Looking back at all the events that meshed so marvelously, when we evacuated Zaire, it is clear that God was involved. Certainly, God was responsible for all the air-traffic-control, with MAF and AIM-AIR both using that same tiny, grass airstrip at Ara. Planes were coming in from, or returning to Rethy, and simultaneously there were planes, arriving from, or departing for Entebbe where passengers were being assembled for the next flight to Nairobi.

The white dust hanging in the air after take-off had no time to settle before the next plane circled in to land. The one on the ground was loaded, motor running, ready to taxi up the narrow grass strip to the starting point. Dust whirled in the brilliant sunlight, stirred up again and again by propeller wash. The smell of avgas, the blast of the powerful engines, and the angle of the sinking sun, all heightened, the sense of urgency, to depart immediately.

The stuffed dog in Jeff’s backpack wasn’t his brindled miniature dachshund, that he had wanted to bring, but it made a good pillow for him on the way to Entebbe. He had named it Buffy, after his grandma’s dog. He was sleeping and would see his friends when we arrived at Entebbe. God took good care of the small stuff too.

When we arrived there we found many of our fellow missionaries, who had left Rethy earlier than we had. They were waiting in the airport lounge, for the same flight that would take us to Nairobi. We talked together about what was happening and what we would do next. Plans had already been made for all of us to go to Rift Valley Academy, to interact with each other, in order to better deal with the trauma we had just experienced. They had scheduled meetings and psychologists to help us deal with the crisis and the loss of all our stuff. It was very easy to relax and doze during those long meetings, because, after all, God was in charge and He would help us know what to do next. It was small stuff to Him.

Some were already making arrangements to become part of the RVA staff, since many of the Rethy children would stay, and help would be needed. A number of missionaries asked for assignments in Kenya, joining in to help where they could. Many made plans to fly directly to their home country, their home church, or their family.

I told Ellen that things in Zaire would not settle down for some time, and that we would return to our old farmhouse in New York. She was much more optimistic than I in hoping to return soon. I told her there would be extensive looting for sure. We had heard that it had already begun before the last men were able to leave Rethy. It wasn’t just the soldiers who looted before they fled, but in the absence of any recognized authority the local people did whatever they pleased.

Jeff and Laura and their children were then living in the house at the farm so it was easy to move right back in. They even had the house warm, which was quite a challenge, using only wood fires for heat. Many from New York went to Florida in the winter, but his teaching job was in Milford. Our daughter Laura is also a teacher and she was delighted to set up a home school program for her little brother.

We continued to monitor the situation in Zaire and heard that Kabila had succeeded in taking over the country. Mobuto fled to Morocco to die there. The country was renamed the Congo. Rethy was a mess, some buildings burned. We certainly could not return immediately.

We received word from the Mission headquarters in Pearl River that we were needed in Florida at the AIM retirement center we called Media. Ellen was to take over as cateress and I would work in maintenance. My retired elderly parents also needed us. Jeff was in seventh grade so we took him with us.

God took care of other small stuff too. Kirk found us a white Mazda in North Carolina, aged about 115,000 miles, but available, and affordable. On the way south we bought it. We were assigned to live in a small caretaker’s cottage near a lake not far from Media. After our early breakfast we would drive the three miles to the retirement center for Ellen to prepare the morning meal for the elderly Scott Home residents.

“Dad, stop, there is a free bike!”  He was right. There it was, a mountain bike with a hand lettered sign taped to it. FREE!  Jeff had lost his bike and his dog when we evacuated. The owner of the bike, sorting stuff in his overfilled garage, looked strangely at us when we asked him. I guess the new bike, maybe used once, was small stuff to him!

Ellen used the home schooling program Laura had set up and Jeff rushed to get everything done before 10:30 if he could. He wanted to get outside with Carlos, Porhelio, or his dad.

Dad was the least popular to help because I was solving problems with the septic systems at several of the retirement cottages. Replacing rotted, root filled, asbestos pipes with new four inch PVC pipe was a filthy job. There was other stuff in the pipes, too. Over a long forgotten sewer system, a five-inch concrete slab had been poured for a carport. I faced quite a challenge there. I had no machinery for Jeff to drive.

I did take him with me to town when I needed to buy plumbing parts. He learned that you need to tie down long PVC pipes in an open pickup. His dad was in too much of a rush. Turning right to merge into four lanes of traffic and having two pipes roll over the side in front of oncoming cars could have been a big deal, but God took care of that, too. The pipes bounced harmlessly onto the road and all the cars avoided them or stopped. I had learned a lesson too.

Jeff favored working with the Mexican yard men since they had a tractor. Carlos soon allowed him to drive the orange Kubota, pulling the leaf wagon, filled with debris, to the back of the property. His skill with the driving lawn mowers was soon being reported by one old resident to another. He mows so fast!  He was on the housetops to cleaning rain gutters today!  I guess Jeff’s goal was to fill the wagon so he could drive the tractor to the dump again.

