There’S a Frog in My Toilet: A Missionary's Adventure in Africa

By Pamela Browne Miles

Theres a Frog in My Toilet recounts the sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant adventures of a couple living in Tanzania, Africa through emails sent home to friends and family. It details what daily life is like when you are sent out to a remote location as a missionary. It takes you through the highs and lows of dealing with sporadic utilities, dangerous living conditions, and almost daily encounters with all sorts of creepy critters. It also contains up-to-date commentary remembering the events discussed in each email. With a sense of humor about things over which they had no control, Theres a Frog in My Toilet shows how God can bring glory to all situations and circumstances.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781512711486

Pamela Browne Miles

Pamela Browne Miles was born and raised in the Midwest, married young while in college, obtained a teaching degree in art and social studies, and spent the next number of years raising four wonderful children. She has had an exciting life filled with a variety of adventures. She has worked in education and politics, and has traveled widely. She is a devoted Christian who loves her Lord and has participated in numerous short-term mission trips all over the world. These trips prepared her for sharing the Gospel in a very remote location. Living in Africa for a year was one of the highlights of her life. She now resides in South Carolina where she is close to two of her adult children and their families. She continues to serve the Lord in outreach ministries of her local church. Her husband of over fifty-five years, Corbin, suffers from Alzheimer’s Disease and resides in a nearby nursing home.

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Copyright © 2015 Pamela Browne Miles.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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Cover art by Pamela Browne Miles.

Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Used by permission. NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION® and NIV® are registered trademarks of Biblica, Inc. Use of either trademark for the offering of goods or services requires the prior written consent of Biblica US, Inc.

ISBN: 978-1-5127-1149-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-1150-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-1148-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015914653

WestBow Press rev. date: 9/14/2015

Contents

I. Introduction

II. The Journey Begins

III. Settling In

IV. Moving In, and the Critters Arrive

V. Miles Across Africa

VI. Home, and Oh, My!

VII. Adventures Continue

VIII. Tragedy Strikes

IX. Epilogue

Then I heard the voice of the Lord

saying, "Whom shall I send?

And who will go for us?"

And I said, Here am I. Send me!

Isaiah 6:8

I. Introduction

It has now been many years since I last stepped foot in Africa. And yet, I can almost remember every minute of the year that I spent serving God in Tanzania, East Africa. It, without a doubt, is one of the most profound experiences of my life.

Let me take you back to 1998, when my husband, Corbin, and I were trying to figure out what to do in our retirement years. We had both retired in 1995 at the ripe old age of fifty-five. We thought it would be a good idea to retire on the same day, so we ended our official careers the end of November of that year. That probably wasn’t the best decision, as Corbin had been the manager of a large number of employees, and I had a job that I dearly loved where my boss was a gentle soul who treated me more as a friend than an employee. I remember our first retired year as a time when we both were unsettled as to what God had in store for our remaining years.

We did a lot of traveling in those years that followed, taking many cruises and trips to foreign countries. While that kind of traveling was fun and, for the most part, very educational, it didn’t seem to fill a need that we both had to do something more significant. We had both been very involved in doing short-term foreign missions through our church, where Corbin had been the missions coordinator for many years. That kind of travel appealed immensely to both of us, so we began to explore the possibility of doing it on a more permanent basis. Parenthetically, Corbin, as a young teenager, had gone forward in church to dedicate himself to serving as a missionary, a plan that had so far never worked out for him. What with college, marriage at a young age, four children arriving in timely fashion, and a career to worry about, going off to serve as a missionary didn’t fit into the agenda. Now though, with the time and the resources in place, it seemed like an excellent idea.

We had both been very involved in working with Virginia Baptists and, more specifically, their mission work around the world. The main training facility of the International Mission Board of Southern Baptists is located right outside of Richmond, Virginia, so we had a lot of experience with that group. We began exploring the possibility of serving as host and hostess in Brazil, where we would be the first contact for Virginia Baptists in Brazil for short-term mission trips. They really needed someone who could speak Portuguese, but somehow that never showed up on Corbin’s or my transcript from college! Nevertheless, after filling out more paperwork than I have ever seen in my entire life, we were accepted as candidates to serve as International Service Corps missionaries. The job of an ISCer is to serve in a helper capacity to the career missionaries out in the field.

