The events, that took place shortly after our second evacuation from Congo, showed us the real reason we had been told to leave. The unrest we had heard about, between the Lendu and Hema at Blukwa, escalated horribly. We heard that the dispute focused on who would control the church. When one group nailed the church door shut, it reminded us that Njaba had announced in the dorm kitchen one day, even before the first rebellion, that the church at Rethy was only for the Lendus.

How could we take that seriously when Jesus had commanded that we love one another? He said that unbelievers would know we are Christians by the demonstration of God’s love among us. Ellen was also in the kitchen that day, clearly neither a Lendu nor an Alure. “Then, where will I go to church?”, she asked. There was no answer.

Nailing the church door shut was followed by a bloody retaliation. Bodies of the hated Hema tribe were thrown into the church. I am grateful not to know the terrible details of what went on there, but the hatred spread. The hidden tension we never saw was being manifest even among the church leaders. It broke our hearts when we heard that Marko, the one who had worked with us so faithfully was involved in forcefully driving out the Hema and Alure from Rethy, including Manasse, the young man with whom he had worked until the evacuation.

Marko was in the vehicle with Pastor Laleni and had an axe with him when they went out to destroy and burn Alure houses. Near Fataki an entire village of over 30 thatched huts was burned and the Hema were driven away. The Lendu and the Hema had revived an ancient hatred that had lain dormant for many years.

A very old man, named Lawi, once told me a story about the origins of the Alure and the Lendu. I didn’t go to his house to hear a story, but when Sarah, the one we called the Goi Lady, told me to come into the hut to talk with her “bwana”, I went with her.

This happened years earlier, when things were peaceful, before the rebellion when Mobutu was overthrown by Kabila’s rebel army. I was the dorm supervisor and my responsibilities included caring for the cattle that belonged to the dorm.

One recurring problem, that had to be frequently addressed, was when the dorm cows would break out of their night pasture and find their way into gardens of recently planted corn. It was the worst when the cows were hungry, the pastures dry, and the moon high in the sky at night. Things were complicated further if the herdsmen just moved the cows between pastures and didn’t bother to take them out on the range to eat their fill during the day. When the overgrazed pasture behind the teacher houses and opposite the Uguru Village was used, we often had problems.

The report came to me. “The cows got out last night and you need to go see.” That immediately became an unwanted priority. I stuffed a thick wad of devalued Zaires into my pocket and headed down past the barn and followed the pasture fence looking for breaks as I headed to Uguru. They said the cows had spoiled Lawi’s corn, near Betewelli’s carpenter shop, right in the village. As I walked, I began counting all the repaired breaks in the three strand barbed wire fence. One hundred and three repairs! Incredible!

Now resolving problems like this, where a cow enters a garden and consumes someone’s corn, was under the authority of the local agronome, assigned by the government. It was settled by counting the number of stalks damaged and multiplying by a fine depending on how developed the corn was at the time. Finding the agronome in Kwandruma, bringing him to the garden, doing the calculations, taking him back, and paying his fee was far beyond what I planned to do. I wanted to settle things quickly.

I saw the hoof prints of the cattle, and the chewed off corn plants. I pulled out my wad of money and offered to settle with the young men who showed me the damaged garden. I thought my offer was generous.

That is when Sarah came up and invited me to come with her. I had heard that Lawi was a story teller but I had never known exactly where he lived. The inside of the windowless thatched hut was so dark I could hardly see Lawi. Smoke from the smoldering fire on the floor rose slowly and drifted out the open door. Lawi had a thin, worn blanket clutched around himself to supplement the heat from the fire. It seemed that he may have once been a very tall Alure man, but he now lay on his woven sleeping mat with his knees drawn up near his chest. When he started to talk he gained strength, and partially sat up as he told me this story.

“There were two brothers who lived at the edge of the forest. They worked together every day as they cleared their gardens. They hunted with each other and shared the wild meat on the days when they were successful. They shared the crops from their gardens.

Their wives cared for the gardens and harvested the produce together. Their young children played on the dusty, well swept, ground between their thatched huts, the dust making their dark skin lighter where it clung to them. Neither had a shirt to get dirty. They seemed to love the freedom of trying to crawl and walk uncertainly in their search for small pretty seeds to pick up and put in their mouths. They were usually carried on their mother’s backs when there was work to be done in the garden.

One of the brothers tried planting new seeds, wanting to see what he could grow in his garden, besides corn and beans. The other brother tried raising goats and liked caring for animals, but both loved hunting and valued above anything else their spears with the highly polished shafts.

The iron tips were made by the blacksmiths who had melted the metal from rock found in a secret place known only to themselves. The brothers sharpening the point and the cutting edges after every hunt. The blade was then heated in the fire until it glowed. Quenching the tip in palm oil hardened the steel. It was then polished with sand and the edge restored with a special piece of shale. The two brothers had special places to keep their spears, each by his own door, if needed against wild animals that might attack at night.

