adds its rusty dust to the air. I understand that magnetic compasses are totally unreliable when flying over that area.

At this point one is travelling parallel to the great Orange River and south of the Kalahari Desert, a waseland of sand dunes, just to the north of the river. I do not have good memories of that area. The road I was travelling was filled with large sharp rocks and my new heavy-duty tires I had fitted to the Chevrolet didn't survive even the first day. We managed to limp into Upington with no spare tire at all, and it was there that I unloaded our heavy trunks and shipped them by the narrow gage rail to my self to be collected at Windhoek. Upington, on the Orange River, is a thriving town, even though the summer temperatures often reach 110 degrees or more. One of their major irrigated crops is the growing of fruits for packing as dried fruit, especially rasins and prunes, but also figs, peaches and other types. The hot dry air is ideal, and the water from the near by Orange River is plentiful. The sheep of this area cease to be breeds used for wool or meat. Instead they are Karakul. The lambs of the Karakul sheep are killed when they are just born to make fur coats from their tightly curled black pelts. If they are not killed very young, they lose the tight curls and they turn to a dull grey. We skipped Augrabies Falls, mainly because we had never heard of them at that time. Not long after that we crossed the border into South West Africa, (German West Africa, now called Namibia). There was no border post there as South Africa had been given mandate over that country by the League of Nations following World War One. From there on, the roads deteriorated until they were simply trails that threaded through the scrubby thorn trees. There was often no pretence of a road being gravel or even having been planned or maintained at all. There were no signs, except perhaps at very obvious forks in the road. This is where we turned north again. Gasolene, called "petrol" was usually obtained from a steel barrel with a measuring pump that was stuck in an opening on the top. That would be standing in front of rare trading store and there might be no sign of life other than the manager of the store or perhaps an isolated farm house. He would certainly not speak English, possibly Afrikaans, but most likely German. They all had one thing in common. They hated Americans. This was 1953! and the Second World War was not long past. Toward evening we came to a small village that had a proper petrol station and a hotel. They also actually had a room available in the hotel, so we could all bathe, scrub the red dust off, and get something to eat, but they had no petrol anywhere in town. Delivery was expected only the next morning.

Much to our surprise there was petrol after we had breakfast and we were able to continue our journey. This time we were driving between the Kalahari and the Namib deserts. The Namib is famous in that diamonds lie scattered on it's surface in places, but do not stop and pick any up or even look! It is illegal to stop here, or to possess a rough uncut diamond anywhere in South Africa. If you happen to find one, it belongs to DeBeers Mining Corporation, and you are required to take it to them. They will give you a price, a price they set. There are still licenced diggers, as the old licences can be passed down in the will of the original holder to his family members. Because of that, there are still private diggers working in some areas even today, especially near or in the rivers.

We made one more interesting stop on the way. That was at Rehoboth. The residents of this community proudly refer to themselves Bastards. They are of mixed blood, German and Namas primarily. We were warned to count our change and watch our belongings if we had to stop there. We needed petrol, but had no problems, even with the unfamiliar money. There was a wide dry sandy river bed to be crossed. No problem, as long as you kept the car moving and stayed on the right path, but some time previously a heavy truck had been lost in a flash flood there. The owners filed an insurance claim for it's loss, and were refused because that was usually a dry river. In time, the company sent a crew who was instructed to dig the truck out of the sand and recover it. As the story goes, they had the truck nearly clear when the cry went up, "The water is coming." Everyone ran for their lives and all made it with their equipment to higher ground, but the second time they tried to dig it out, the same thing was repeated, and the truck was buried again. This time the equipment was lost as well, and the insurance company paid out the claim in full!


Late in the afternoon, tired and dusty, we rounded a curve, and there was Windhoek, with it's German Castle; one paved street, street lights, and even a stop light (robot) or two. It had two, or perhaps three hotels. We stopped at the very first one. There was "No room in the inn." I know how Joseph and Mary must have felt. We had a tiny baby and no clean bed, fresh water, or supper. They did, however temporarily, squeeze us into a tiny room in an alley behind the hotel. I know now it must have been used for their black staff, but it was clean, we could, and did use the communal bath, and we did get food in the dining room. Praise the Lord. We had arrived at the end of a very long journey. We would have to go "house hunting" immediately.

