Untitled Document
Valentina was at Goma, a small town in Zaire just
across the Ruzizi River from Rwanda. A trader, she had come downriver from
her home in Bukavu to purchase items for resale. The open-air market was unusually crowded. Rwandan
refugees, who were fleeing the bloodbath in their country, were everywhere.
As Valentina made her way through the market with her
head down, a vendor spotted her and called out. She went to see what the
woman was selling from the small pushcart behind her. The cart did not hold goods for sale, only a girl,
about 4 years old and sick with cholera. Next to the cart stood an older
girl — sick enough to be on a cart herself — and a teenage girl
with an infant strapped to her back. The vendor had taken pity on a refugee family and was
trying to enlist aid. Valentina listened to their story. The
children’s father had been shot and killed in Kigali at the start of
the fighting. The mother was gone now, too, a victim of cholera. Only these
four children were left. In another place, another time, the story would have
drawn tears. Here and now? The refugees, who had been drinking
from and bathing in Lake Kivu, were dying by the thousands. Nothing
Valentina could do would make any difference. Even as she stood there, the child on the cart
stopped breathing. She was gone. “Only the baby,” the vendor was pleading
with Valentina. “Take the baby with you. He’s not sick . . .
”
“No,” Valentina said. If the baby
wasn’t sick yet, he soon would be. She walked away. “Mama, uko na deni
mbele ya Mungu!” the vendor called, out
of desperation, in Swahili. “Mama, you have a debt before
God!”
Valentina, a religious woman, turned back. The 9-year-old girl was ill, but the vendor had a
place for her. Valentina took 17-year-old Clementine and the baby, Moise,
back to Bukavu to seek help from the orphanage near her home. At the orphanage, Valentina and the baby were
refused. Howard and June Crowl were running the orphanage.
They could not take the child in, for fear of spreading disease. Instead,
they provided Valentina with antibiotics and formula. “If he survives five days,” they told
her, “bring him back. We know a couple willing to adopt an
orphan.”
So began the life of Moses Rogers, 13 years ago.
Phil and Angela Rogers, missionaries from Lincoln,
Ill., did not go to Africa looking for a child. They did not go looking for
most of what they experienced that year as they rode out the savagery that
tore Rwanda apart. Before leaving for Africa, the couple had a rather
quiet life in central Illinois. Both graduated from Lincoln Christian
College, and they married after Angela completed her sophomore year. Phil
graduated from the seminary in 1984; four years later, Angela earned a
master’s degree in elementary education from the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Phil was serving as pastor of the Hooton Church of
Christ in Danville when the couple began thinking about making a radical change in
their lives. “I had never really thought about missionary
work,” Angela recalls, “but Phil’s mom had always invited
missionaries into their home when Phil was young, so he’d grown up
with that. He came to feel he was being called to Africa.”
They joined the Africa Christian Mission (now known
as ACM International), and by January 1990 the Rogers family — which
now included Michelle, 4 years old, and Rebecca, 17 months — moved to
Zaire. Phil was going to teach at a Bible institute. “The trip was about planting churches,”
Phil says, “and taking safaris. We had a lot of fun doing that. We
distributed a lot of Swahili Bibles to village churches and showed the
Jesus film.”
Many of the nations of central Africa were in various
stages of unrest. Zaire was ruled by dictator Mobutu Sese Seko; neighboring
Rwanda was experiencing deepening ethnic and social divisions between its
Hutu and Tutsi peoples, but those weren’t readily apparent. “Rwanda was considered to be a paradise by the
poor of Zaire,” Angela says. The Rogers lived in a small jungle village named
Bafwasende — so remote, it took two hours in a six-passenger plane
from Bukavu to get there.
The couple committed to a three-year term, after
which they would be furloughed home for one year. It was a standard
missionary arrangement. But that’s not how events played out. “We were there a little over a year and a half
when we had to evacuate suddenly,” Angela says. “The soldiers
in the capital [of Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of the
Congo] had gone unpaid for a month or so. Their families were beginning to
starve, so they decided they could use their AK-47s as currency, so to
speak. They started rampaging, going store to store in Kinshasa. All U.S.
citizens were told to leave the country. Two mothers and five children, including Angela and
her daughters, were picked up first by the six-passenger plane that served
the missionaries. As soon as the pilot reached Bukavu, he had to fly south
for other women and children. The next day, it stormed. The men would have
to wait several more days.
