Last week we thought about the fact that the one who lives in the house or the one who builds the house is of greater importance than the house itself. Houses don’t really last very long. The ruins of one house can be used to build another. We need to think about the fact that we are called God’s building. People will readily agree with the first part of the following verse, but have a hard time with the second half. “For every house is built by some man; but he that built all things is God.” God formed man from the dust of the ground.

Ted Crossman used bricks from a Belgian settler’s house, destroyed in the Simba Rebellion, to build what was to become Ellen’s and my first dorm apartment at Rethy. Tall steel pole-jacks, that he found at an abandoned hospital building project somewhere near Mahagi, may have given him the idea of cutting the roof of the big old dorm to make room for the addition. On one side, the gabled roof was split into three sections, and the entire center section, hinged at the peak, was jacked up so a second story could be built beneath it. Those jacks were to remain in place until the front brick wall could be built up to support the roof. The hinged section was to be lowered down onto the wall, and the jacks removed. Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

How would you remove the long steel jacks which were to pass through a cement floor that was to be poured for the upstairs? Where should the jacks be placed to lift all those rafters and the roof? The pole jacks could be shortened only a certain amount, so they would still be very long after the roof had been lowered down onto the walls. They would have to be tilted to bring them down through the cement floor.

The new outside wall was in place. New interior walls had also been built. Someone had to think ahead and have a way to get those temporary jacks out of there.

When the second story floor was poured, all the wet cement was brought up in buckets to be carried to the far wall and dumped down through the reinforcing bars to the top of the support wall, and out onto the wooden form. The form was a little like a big flat table made of Cypress boards that fit exactly between the downstairs walls. All the cracks between the boards were stuffed to keep the wet concrete from leaking through. The form was supported on the downstairs floor by so many pole legs that it didn’t move at all when the men walked across on the plank path to deliver the cement.

Ted made a rectangular open box around each tall steel jack where it came up through the form. It was fastened to the form to keep the cement away from the poles so they could later be removed. It was long enough so the pole could be tilted when it was taken out. It was the same height as the depth of the cement for the floor, so when the forms and the jacks were removed the rectangular hole could be filled in, making it even with the floor, and the ceiling below.

Ted was the designer. The Africans said we lived up in the air like birds. Though Ted had had the idea of building a circular staircase we used a more conventional stairway, not flying, to get upstairs.

God has created many things that we richly enjoy in this world, but we can get too attached to the good life and forget that we were given life in order to have the opportunity to get to know God. Israel was warned not to forget God when they prospered in every way, are full, and live in goodly houses. People then become proud and say, “My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth.”

We liked our house. In the dining room, Ted had thought of building one wall to include a long brick planter where Ellen grew philodendron. It made a beautiful leafy wall across from the bay window in that room. He filled in the rest of the wall above the planter with translucent corrugated roofing material that was usually used in building skylights. Light did come through that wall into the store-room on the other side. With the lights on, in the store-room, the plant was back-lit. Ted loved to build beautiful things.

We lived in that apartment for over ten years and shared it every day with our dorm children. They wore out the couch as it was the most popular place to sit with your friends during Dorm devotions and story time. The race to get a place often ended up with too many boys in it, straining the structure, until only a total rebuild would make it worth re-covering. The webbing tore and the inner springs lost their rebound capability from excessive abuse and came out through the cushions.

Stuffed couches really do include horsehair, cotton batts, heavy webbing, coil springs and framing wires. The cover has a lot of decorative beading along the edges and around the corners. There are hundreds and hundreds of tacks, some with polished bronze heads. It was quite a challenge to rebuild, but was ready for use when we started the next term. Unfortunately, the heaviest cloth from Bunia wore out very quickly.

That couch and the rest of our stuff moved with us when our assignment was changed to be the ones to care for the grade seven to nine children in the biggie dorm. We later moved again to what had been the Klines apartment when I was working on the installation of the Koda Hydroelectric plant. As the Rethy Station Manager and the director of Editions CECA, (the church’s printing and publications department), I had very little time to be involved in the school activities. We had also just started FM broadcasting, in several languages from a temporary studio near the printing press.

Ellen continued to be the cateress at the dorm, the book-keeper, and the one who calculated the dorm wages using the revision factor every month. She also became known as the “Veggie Lady” as she filled orders for many who hadn’t access to fresh vegetables as we did at Rethy.

The enrolment at Rethy had decreased and there were fewer dorm children and dorm parents, so we got four little boys to care for in our home. They fit right into our family with Ellen making everything work. They were about the age of our youngest son, Jeff.