GROWING POPULARITY RESULTED IN PERSECUTION.

Our evening Bible studies rapidly grew in numbers, even with our language problems. South West Africa, now called Namibia, was at that time mostly German, Afrikaans or tribal speaking.

As we grew in numbers, we naturally attracted the attention of the school that all of the children attended. Since there was no other choice for them, that put them in a very difficult situation. They were being punished and threatened that they would be expelled from the school if they did not stop coming to our Bible studies.

The few children had grown in numbers as we switched from small evening groups to a much larger Saturday group using the style of the Daily Vacation Bible Schools we had known in America and I had taught in Harlem the summer that I had worked with the Go Ye Chapel ater my first year at Lincoln Bible Institute. We had to improvise and make our own teaching materials there as well. I had, for example, added further scenes to the flannel-graph lessons we had taken with us so that we could teach basic doctrines as well stories. Most of these children knew nothing about baptism. They had all been sprinkled as unbelieving infants. Now they realized that Bible baptism was the immersion of a repentant believer. In anticipation that we would soon need it, we had a baptistry built at the corner of our house. Before it could be used, a teacher from their school moved in across the fence from us, and his reports all but closed us down. The school was German Lutheran run and they had no toleration for these Americans.

Our attendance dropped drastically, so I asked for Nic Qwemesha to come during the Christmas school break to hold a meeting for us and to evaluate the situation and advise us what to do. That happened also to be at the time our lease expired and he really urged that we should move to Kimberley where language would not be such a problem and where I could teach at the Minister’s training school as well. He would be my interpreter. That is what we did.

I notified our landlord that we would be leaving, and as soon as our third daughter, Donna, was born, I put the family onto a plane for Kimberley, and I loaded our meager furnishings into our Chevrolet Carryall, railed some of our things, and I brought the rest over that difficult road never to return to Wundhoek again.

I had always felt that if we had to leave, as Paul the Apostle had often had to do, we would move elsewhere and continue to serve the Lord where he opened a door for us. It never even occurred to us that we could return to America and “lick our wounded pride.” I started to teach a class at the training school and as, we had already turned to the printed page I expanded that. The Bible Corrspondence lessons was certainly the leading of God. Though we did many other things, as needed, the printed page became our main thrust over the years that followed. It opened more doors than we could ever hope to enter. Our first few enquiries grew into a veritable deluge. The more languages we added, the more people responded. We first started printing in other languages as there were educated people to make the translations. They were not always professional translatrs, but they were a real blessing to people who sometimes struggled to read at all, let lone, in their own spoken language However we did have professional teachers and ministers who helped. I just had to type every word letter by letter and then have them read it to detect the errors I made typing to me "unknown languages." I had not had a single lesson in touch typing in my life.

OUR FIRST HOME IN WINDHOEK

Our first home in Windhoek was a few blocks away, at the other end of the one paved street. It was a larger hotel and it did have a room. There was no check in desk but the manager, with the hotel register, was at his usual position tending the bar off to one side. All hotels in Namibia were like this one in that they were registered as a hotel primarily because a liquor license was always given to hotels, no matter how few rooms they might have. This one was not really so bad, however. They gave us a comfortable room near the communal bath. And a door in the passage just by our room opened onto the beer garden. It was really only used in the evenings, so the paved area with trees and flowers was great for Kathy and ourselves to use when the walls seemed to be closing in on us. There was also a small zoo and park, near the post office, which was only a short walk up the street. Being the city center, that street was lined by a good selection of small stores and shops.

Since the streets were not all named and numbered anywhere other than right in the center of town, we needed to apply for a post office box, and start looking for a proper house as soon as possible. The house search became a matter for urgent prayer and searching. There was an English Newspaper, with mostly Upington news, and it contained small’s adverts. From those, we learned that houses were extremely scarce. Driving around to get the layout of the town in mind, we noted no empty houses anywhere. After a few weeks we were moved across the street to an overflow area of the hotel, where we had a larger room and no bar across the garden, but at the same time we were told that all their rooms were rented a year in advance for the holiday season that was coming up very shortly. We had to be out by then.