After the family was reunited, they returned to
Lincoln for a three-month stay while the events in Zaire played out. Though the Rogerses were safe, they felt that they
had been torn from their real home. “The three months we were back, there
wasn’t a night Michelle didn’t cry herself to sleep, because we
didn’t have a chance to prepare her [for the move],” Angela says. Despite the considerable risks, the couple never
considered not returning to Africa. “We’ve decided the safest place you can
be is in the center of God’s will,” Angela says. “If
he’s asked you to go somewhere, that’s the place to
be.”
There was no repetition of turmoil during the
remainder of their three-year term, but the Rogerses had learned to expect
the unexpected. “I don’t think that incident changed
things, except the realization that anything could come crashing down at
any time,” Angela says. “The last year of the three-year term
was productive and calm, and we were grateful to be there.”
The Rogers family still numbered four on returning to
Lincoln for the first furlough, in 1993. “Furlough is necessary because you have all
these supporters you really need to touch base with,” Angela says.
(The financial needs of missionaries are generally met by contributions
from churches and individuals back home.) “A lot of times we would go
to a church and Phil would preach and we would teach Sunday school.
Healthwise, it’s good to get out of the area where malaria is
prevalent — to get much-needed rest and to see family.”
After about 15 months, the Rogerses returned to
Africa, but because the pilot who flew them to Bafwasende was on furlough
they were forced to wait in Bukavu. It was 1994, and soon Rwanda would run red with
blood.
Bukavu is directly across the river from Rwanda and
upriver from Goma, the Zairean city to which refugees first fled where the
cholera epidemic broke out. “We were house-sitting at our pilot’s
house,” Angela says. “I didn’t realize my daughter and a
friend were able to climb on a wall [at the friend’s house] and see
over the Ruzizi River into Rwanda, seeing things that were haunting. For
the first time in my life we had to get used to gunfire at night —
all kinds of scary noises — and knowing we were helpless to do
anything about it.”
Soon the refugees began pouring into Bukavu as well
as Goma.
“They just kept streaming in,” Angela
says. The Rogerses grow passionate as they talk about the
efforts made to save lives, how, even before the missionaries began
mobilizing, the impoverished residents of Bukavu and other cities in Zaire
gave clothing, food, and shelter to the Rwandans. Then the Rogerses were given what they felt was an
amazing opportunity to make a difference. The ACM trustees sent word that
International Disaster Emergency Services had funds to offer, if the area
missionaries could use them to ease the refugee situation. “Phil and I became part of the refugee
committee that helped distribute these funds. We had African pastors,
missionaries, laypeople. . . . We would buy, like, 50-kilo bags of beans
and rice. “It continued months and months. One of the
best decisions we made: We hired some African nurses to provide medical
help for free to the refugees. We had a clinic at the church [in Bukavu]. “Then we started praying about helping in what
some might say was a smaller but more significant way,” Angela
relates. “A couple of missionary families were talking about the
possibility of adopting orphans. Phil said, ‘Well, are we going to do
it?’ So we started praying about it in April, just after the
full-scale war broke out.”
In July, their friends the Crowls called about a baby
named Moise.
“We had only a day or two of warning,”
Angela says. “They didn’t want to get our hopes up [in case the
child was taken by cholera].”
All the Rogerses knew about Moise was what
17-year-old Clementine could tell them. They had to rely on interpreters
with the International Red Cross to learn the child’s story. “Moise is French for Moses,” Angela says.
“That’s what he was named by his mother. We decided the name
was fitting, as it means ‘drawn out.’ The Biblical Moses was
drawn out of the river, and ours was drawn out of the Rwandan war.
“Phil had no idea, but we found out later that
he had an uncle named Moses and a great-grandfather named Moses. It’s
a family name, and we didn’t know it. Moses’ other name, given
him by his mother, Ndayambaje, means, ‘special blessing . . . answer
to prayer.’ I always wished I could talk to her.”
With Moses in their care but not legally adopted, the
family went back to Bafwasende and remained there until 1995.
“Then things kind of deteriorated in the
country,” Angela says. “All of ACM left Zaire in
1995.”
Obtaining a visa to get the child to the United
States was an ordeal, and the family was suffering from parasitic diseases
— three had malaria, two schistosomiasis. But that was just the
beginning of a lengthy struggle to legally adopt the child. The adoption was still uncertain as the family
prepared to return to mission work a year later — this time in Mali.
