Lamentations 3:25
New King James Version (NKJV)
25 The Lord is good to those who wait for Him,
To the soul who seeks Him.
To the soul who seeks Him.
George taught at Ikizu Secondary School in Tanzania, Africa.
He was promoted to principal the year we arrived there. He loved the students
and all the people in the area. Many a time he went out of his way to help
someone in need, someone whom I was ready to ignore. The people loved him for
it. Sylvia and I were the only missionaries without a car at Ikizu. George usually
offered to take Sylvia with him on his weekly trip to town, an hour’s drive
away, and never charged us a cent.
As time went by he developed numbness in his legs. Doctors
recommended back surgery to take the pressure off pinched nerves. He had the
option of returning to the U.S. to get the surgery done or having it done in
Africa. He told me that he chose to have the surgery done in Nairobi because it
would save the mission many thousands of dollars. Whether or not the result
would have been the same if he had returned to the U.S. no one will ever know.
But the surgeon cut too deeply and left George paralyzed from the waist down.
He returned to a small house in Cicero, Indiana, where he was
simply forgotten. He hoped for a surgical procedure that would reverse the
paralysis, but it never materialized. Depression settled in on him, and
bitterness seemed on the verge of overwhelming him. Yet George refused to let
it get him down. His indomitable will and the Grace of God overcame these, and
he became a great source of courage, happiness, and joy. As the years stretched
into decades, he took up quilting, some rug weaving, and wheelchair gardening.
We visited him and his wife anytime we took a trip across the country. We
always left their place feeling better about life, God, and ourselves.
He had fallen before we stopped by one time. In obviously
severe pain, he looked at me and with a broad smile and a twinkle in his eye
said, “Can you imagine anyone falling out of bed and breaking a hip?” Then he
chuckled about the absurdity of it. He had had a bar mounted above his bed. He
would grab the bar with his hands and move his paralyzed body out of bed and
onto his wheelchair. His hands had slipped off the bar that time. The fall
proved to be the final blow, and he passed away a month or two later. He had
been paralyzed for over 35 years. In spite of this, he never failed to thank
and praise the Lord for His goodness. What an example!
Thank You, Lord, for
being good to us, especially when things go wrong, wrong, wrong. Thank You for
the joy that George experienced in his affliction and that such joy can be ours,
too.
I am moved by the humorous words with which you write the predicaments that befell Pastor George Dunder. I am one of those students that won the warmth of his heart and benefitted by way of the various assistance that he accorded me. In one of his missionary visits in 1968 he had come to Nyansincha and preached in my village church. There was no house fit to accommodate a white man. Fortunately he had come with a tent. I looked at him after I was told that he was the Headmaster of Ikizu a school where my admired cousins, Chacha Ngutunyi, Abraham Sando and Mukohi Michael were schooling. I courageously moved close greeted and requested if I could come to his school. He said yes. It was a year of my Primary school completion and so I requested for his postal address. That is how I got a chance. At Ikizu I won his love. In November 1971 he drove nearly 100 km with his whole family i.e. wife, son Roger and a visiting volunteer to my village home and they spent some nights. It was a hillaric experience for my parents to host a white man's family in a typical and much inferior African home. During the nights and using a Car battery he showed some slide pictures of various sceneries in America to the villagers who all assembled to marvel at the experience. The experience is still memorable with those who were by hen kids. One of the boys was heard telling his mother, 'when I grow to become a full youth I will bring a white mans family to spend a night at our house just like Matiko has done'.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great story. Thank you very much for sharing it. I taught both Chacha and Abraham and possibly Mukohi. Abraham ran the water pump for the school under my supervision. He was very responsible at all times, and it was from him that I began to understand and respect the Kuria. At the time when the drought was so severe that our well dried up it was God's intervention and Abraham's persistence and understanding that made it possible to keep Ikizu open.
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