We knew we would be happy to leave if we could, because we were not happy with the menu available. All the desserts were laced with wine or brandy, blood sausages featured heavily on the menu and they expected us to order from the bar with our meals. The coffee was so strong we could not drink it. In other words, we were probably as big a problem to them as they were to us.

In our exploring the town, we had driven across the valley to the black community so we were praying for something near there. That was exactly what the Lord provided. One day the paper listed a shop with a house attached. It was a renovation in progress but suited our needs perfectly. The "in progress" stopped promptly we signed the lease of course. The lease was high, well "exorbitant" might be a better word, but it was available exactly when we needed it and it was on the last street with only a dry stream bed that separated us from the black township. That one block long street was lined with trading stores offering very basic foods. Our house was on the corner, with a new porch added on the street side, and a small shop added with that. We had a chapel, a porch, and a study/store room in that half of the building. A separate entrance on the side led to a tiny living room, a small kitchen, and the bath with a cold-water shower over the tub, and a basin. Off the living room were two bedrooms. All the floors were rough concrete, and there was no floor at all outside the entrance to this part of the building at all. Our door had no less than four locks or bolts. A stroll led to the toilet, which contained a bucket that was collected by the municipality occasionally, emptied into the “honey wagon“ and a disinfected bucket replacement installed sometime during the night. The upper yard was littered with builder‘s rubble. and the lower one sloped to the dry stream bed. We would not have believed it could happen, had we not seen a car being swept away in that stream during a torrential rainfall one day. This was to be home for us, the scorpions, and a small snake for the next two years.

IRON BARS DO NOT A PRISON MAKE

It took us only a few days to learn, what the multiple bolts and locks on the door should have told us immediately. There was a reason that all the windows had heavy, about three quarter inch, iron bars. They were not there to keep someone in, but rather to keep everyone out. It is rather a shock when we awoke early in the morning before curtains could be hung, to see a black face peering through the glass only about three feet away. Our bed was directly under the window. We had a tin of kerosene for the stove, and foolishly left it outside so Kathy could not mess with it. It did not survive the first night until it was stolen as our canvas water bag had been stolen from the car the first night it was left outside the hotel. Strangely enough in those days, no one touched the car itself the whole time we were at Windhoek, and it was parked under a tree on the corner of our upper garden, and immediately by the street. The fence was missing there as the builder had taken it down. He also left a great pile of rubble, the home of many scorpions.

Not long after we moved in and started to use the shop as a chapel, there was a knock at the door and when I opened it, an African man was standing there. He let it be known that he was there to buy liquor. I am confident that he had been sent by the police to see if we were using the building as an illegal liquor store. It was illegal to sell liquor to the Africans at that time, but that did not stop nearly all the nearby shopkeepers from selling it, usually through an open window at the back of their shop, perhaps a kitchen. I remember watching in shock as a pickup truck was used in a raid on the butcher shop across the street. It was filled with bottles when the police left afterwards. To involve us, unaware at that stage as to what was going on, a police lookout had hidden behind our toilet to spy on and report that shop. That occasion did not make for friendly relationships. The manager of the shop next door to us made it a point to turn his back on us any time we went outside. Two shopkeepers, sisters, whose shop was directly across from where I parked our car, and who did not live on the premises, were the only neighbors to treat us with any form of friendship at all. I don't think they sold liquor, but they did sell bread, milk, sugar, flour and other necessities and we often bought those small items from them. It was from them that we learned a few German words and expressions. We did our weekly grocery and meat shopping from shops down town. At the butcher shop we mainly had to point at what we wanted as they had different names for so many things. We wanted hamburger meat, and it took a while to discover that it is called "minced meat" In those days most of the meat was cut from a carcass that was hanging on a hook in the open shop. A cleaver, and a knife were used to hack off the piece you wanted. The grocer had a small shop with counters and all the food was displayed on shelves behind them. The Jewish grocer soon made us welcome and suggested that we come behind the counters and select what we wanted and just set it on the counter.He would take over from there. He suggeste that after we wanted a can of creamed corn, which he knew as a tin of "mealies", never mind that it said "creamed corn" on the label. Fruit and vegetables came from the "green grocer's" shop or from open air markets. In some of the other stores we got a "cold shoulder." The attendant simply turned and walked away as soon as he heard our accent. Our first Sunday in Windhoek, while we were still living in the hotel, we went to the Methodist church services, the only English service we could find and the church was just around the corner from the hotel. We soon learned that even though the words were nearly the same, the tune was often quite different. Even if the people did speak English, they ignored us completely. After that, even in the hotel, we had our own communion service and Prayer and Bible reading. I was reminded of Paul when he first came to Philippi. He went out to the riverside where he found a group of women who gathered there for prayer. Lydia and her staff believed and were baptized. We had no riverside and found no one.