The judge overseeing the lengthy adoption process had
taken a vacation at the wrong time. Hoping to salvage their trip home and
running out of time, Phil and Angela made a car trip to the Rwandan
Embassy, in Washington D.C., hoping to expedite matters, but the effort
proved futile. “We got nowhere. We were in D.C. less than twenty-four
hours,” Angela says.
The complication arose from the fact that anybody who
could prove a family tie had legal rights to the child — and in the
chaos that was Rwanda, finding relatives was a slow, difficult process.
“We knew they’d searched for family,” Angela says. The
only known surviving relative was Clementine — the 9-year-old sister
was dead by then — and Clementine, with whom the family no longer has
contact, had initially agreed to the adoption. Rebuffed in Washington, the Rogerses returned to
Lincoln on the day before their scheduled flight to Mali. Angela’s mother, Patsy Wilson, was waiting for
them in the driveway. As soon as they arrived, she told them to get back in
the car and drive to the courthouse — a judge was there, ready to
sign the adoption paperwork. Forty-five minutes late, the adoption was approved. Patsy’s take on this: “God is seldom
early, but he’s never late.”
The Rogers served in Mali just nine months. Phil had
begun showing symptoms of Huntington disease, a degenerative neurological
disorder.
“It’s genetic,” Angela says.
“His father, grandfather, great-grandfather each died of it.
That’s why we came back. It was May when we came back.”
On learning that the Rogers family would be returning
early from their mission, members of the family’s church in Lincoln,
Jefferson Street Christian, fixed up the Rogers home. “It was amazing what they did. The house was
fully furnished — couches, chairs, washer, dryer, appliances, swing
set, you name it. Toothpaste, towels, milk, and cereal. They wanted it to
feel to us like we had just come home from an overnight trip.”
The girls were 12 and 9. Moses was 3. Angela started working in the public school system as
a reading specialist, but her husband had to retire because his illness.
Phil served as a church elder for some time. He still
fights to stay involved. “I’ve got to live every day for the
Lord,” he says with difficulty. “We’ve got to give him
our whole heart.”
“Even now,” Angela says, “he greets
at church. He uses his walker, stands right inside the door. I’ve had
so many people tell me what it means to them to have Phil there, what a
testimony it is that he continues to praise God. “What we decided was, God changed our location.
We’re still missionaries; God just changed our mission
field.”
Today Moses Rogers lives an ordinary life, but
it’s one full of promise. The young man who will carry the Rogers
name forward without the specter of Huntington disease speaks for himself:
“I’m in eighth grade. I play a lot of sports: football,
basketball . . . I do good in school. I’m on the honor roll and
stuff…”
“He’s in the Scholastic Bowl,” his
grandmother Patsy Wilson chimes in. “And he plays pingpong with his grandpa,”
adds Bob Wilson, his grandfather. Moses continues: “I play the drums in a jazz
band, concert band, and the marching band in school. I’m learning to
play guitar. I know I want to go to college. I’d like to get an
academic or sports scholarship. I’m not sure about after
college.”
His mom tells of his football prowess with a twinkle
in her eye: “He’s amazingly consistent — 1,700
yards’ rushing last year.”
He’s also done some acting in several plays at
the Lincoln Community Theater. “He was in Annie,” his mother says.
“The person who wrote the review said, ‘Moses Rogers stole the
show.’ He only had one line.”
Asked how he feels about his older sisters, Moses
rolls his eyes and goes mute. “Typical teenage-boy response,” his
mother says. The Rogerses know the ethnic group in Rwanda from
which their son came, but they won’t divulge whether he’s a
Tutsi or a Hutu.
“That’s something we’re trying to
protect,” Angela says. “I’m not sure if he even
remembers. “I think people simplistically think
there’s one ‘good’ tribe and one ‘bad’ tribe,
and that’s not the case. That’s why I appreciate the movie Hotel Rwanda. The hero
was from the ‘bad’ tribe, but it’s not so
black-and-white. It has to do with whether people are trying for a peaceful
resolution.”
Moses understands his unique heritage — but he
doesn’t think much about the past. “It would probably be different if I remembered
about my family, but I don’t have any memories about it or
anything,” he says.
That’s just as well. For Moses, the time for building memories is now.
Larry Crossett is a regular contributor. His profile
of the Rev. Frederick Nettles, “Tightrope,” appeared in the
July 19 edition.
This article appears in Oct 4-10, 2007.