I’m not sure which one taught Jeff how to operate the bucket on the Kubota, but when he and I broke up the cracked foundation block in the lake Minneola swimming area, I used the bar and sledge and he operated the tractor. Seemed a good project, since the screened in Piot had long since fallen and water snakes lived in the open cracks. I provided the heavy hand labor and my seventh grader operated the front loader. We badly over-loaded the wagon with rock, but left no trace of the rubble on the sandy beach.

Carlos and Porhelio had their own families and so adopted Jeff. Jim Littlejohns and Jeff spent quite a bit of time in Jim’s little shed where Jim painted pictures on the back of sheets of glass. He also helped Jeff make a pinewood derby car. They fished together on the lake and Jeff caught more than Jim did that day. They asked Ellen to cook up the fish. It was nice for Jeff to have a buddy since he left so many behind at Rethy. Jim was 90. The difference in age didn’t seem to matter at all, just small stuff.

I’m not sure why Porhelio possessed a quality .177 pellet gun to use at his orange-orchard, but he thought of Jeff and soon Jeff was hunting squirrels at Media. They were abundant, since so many of the retired missionaries fed the birds!  We cautioned Jeff that he needed to be sure the little old ladies didn’t mind him shooting their squirrels.

“Mom,” he said, “they tell me to come shoot all their squirrels and they bring me a plastic bag to put it in when I get one.”

Jeff was glad school finished at about ten each day and he certainly didn’t think of driving the Kubota as work. He didn’t think of it as training either. It wasn’t quite as big as the Ford 4000 Bill Stough has loaned to us at Rethy, but it was a diesel and had a bucket. The front loaders he now drives at his job could scoop up that entire tractor, but the skills he learned started in a small way.

There was an enormous tree stump in the large mowed field between the two entrance roads to the retirement center. The gigantic Oak had no doubt once dominated the area but had died. Some daring missionary had somehow removed the upper parts of the tree, but what was left was more than five feet through and still, solidly stood. It had some kind of wire mesh wrapped around the trunk, reaching up nearly fifteen feet, filled with dead vines and leaves entangled in it. Jeff and I agreed that removing what was left of the tree would be a cool project. Carlos and Porhelio showed us the old chain saws and the worn chains that needed sharpening. I think Bob Richards, the retirement center manager, approved.

The Kubota bucket could do nothing to dig out the heavy roots going down into the sand. It was slow work, having to dig out and chop away all we could before trying the chain saw. The deeper we went, the more likely it was that we would end up sawing sand, ruining yet another chain. Eventually we had to climb down in our hole to cut roots. It seemed quite possible that the tons of wood above us was nearly ready to topple.

Using ladders, we tied a heavy rope high up the trunk, to get the best leverage we could, in order pull down the tree. The Kubota yanked on its tether, was jerked to a stop, the back tires began digging holes in the sand, and nothing else happened.

I had Jeff drive around the base of a large pine tree, winding the rope with the maximum possible tension, and we tied it there. Using another rope fastened at the midpoint of the taut rope, and puling at right angles, we multiplied the tension on that stump tremendously.

Now, in Vector-Analysis, engineering students draw vector diagrams, are given the angles between the ropes, the tension on the rope between the high point on the stump and the base of the pine tree, and calculate the maximum tension that can be realized by the tractor driving on the sand. The weight of the tractor was given. I suppose they needed the slope of the sand and the horsepower of the Kubota. We didn’t worry about calculations.

My seventh grade son drove the tractor. The ropes squeaked as the tension peaked, the angles changed, and the once mighty oak lost its grip on the ground and fell.

Jeff had left his home school courses that morning to join dad and start his engineering courses.

Even though we managed to cut it in half by removing outside blocks to reach the middle with the chainsaw blade, the wood was still too heavy for us to move.

A commercial front loader on site, working on a new duplex pad, came over to help us. He was just able to keep his back wheels on the ground and drive with the smaller section in his bucket to drop it out back. The other he couldn’t lift. The back wheels just rose up in the air, so he pushed and rolled the larger piece into the shade of the boundary trees on the far side of the entrance road.

I heard that one of the retired residents, Dorothy Miller, was later asking what happened to the huge Bougainvillea that was out in the front lawn. I then understood, where all those dead vines, and leaves came from and that someone actually noticed that the oak was gone.

The commercial front-loader that came to help us had been hired by Bob Richards. He had been able to change how the land was registered and the addition of new residences had begun. Designs for a new, larger, Scott Home were being considered. Using a building design program I had used for the radio station proposals, I offered several plans and got in on some of the discussions. Ellen was asked to prepare a month of balanced menus to improve the meals for the elderly residents. My parents were also doing much better.

Because of our early return from Zaire, our daughter Debbie moved up her wedding date to the end of May, so we said goodbye to my parents and left Florida before it got too hot. The Kitenge material, bought at the Bunia market place, needed to be made into wedding dresses. We bought a carrier for Jeff’s new bike, loaded what little stuff we had, and headed home to the farm.

Why do we divide our problems into big ones, and small ones, and try to care for the small ones, all by ourselves?  Nothing is too hard for our God, and yet He cares for the sparrows, noticing when even one falls to the ground?  To the infinite God nothing is small stuff; even Jeff’s little pellet gun was included in what came home.