STRANGE VIEWS FROM OUR BEDROOM WINDOW

The only window in our bedroom faced the dry stream bed and across the valley the township beyond. Through we learned many different and interesting things. On our first night there had been a death nearby so there was a wake that lasted all night. That is a custom common to all African people. Of course it prevents the very common rats from getting to the body, but it is also a part of the ritual. Later in South Africa we became accustomed to African funerals and learned of the tradition that the widow must huddle in a corner of the room under a blanket until the funeral is conducted, that a candle must be burning by the body, and that the shovels that dug the grave and will be used to cover it must be ritually washed afterwards before the feast that is inevitably served. It was more in curiosity rather than being disturbed that we listened to the singing that continued all night, that first night in our new home. They sang hymns softly, but all night long. This was a first lesson in African culture. Another strange thing was that there seemed to be a lot of activity going on in the open area under the thorn trees at the week ends. Women came and went carrying large tins on their heads. They carried everything on their heads. I remember seeing a woman with spike heeled shoes balanced on top of her head, others with pails of water, and even one carrying a bedstead. These particular women seemed to be carrying something that they had dug up from under a tree. They always replaced it with a full tin they had brought with them. This seemed always to happen at the beginning of the weekend. Then it dawned on us. They were bringing a sweet mixture with yeast, which they buried, in the hole where they had just removed the tin they left there the week before. In this hot temperature, the sugar and the yeast, and what ever else had fermented. This was their "brewery" in action, African style. No one would arrest them for this. This was another lesson in African culture. Never drink just whatever is set before you unless it is a factory sealed cola or a hot cup of tea. On another day we noted, a very strange many-legged "creature" that crept across the horizon of the ridge far in the distance. It was bewildering to see a house, one of the tin shacks really, that appeared to have sprouted legs and was walking away. It was a medium size structure, probably a eight by ten feet, but a group of people, probably men as their bare legs showed from above the knees down, had walked inside, picked it up and were carrying it over their heads to a new space. This was moving day African style.

HOW THE WORK STARTED

Our furnishings in Windhoek were very few. We had no bedroom furniture at all, and we slept on a folding couch in the living room. The kitchen had a table and four chairs, and I seem to remember an old refrigerator. There was electricity only a half day. We bought everything from a second hand store.

The chapel was a different matter. As soon as we had a few folding chairs, and had accessed our trunks and supplies, we started turning the lights on in the chapel, set up a flannel graph tripod with a basic scene on it, and at the same time each evening we opened the door wide and set a record player out on the porch. Then, African style, we turned it up loud, very loud, with a speaker directed toward the nearest houses. The record was of hymns played on the chimes. That carries and it had to compete with "Mocking Bird Hill" that was blasting from the beer hall a quarter mile away. After the record was finished, we started with our own devotions and prayers. At first, no one came, but we were being heard, and unknown to us, being watched and listened to as well.

