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.
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