As Greg Zimmerman stepped from the small plane and gazed upon the Tshikapa landscape that had been his home 40 years ago, he felt both joy and sadness.
Walking through the village, the scenery rekindled good memories of the camaraderie shared from 1970-1972 when he worked alongside the Congolese and fellow North Americans as they helped develop the area’s agriculture.
Then he noticed the condition of the roads.
Once reasonably smooth, they were cracked, run-down and neglected – virtually impassable by auto. It was the toll that decades of despotic rulers and a 10-year civil war had taken on the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
“The infrastructure was not in as good a shape as I remembered and it hadn’t expanded in the past 40 years, but the numbers of people did,” said the Flanagan, Ill., resident, remembering when Kinshasa, the nation’s capital, had 3 million people. It now has 8 million.
Zimmerman was among 12 North American mission workers with strong ties to the Congo who traveled there in January at the invitation of the Mennonite Church of Congo to help build a welcome center on the church’s grounds, which also houses its national headquarters.
Joe Shetler of Goshen, Ind., Dale Epp of Henderson, Neb., and Fred Suter of Bluffton, Ohio, also lived in Congo for two years in previous service assignments. Alfred Neufeldt of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, worked there for three months in the late 1960s. A mission worker’s child, David Rocke, of Gilbert, Iowa, grew up in the Congo and returned for several years as an adult with his wife, Cathie. Arnold and Grace Harder of Mountain Lake, Minn., who coordinated the team, had spent 27 years in the Congo since 1969 and had returned several times to help in the technical development of the center.
The Mennonite Church in Congo is building the center to host the 100-year anniversary celebration of the Congolese Mennonite Church in July 2012. As Tshikapa has no hotels, the 20-room dormitory-style center would also provide an inn for travelers, generating revenue to help the church become more self-sufficient.
The Congo is the first and longest sustained mission effort of the Mennonite Church in Africa. The church has grown to 220,000 members and 1,400 congregations.
“The center is what Mennonite church leaders are calling a physical symbol of 100 years of evangelism in the Congo,” said Rod Hollinger-Janzen, executive coordinator for Africa Inter-Mennonite Mission, the organization that planned the trip. “The local church mobilized its people and gathered a lot of building materials such as stone, gravel and lumber. They asked us to provide the manufactured goods like cement, electrical and plumbing fixtures.”
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(Front row from left) David Rocke and Cathie Rocke, Gilbert, Iowa; Carmen Good, Valparaiso, Ind.; Dennis Miller, Goshen, Ind.; (Middle row) Fred Suter, Bluffton, Ohio; Alfred Neufeldt, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; Grace and Arnold Harder, Mountain Lake, Minn.; (Back row) Greg Zimmerman, Flanagan, Ill.; Joe Shetler, Goshen, Ind.; Dale Epp, Henderson, Neb.; Tom Nickel, Mountain Lake, Minn.
Congolese and North American workers together raised brick walls, stirred cement by hand, poured the foundation, and did plumbing and electrical work, Zimmerman’s specialty. It was hot, and there was mostly no electricity, but thank God for the “miracle of John Deere,” said Dennis Miller, a cement specialist from Goshen. The tractor had been given recently to the Mennonite Church of Congo president, Pastor Adolphe Komuesa.
“We would have had to use the one lone wheelbarrow,” Miller said.
They worked hard and laughed over coffee, as five on the team translated in French or Tshiluba.
“I tell you, the camaraderie with the Congolese brothers was one of the highlights of the trip,” Miller said.
Grace Harder of Mountain Lake, Minn., cooked for all of the workers, along with Cathie Rocke of Gilbert, Iowa.
“I was stretched out of my comfort zone,” Harder wrote in a report where she mentioned the need to be better prepared for the lack of modern conveniences. “I look back and see how the Lord prepared me step by step … I learned that I had to trust God through each experience and, hopefully, I also grew through those experiences.”
For Zimmerman, the trip’s highlight was re-experiencing the joyful, against-the-odds attitude of the Congolese people.
“To see the church grow over that time is exciting to me,” he said. “The worship services meant a lot because I could understand a lot of what was happening and being said, and it reminded me of 40 years ago.”