We were beginning to be despondent about what else we could do and one evening decided to have our devotions in our own kitchen. When nothing happened in the chapel that night, we were startled to hear a timid knock on the door. And behold there was a small cluster of children there. They wanted to know, weren't we having Bible. The oldest girl, Fredrika Pieterson, a young colored lady and her brothers and sisters and their friends had been listening and watching from the dark street as there were no street lights in the area. This was the start we had been praying for. A few weeks later a school teacher offered to interpret for us and to give us Afrikaans lessons. We were exuberant. From that start, the young group grew and grew so I bought wood and built simple benches for the chapel. We expanded our lessons to include a Saturday afternoon time using vacation Bible School type lessons with handwork. And were learning a little Afrikaans. We met and made friends with one of the African ministers from the area. When the group began to grow, we naturally attracted the attention of others, and the devil got involved. We were being too successful. There was only one school available to these children, and they all attended there. That school was a mission school operated by the Rhenish Lutheran Church. At first they merely threatened the children, but when that did not stop them, they started to beat anyone who came to visit us and threatened expulsion from the school. Our interpreter turned out to be a police spy, as several politically activated missionaries had been investigated and two priests expelled from the country. About that time the shop keeper beside us rented an outbuilding in his yard facing our home to a teacher from the school who moved in there solely to write down the names of all the children who came to our services. They were to be expelled if they did not cease.

Of course, the parents stopped their children from coming to us, and I decided it was time to make a greater effort to contact English-speaking adults who would not be intimidated so easily.

I prepared, and using a hand operated stencil machine printed copies of a basic lesson series of studies. To get them into the hands of English speakers, I placed an advertisement in "Drum" , one of the English language magazines published particularly for African readers. The small single column advertisement did not cost much at all, so I was really surprised when requests started coming in from all over Africa. The only problem was that none of them were from South West Africa,(Namibia) where we were. Another surprise was how long these adverts were still being replied to after the date of the issue that carried them. A year later some of those adverts were still producing mail.

We had letters from South Africa, the Rhodesias, Malawi, Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, Nigeria, Ghana and even farther away. Two editions of that magazine were printed each month and they were being read all over the British Commonwealth nations of Africa! As time passed, we received letters asking for us to come to work in Nyasaland, Rhodesia, Nigeria, and Ghana. We could not say yes to them all, but we did keep track of them and it was from those invitations and contacts that new missionaries wereable to open new missions in Nigeria and Ghana. Others went to other places where there had already been missionaries, but more were needed.

This was the beginning of what was destined to become our main emphasis; publishing the Gospel in printed form.

AMOTHER WAY TO REACH OUT

Knowing that we needed to contact adults, Bob bought a small hand cranked Gestetner stencil printer, prepared a series of correspondence Bible lessons in English, and placed a one column 2" advertisement in "Bona" and "Drum" magazines. I chose magazines because people don't throw magazines away the way they do newspapers. Both Bona and Drum are Africa, English language magazines. Both are very popular all over Africa. What I did not know is that they are published in several editions, depending what country of Africa may be their source of publication. Those two adverts reached out to South Africa, South West Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, both Northern and Southern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Gold Coast, and even beyond. Those are all countries of the British Commonwealth sp English is taught in the schools. After a slow start, the requests rolled in, including invitations to come to their countries to work. Two new mission fields actually opened because of that decision. God had led in this! And He had chosen me because of my particular talents and personality.

That was how Bob became a self trained "printer and publisher" for soon the Gestetner had to be replaced by an electric offset printer and then larger and more effecient offset presses; until finally finally there was a "roll back" when he reverted to an electronic Risograph. Actually it was a new innovation to printing. Yes, it uses a stencil but much differently than the old machines and far cleaner, but that is a whole new blog to come later.