Of course we had accumulated stuff that we thought valuable, during our twenty-eight years at Rethy. I valued the tools without which I could not do many of the things that I loved to do. God had blessed us there at Rethy and Ellen had made many photo albums with hundreds of pictures of our own and dorm kids that we didn’t want to forget.

When it became clear that Mobutu no longer had control of his country, that the money with his picture on it was nearly worthless, that he hadn’t paid his soldiers for months, and that Kabila was leading rebels in his quest to take over the country, we knew that time was short. Was there anything worth saving in our home?

A number of years earlier the bitter hatred between the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda resulted in 100 days of genocide by the organized, brutal killings of nearly a million people. Millions of Hutu fled into Zaire. Kabila led a rebel army of Tutsi soldiers and thousands of children warriors with the goals to take vengeance on the Hutu, liberate Zaire from Mobutu, and seize power. They experienced very little resistance as Mobutu’s unpaid soldiers looted, and fled, rather than stay and fight. They were advancing through the Ituri forest in the vicinity of Beni and Oicha heading toward Bunia.

There was very little time left in the school term and we prayed that the Lord would grant us time to complete the classes and get the dorm children back to their parents before we were forced to leave. We had one empty dorm so Ellen and Karen Lewis, with the help of the faithful dorm workers, got everything set up to receive missionaries fleeing the country. One who had been badly traumatized wept in wonder and joy to find her name on a door when the Missionary Aviation Fellowship (MAF), plane, brought her to Rethy.

MAF and AIM AIR, (Africa Inland Mission’s air service), were on the radio continuously arranging flights and monitoring the progress of a huge convoy of commandeered rebel trucks which was creeping along the rain forest road between Oicha and Bunia. Rethy was seen as the best place to care for so many who needed to be housed and fed as they awaited flights on larger planes out of Bunia. The essential AIM office staff from Bunia was moved to Rethy and the field treasurer set up his computers in an empty dorm room. The Cessna planes flew in and out of Rethy and kept us updated on how far Kabila’s army had advanced.

The forest roads have no firm base and long sections often became impassable mud trenches with bottomless holes through which no truck can pass. Building a road in the jungle around those huge holes took days and days to accomplish since the rain poured down continuously. God was answering our prayers.

One pilot reported that he flew over Komanda and counted forty-two big trucks strung out on the part of the forest road that was visible from the air. Once the army had regrouped near that intersection on the Bunia-Kisangani road there would be no time left since the main road was well drained and it was only 100 kilometers to Bunia. Those trucks, packed with hundreds of standing soldiers and with whatever other equipment they had dragged through the forest, caused the local unpaid soldiers to panic. Kabila’s announcements that he was coming was the signal that caused Mobutu’s soldiers to loot what they could, seize any transport they could find, and flee, leaving total anarchy behind them.

God’s rain in the forest had allowed us to finish the school term and get all the dorm children back with their parents. Many of the Rethy staff left as soon as there was room on an MAF flight.

I had gone down to Ngenge to what we called the Ara airstrip, to have them cut the grass. Since there was no potable water there, I also brought down 40 liters of drinking water in the yellow containers the dorm used for picnics. That airstrip was about 3,000 feet lower than the one at Rethy and might be needed if we were blocked from using the Bunia airstrip. There was an immigration officer there who could stamp our passports registering our official departure that would validate our “Visa de Sorti et Retour”. I don’t think he had any idea what might happen as he normally processed papers for people traveling by boat to Uganda.

A month earlier, though Ellen hadn’t felt the imminence of our possible departure, I had sent a box of photo albums and small tools to Kenya. We were now told by MAF to collect no more than five pounds of our belongings and to be ready to leave when they had space. Threats of looting had begun with windows already being broken at Clements house on the lower road. People hid and stored their “stuff”, hoping it would be there when they returned. I put some important papers with the old Hercules shotgun above a false ceiling in a dark hall closet.

The day we left Zaire, some Egyptian advisors to Mobutu’s army crowded their way onto the MAF plane when it landed in Bunia. The two Cessna planes bringing missionary passengers from Rethy turned back to depart instead from Ara. They filled the first planes to the maximum weight possible to take-off at the lower altitude on the longer grass airstrip.

Both MAF and AIM AIR planes shuttled passengers between Rethy, Ara, and Kampala and, at the end of the day I found out that they needed to squeeze me in the last plane, from Ara. Ellen took the material for Debbie’s wedding, her account books, her cook books and her well-worn Bible with years of notes that only she can read. She saw my mother’s old glass salad bowl and brought that too. I brought nothing.

We were together on the next flight from Kampala to Nairobi. God had something else for us. Why do we cling so tightly to what we have? Everything belongs to God and it is certain we can take nothing with us.