A throng of mourning women stirred the dust of a dirt road in the Congo bush. Wailing and chanting, they cradled tiny, limp bodies bundled in banana leaves, forming a tragic parade to the village cemetery. Their babies and children had died in a measles and polio epidemic—nearly 100 bright young lives being swiftly extinguished by preventable diseases.

Witnessing such scenes in Africa in the 1980s motivated a nurse and a farmer from the West Ohio Conference to go into missionary service with the United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries. In 1989, Sharon and Tom Crowe began working with the villagers of Nyembo Umpungu in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Their mission station has striven to improve health and nutrition. But the war in the Congo has forced them from their post.

In the Congo bush, said Sharon Crowe, 35 to 40 percent of all children aged 18 months to 3 years die from causes related to malnutrition and disease. Shortages are common even in peacetime—a legacy of former President Mobutu's corrupt regime, which squandered the country's wealth and denied its people such basic resources as health care and education. War has further cut the supply of medicines, food, and other necessities. It has kept the Congolese government from meeting its goal to vaccinate all children for polio by the year 2000.

The missionaries at Nyembo Umpungu have been evacuated five times in the past 11 years because of war. But since they've fostered self-reliance, "teaching villagers how to better their own lives," Tom said, "the mission continues whether we are there or out of the country."

Scarcity always forces painful choices. Which children will benefit from the mission feeding program when there isn't enough food for all? During a cholera epidemic, the mission clinic was running out of intravenous medical supplies needed for rehydrating victims. "We had to decide: 'Is this little baby going to live or die?'" Tom said. "We prayed a lot. We cried a lot, too."

Epidemics, floods, poverty, and war keep the mission dependent on Advance Special funds and donations of equipment and supplies.

Most local wars have been struggles for the Congo's natural resources: copper, diamonds, gold, and cobalt. Each successive struggle has been more destructive, with more sophisticated weapons and greater involvement by neighboring countries. The Nyembo Umpungu mission station is 400 miles from major settlements and far from battle sites. Still, the wounds of war are evident there. Passing soldiers will strip a village of food, medicine, and livestock. They have raped girls aged 12 and up, causing unwanted pregnancies, venereal disease, and AIDS. They have abducted boys as young as age 11 and forced them into the army. In the most recent war, Sharon said, President Laurent Kabila has striven to enforce ethics, claiming that "he would destroy the soldiers if they destroyed the country."

Whether facing war or everyday hardships, villagers "have an eternal hope," Sharon said, "that one of these days, things are going to be better." Adults laugh and sing as they work. Children are resourceful in their play, wrapping string around plastic to make soccer balls and poking sticks through leaves to fashion whirligigs.

Health Care and Nutrition

The polio rehabilitation program helps young victims regain the use of arms and legs. The burn unit mostly treats little ones who fall into cooking fires or overturn pots of scalding-hot liquid. If treated soon enough, children have better chances of surviving their three leading causes of death: diarrhea, malaria, and worms.

In families' mud huts, children sleep on woven grass mats with no blankets or netting to protect them from biting mosquitoes and rats. They seldom have breakfast—just a drink from a jar of river water, sometimes contaminated by the bacteria that cause cholera. They wash outside with a pan of water and a towel. The tall grass serves as their only toilet. They forage for lunch, perhaps finding some sugarcane, grasshoppers, or grub worms—a source of protein.

"Our children are protein-malnourished," Sharon said. "They have enough food but not the kind of protein they need." Once the mothers wean their babies at about 18 months—when the women are usually pregnant again—the children's health declines.

At any given time, 47 percent of village women and girls are pregnant. The mission maternity clinic provides prenatal care and education. Even so, Sharon said, "one of the biggest problems we encounter occurs when 14-year-old girls try to have babies. Their bodies aren't ready, and the girls are not well fed. Thus there are a lot of miscarriages, and many babies who are born alive are infected with malaria and soon die."

Parents arrange dowry marriages for daughters at age 12 or 13. Traditionally, village women don't practice family planning. During a woman's childbearing years, usually age 14 to 40, she will have about 20 pregnancies to bear four children who survive. Despite the frequent loss of their young children, the women mourn each death, never becoming desensitized to the tragedy. "I've had women faint in my arms," Sharon said, "when I've had to tell them there was nothing we could do because their children's illnesses were too far gone."

Sharon and 11 other nurses at the mission station vaccinate children against measles and polio. When the Crowes arrived in 1989, a witch doctor told parents that vaccines would make their children sterile. It took a measles epidemic and the deaths of 100 unvaccinated children to prove him wrong.

Nutrition and Agriculture

In the Nutrition Club, children learn healthy eating habits as nurses draw color-coded symbols on the chalkboard, using orange for vitamin C. The children also learn about raising vegetables and tending rabbits at the mission farm. Older agricultural students observe Tom and 17 farm employees demonstrate test plots, reforestation, crop rotation, fruit growing, and production of high-protein foods such as as soybeans or oil from crushed palm nuts.

Tom teaches villagers "how to raise better crops with better seeds" so they can grow food for their families, the market, and the feeding program. He teaches brick-making, brick-laying, carpentry, and grain mill or sawmill operation also.

His newest project involves small plots of land next to homes, where nutritious vegetable gardens can be planted. Pens are used to keep goats and hogs, with their droppings and worms, away from the houses and gardens.

Another project will be building kiln-hardened brick houses. Such houses will long outlast the villagers' mud-brick huts, which are usually washed away by rain in three years. Screened windows and doors will protect children, and open-pit toilets or latrines will improve sanitation and hygiene.

Daily and Sunday Education

The women's desire to learn led to the Women's Progressive School, which offers literacy classes in Kiluba and French, teaches soap-making and goat-milking as cottage industries, and teaches health, nutrition, sanitation, and family planning— a concept villagers welcome as their children's chances of survival increase.

What excites women most, Sharon said, is "knowing how to raise their children to adulthood," finding the best protein foods, and learning how germs are spread.

One of the missionaries' most cherished gifts to the children of Nyembo Umpungu is the Sunday school they started at the village church, now attended by 250. As the children learn through skits, songs, and Bible lessons about God's love and Christ's salvation, "they see that there is something better; there is more to life," Tom said. "Their attitude changes and they tend to stay in school longer." The mission, he said, "is a way of giving the children hope."

Note: After being evacuated from the Congo for 17 months, the Crowes returned in March to Lubumbashi. From there they'll monitor mission programs and send supplies to Nyembo Umpungu until they can safely go back.

Darlene Slack, a freelance writer and mission interpreter in Ohio, has traveled to Africa twice—most recently, with a GBGM travel seminar to South Africa, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe.

Introduction to The Caring Connection:
Institutional Ministries in the United States.