At this early stage, Bob invited a man to come from the Minister's Training School in Kimberley, to hold a meeting and advise as to what should be done about Windhoek problems. Nick Qwemesha came during the Christmas Summer break at the school. It had been arranged that he would stay in the home of the minister of African Methodist Episcopal church, perhaps a quarter a mile away from us. He and his family were to be out of town. That was arranged because it was illegal for Nick to stay in the home of a white family. Those were Arpartheid Years and as foreigners, we could expect to be under surveillance. We had already had the experience of the Police Spy interpreter. On the second day, Nick came to the Mission, cap in hand and asked to be allowed to stay with us. He would sleep anywhere! Even the little children were drunk in the township, and I am sure that he was frightened to stay there and walk back and forth to our home. Of course we took him in and made a plan, though there was not even one spare bed anywhere on the property. I think he put the benches together and put a mattress pad and blanket on them. He was happier, and we came to know a literally, life long friend. Many years later his family phoned to ask me to come over 400 miles to preach his funeral, and His widow traveled hundreds of miles to see us when we returned to Africa to be at the wedding of a granddaughter. It would have been a very difficult trip for Gerty in the heat of season and riding in an overloaded car.

Nick was very upset that there was no telephone in this house right on the very edge of the township. When even the tiny ones who came to the meetings had obviously been drinking, He made it very clear that we should leave as soon as our lease expired and come and help teach at the Preacher Training School in Kimberley where he would be my interpreter. Phyllis had our two older girls and by that time Donna had just been born, so she and the children flew from Windhoek to Kimberley and Bob followed by road retracing the route followed two years before. This time he knew where he was going and what to expect. A new phase, a new home, and new friends lay ahead. We were to spend a happy twelve years in Kimberley and the family had many friends there.

SURVEYING OUR NEW FIELD

After we had been in Namibia for a few months, we made a short trip to the North to investigate where the various peoples lived, what it was like there, how large the villages were, and more importantly if there were already churches working in those villages. The turning around point had to be the Etosha Pan Game Park. There was only one road going farther north and it crossed the border into Angola and was not open to travel without special permits and vehicles.
I recall only two towns north, and one of those was a mining town and little more. The other was dominated by the Rhenish Mission Church. In South Africa the church would have beent a Dutch Reformed Church built literally on an island in the middle of the main street but Namibia was primarily German and not Dutch. The countryside as very barren, very rocky, and almost desert in nature.

The apex of the trip was the game park, but interesting to us was the fact that we saw the only pair of Cheetah, dozing under a thorn tree still well outside the park. We made a stop at the old German Fort that marks the park entrance. It was once manned by the military who patrolled riding camels, however that time was far past. There was a natural pool there and that is where we had our lunch beside it before crossing the park to the west on the only road. I understand that the tourist industry has since made that fort into a campground for tourists. That particular park was not fenced at that time. It is composed largely of a great pan which fills with water during the rainy season. At the time we were there it was covered with grass and being grazed by many buck, impala, and other grass eating animals. There are also elephants and since there are the bock and antelope, there are also lions. We once foolishly made a brief pause under a cluster of thorn trees that crowned a "koppie" near the road. We now know that lions usually spend their day sleeping at just such places. At night, they hunt.

Miles further down the road, we had a flat tire and had to change it surrounded by three foot high grass. We thought we had left the park by that time, but apparently had not as a truck load of African workers became very agitated when they passed by. Almost immediately after we started again we passed a large sign, telling is to beware of the elephants, and of course the lions. God looks after the foolish people of this earth!

As darkness began to come and we had yet to see anywhere to buy petrol we parked beside the road at the entrance of a farm that displayed a sign that they had petrol to sell. We could see a light in the distance, but it was a long dirt road and we were all exhausted, so we made camp there. It would not have been necessary as it turned out that there was a country hotel with petrol available only a short distance further down the road.

We returned to Windhoek knowing that we were already living in the very best place that there was to start a new work. God had been leading us to it from the beginning.

A few months later, we made another much shorter trip travelling east that time to the only town in that direction. It was at the border between Namibia and Botswana. We camped just off the main road on a trail that probably led to a farmer's home a mile or so away. The next morning, we turned back at the little border town without even really stopping and headed back to our home in Windhoek. The road had deteriorated to a sandy trail, that at times became either very corrugated or very soft sand. Over the border in Botswana it would have deteriorated to be like driving in a sandbox. Francistown was hundreds of miles farther on the other side of the country. After that, we stayed in Windhoek and never ventured more than a few miles out of town in any direction.