That night they were both sleeping deeply after eating all they could of the young wart-hog they had killed the previous day. The cooking fire still smoldered slowly. Nothing had been put away. Even the spears used hadn’t been cleaned and polished. They were leaning on a small tree near where the meat had been cut up to roast. Rats scurried around, searching silently for any small scraps they could find.

The cracking of dried forest debris under the heavy tread of the elephant became louder as the huge beast made its way to the corn garden. Though it usually ate the abundant tall grass and the young growth it tore from the branches of certain trees, it had developed a taste for the maturing corn. Though both men were hunters, only the older brother woke, and rushed out to drive off the elephant. His spear wasn’t by his door, but he found it leaning on the tree and ran down the path to the garden, yelling loudly.

Strangely, the elephant ignored the human as he uprooted more stalks of the succulent corn with his trunk and folded them into his mouth. The man was so enraged that he ran beneath the elephant jabbing upward, using all his strength, so that the sharp spear penetrated the softer underbelly of the elephant. He couldn’t remove his spear to stab again since the elephant forgot the corn, smelled the human, and charged off plowing a new trail into the jungle. The older brother was trembling in relief as he returned to his hut.

When daylight came he told his younger brother that he had saved most of the corn garden from the elephant and had jabbed a spear into him, but lost the spear. It soon became undeniably evident that lost spear had belonged to his younger brother. The remaining spear, still leaning on the tree was his own.

The younger brother snatched up the remaining spear, broke the slender polished shaft, and demanded that his brother go get his spear and bring it back to him. Gone was all understanding and reason. Retrieving a spearhead embedded in the belly of an elephant was absolutely impossible, yet the older brother set out the same day taking a small bag of salt to trade with, if needed.

It was easy to find the beginning of the elephant’s trail where the corn had been destroyed. There was blood on the ground. There was a remote chance that the sharp spear had inflicted a mortal wound and after days of tracking he would find the dead elephant and be able to recover the spear. However, he found less and less blood sign so he lost hope, especially after the tracks of his wounded elephant mingled with many others on the hard-packed jungle trails.

There were old stories of the Elephant Lady, one to whom wounded elephants could go to for help. Her hut was deep in the jungle; how could he ever find her, to see if she had helped his wounded elephant? There might be several trails leading to her house so he began following the ones he judged led to the darkest areas, away from the grass-lands.

There were two huts in the clearing and he saw a very old woman bent at the waist stirring something in a clay pot over a fire. The stories were true, she said. She would need salt in payment. She used salt to put on the wounds. This was what she was cooking with leaves to be ready for the next elephant. There was one a few days ago with a broken off spear she had removed. She had used the last of her old medicine on that one. The elephant had been happy when he left. She had saved the spear because the men need spears to live.

The second hut contained a crisscrossed pile of broken spears, some rusty with age, with one on top that the man recognized. He could cut and fit a new shaft to the spear head. All would soon be as it had been before between the two brothers. There would be harmony and love again.

When he got home he found his wife in great distress, clinging to their plump little baby. His brother’s wife was screaming at her, clawing at the baby, demanding that she return something immediately. His brother was there too, with hot, irrational, anger distorting his face. Here he was, with his brother’s spear in his hand, having just accomplished the impossible! As he offered it to his brother, he heard more. “Your baby swallowed my colored beads, and I want them back, right now!” she screamed.

“Surely you can wait patiently for a few days,” was his reply. “We can watch carefully. The beads will be found. We will clean them.”

His younger brother snatched back his spear, and with it fulfilled his wife’s horrible demand.”

Lawi stopped telling his story. Then he said, “that day an axe was driven deep into the ageless rubber tree that dominates the hill on the edge of the escarpment, to divide forever the land between the two families, the Lendu and the Hema. The axe is still there.”

Lawi seemed tired and pulled up the thin blanket as he lay back down. Sarah said we needed to go. The bright sunlight was blinding when we stepped outside.

I still held the bundle of Zaires I had brought to pay for the corn that was damaged by the dorm cows. The young men didn’t seem interested in taking it. I wanted to make things right and tried to give the money to Sarah, but she asked, “Didn’t you hear his story? He doesn’t want your money.”

I felt ashamed and helpless. They were so poor and I was unable to give them anything. We did buy popped goi (amaranth seeds) from Sarah every time she brought some to the dorm. One day I found her warming herself by the fireplace in our living room. Maybe she felt more at home in our empty house sitting on the floor in front of the fire than in the dorm kitchen. Perhaps the tribal hatred known to Lawi and Sarah was festering even then.

Now we were in Kenya and could do nothing but pray to our Almighty God to work in the hearts of so many who had heard the gospel message and professed to have accepted God’s provision in Jesus, yet were not following Him.

Are we, here in America, in need of the same prayers? May God have mercy on us.