Ruth writes well and this keeps you reading. She tells briefly of her early life, how the family emigrated from the UK to South Africa and how after school and training as a nurse she came to London to be interviewed for a job with BCMS (Bible Churchmen’s Missionary Society now known as Crosslinks.) They sent her back to Africa, to the Pokot tribe. These were a nomadic people who wandered freely across the Kenya/Uganda border and so of necessity did the missionaries. Her destination was a ‘bush hospital’ at Amudat and her description of the journey there and her subsequent life there taught me about the conditions the Pokot people, and the missionaries who served them, lived in and about the nature of the countryside around them. Ten years later she was caught up in the deportations of the Idi Amin government and found herself back in London with little more than the clothes she stood up in.
After a time in the UK, her next posting was to Tanzania, not back to her beloved Amudat, but this new hospital at Murgwanza, pronounced she helpfully writes as ‘Mu-ru-gwanza,’ was much larger and more advanced and was recognised by the government as the ‘designated District Hospital’ which meant more staff, better equipment and more facilities. She was never as happy here as she had been at Amudat and was pleased when after some training in communications, she was moved to Mwanza to start a cassette ministry. She had no idea what that involved but ten years later, when politics again intervened and she was instructed to return to the UK, this fledgling ministry had grown to reach many many people. But the story doesn’t end there, and these final pages are just as interesting to read as the ones that have gone before!
After a time in the UK, her next posting was to Tanzania, not back to her beloved Amudat, but this new hospital at Murgwanza, pronounced she helpfully writes as ‘Mu-ru-gwanza,’ was much larger and more advanced and was recognised by the government as the ‘designated District Hospital’ which meant more staff, better equipment and more facilities. She was never as happy here as she had been at Amudat and was pleased when after some training in communications, she was moved to Mwanza to start a cassette ministry. She had no idea what that involved but ten years later, when politics again intervened and she was instructed to return to the UK, this fledgling ministry had grown to reach many many people. But the story doesn’t end there, and these final pages are just as interesting to read as the ones that have gone before!
