The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1931, Page 174

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feet away from him.”

174 THE LUTHERAN PIONEER

ants. This he broke over her head. The ants pene-
trated her eyes, her ears, and her nostrils, causing
the most intense pain. Even the people around, who
so often seem entirely devoid of pity, were moved
by her agony to come to our Negro evangelist who
was not far away and beg him to intercede for the
woman as they were themselves afraid to do so.

The evangelist was himself new to his work, he
had not long known the Word of God. But he felt
that it was his duty to risk his own life to help the
woman. He came into the chief’s compound, and
when he saw the tortures the woman was suffering,
he took his knife and cut the fetters that bound her.
He escaped the chief’s vengeance only because he
“mew the things of a book” and was “the child of
the white person,” meaning one who was in a white
man’s employ. Thanks to his influence the woman
also was punished no further.

On a later occasion the chief became so angry at
the evangelist that he was only prevented from at-
tacking him by the fact that his own fetish told him
that he would “see trouble” if he did so. Later,
however, the chief presented him with a nice hat,
and they became as good friends as could be ex-
pected with the difference in their standards of
living. This evangelist has more than a hundred
boys in his school, and perhaps some day a number
of them may be sent to regions farther on, where the
same sort of scenes are daily enacted.

We now have twenty-one outstations among
these people, twenty-three Bible-readers and evan-
gelists, 1,100 pupils in the schools learning to read
and write, over twenty-five hundred present at the
Sunday services and more than five hundred in the
catechumen classes. In our Sakbayeme field there
are 3,645 church-members, 10,530 catechumens, over
six thousand boys and girls in the schools, and
an average church attendance of nearly twenty
thousand.

Our work is constantly growing; sometimes the
task of taking t!.e country for God looms up over-
whelmingly. My husband’s travels on foot and by
bicycle took him over an extensive region, in which
there are perhaps twelve thousand Christians. He
goes through miles of forest, crosses the streams in
@ canoe or sometimes just balanced on a floating log,
and often sees and hears the ravages of wild ani-
mals. He sees monkeys of many varieties and once,
walking on a forest path, saw ahead of him a full-

‘grown chimpanzee. My husband said: “He watched

me, and I watched him. But I was glad to see him
trot off into the underbrush when I was about fifty
A number of people have

lately been killed by leopards across our river, the
Sanaga. One woman left her house early in the
morning to get some fire from a neighbor. A leop-
ard sprang from the bush and grabbed her. Her
cries aroused the village, the men took cutlasses and
spears and followed the beast, but too late to find
more than the half-eaten body of the poor woman.
Another leopard broke into a house where a man
and his wife were sleeping, tore the man with his
claws, and carried away the woman. Though the
man followed him with the spear and forced the
animal to give up the woman, she was already dead.

On a recent trip my husband visited a score of
small villages, centers of clans with such names
as Ndug Makumak, Log Nkol, Log Yaga, Ba-
sangen, etc., and held eight Communion services.
At each of these all the Christians of the surround-
ing region came in. In most of these centers there
is a little shelter called a chapel. Since the be-
ginning of the year more than a thousand have
“been written,” that is, have expressed a desire to
follow Christ. My husband talks with each one
personally, all who partake of the Communion, all
who are in trouble, all who are inquiring, all who
have fallen into sin and must be disciplined. Where
he can establish an evangelist or teacher, it means
the transformation of a whole region. Unfortu-
nately even a short delay has meant that a whole
district became nominally Romanists or Moham-
medans, and these faiths do not seem to desire to
raise them out of their sinful practises. They are
given certain forms and charms instead of their old
fetishes, and that seems to be about all. They buy
trustfully verses or words from the Koran sewed up
in a piece of leather and wear them as a sure protec-
tion from harm.

Our evangelistic work has been carried on with
a great desire to deepen the spiritual lives of the
Christians, to renew their zeal in the Lord’s work,
and to reach the throngs of unconverted around us.
We had a helpful evangelistic conference during the
year for our native helpers using the Mvele lan-
guage. There were 150 in attendance. A course in
the fundamentals of faith, talks on the evangelist’s
life and work, plans for work in the schools, a rapid
review of elementary French, and an inspirational
talk each day. We feel that these conferences will
mean much to the work, and we hope to have them
yearly. Oh, to make them strong for Jesus! How
can-this be done? The evangelist’s life is one
continuous routine among the same heathen people.
He has little intercourse with his fellows of the same
spirit, no “furlough.” Who can realize the mental