With the blessings of family, friends, and our church, Parkwood Baptist in Annandale, Virginia, we trooped off to Richmond full well expecting to get our papers to go to Brazil as host and hostess to visiting short-term mission groups. After two frustrating days of trying to figure out what happened to our paperwork, we discovered that the International Mission Board had hired a couple who lived in Brazil and who already knew how to speak Portuguese. Debating whether to pick up our bags and head back to Northern Virginia or stay for the rest of the weekend, we were approached by the recruiter for Eastern Africa missions about the possibility of serving at a small Baptist hospital in Kigoma, Tanzania. We prayed, and then we prayed, and then we prayed some more. We finally felt led to accept and apply for this position. After all, how much harder could it be to learn Swahili than it would be to learn Portuguese?

When we got home, you can imagine the shock that our family experienced when they learned that we were going to Africa instead of Brazil. I’m not even sure I understood the implications of this decision at that time. I began to claim Psalm 37:4 as my verse, Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart. By the time the acceptance letter came, going to Africa was the desire of my heart! In all the things that happened after that, I never once felt like I was out of God’s will or that we had made some cosmic error in our life by going to Africa. The next couple of months were extremely hectic, what with selling the house to our son and his family, packing up thirty-nine years of stuff, getting vaccinations, and trying to figure out what we really needed to take with us to Africa. I still stand in amazement that we could pare our lives down to fifty packing boxes, which we stored in our son and his wife’s basement. When it comes right down to it, most of the things we think we just can’t live without are just stuff! Even my fifty-seven pairs of shoes!

I’d like to introduce you to the members of our family so you will know who I am talking about in the following e-mails. Our oldest son, Todd, is married to Dawn, and they have three children, Keri, Patrick, and Shannon. Our second son, Chris, is married to Susan, and we were fortunate to live with them for a while before we went to Africa and after we came home. Our daughter, Lindsay, is married to Rocky Lewis, and they have two children, Kelsey and Trey, who is married to Rachel. Our youngest son, Neal, is married to Stacy, and they have four boys, Corbin Neal, Aidan, Boston, and Rowan. They now serve as missionaries with an organization called Youth with a Mission (YWAM) in Scotland. Our church was Parkwood Baptist Church in Annandale, Virginia, where we were members for almost thirty years.

I’ve begun with an overview of our time in Tanzania to help you better understand what we are talking about in the e-mails that are printed in this book. Some of these depictions will be expanded in greater detail as they come up in our daily life in Kigoma. I loved Tanzania. As I have often said, Once there, Africa gets into your soul. I hope and pray that you can see a bit of my soul in the following.

Kigoma Mission: An Overview

Kigoma is a city of about seventy-five thousand people located as far west as you can go in Tanzania. It is a mix of people, almost exclusively black and almost exclusively Muslim. To be a white person in Kigoma made you an object of interest every time you stepped out of your door, although there were probably about thirty of us in the city. Kigoma is located on the bank of Lake Tanganyika, the second-deepest lake in the world. It is at a point on the lake that is only about thirty-five miles wide, so we were able to see the Congo on the other side of the lake.

Kigoma has a sister city located about ten miles away on the lake named Ujiji. Ujiji is famous for a very well-known event that happened there many years ago. David Livingstone had traveled into the central part of Africa looking for the source of the Nile river and to evangelize the natives. Dr. Stanley went in search of him later after no word of his whereabouts had been heard. It is the place where Dr. Stanley finally caught up with Dr. Livingstone and made his famous statement, Dr. Livingstone, I presume? There is a museum in Ujiji commemorating this event and a guide who will give you a ten-minute spiel in Swahili, English, or French relating all the events of that momentous occasion. The only problem is that he speaks so fast, all three languages sound the same. The government of Tanzania has built a couple of well-designed memorials at that location, but there is also a museum there that almost defies description. Inside are eight free-standing, painted panels leaning up against the wall with scenes depicting the meeting of Stanley and Livingston. There is also a life-size papier mache of the two men shaking hands. These are located at one end of a rather large room. At the other end are bats hanging from the ceiling and guano (bat droppings) all over the floor!

The people in Kigoma are unfailingly polite, very unassuming, and very happy, for the most part. It didn’t appear that anyone was starving, although begging is prevalent on the streets. The biggest problem appears to be lack of medical care. Many people are grotesquely crippled by unset bones, leprosy, and other lesions on their skin. The other major problem is the ever-present threat of malaria, for which there is no sure-fire remedy, and a lack of immunizations for diseases that have been conquered in the States for years, such as measles. There are a number of tribes in the area, and after living there a year, we were often able to identify someone by their tribe because of their facial features. They tend to marry within their tribes so that the purity of the tribal features is maintained.

We were there as part of an attempt to help out with the medical problems in the area. The Southern Baptists have, for a number of years, maintained a hospital devoted to bringing excellent medical care for very little cost to people who live in that part of Tanzania. There is also a government hospital that seems to leave a lot to be desired in all areas of care. Their biggest shortcoming is the lack of nurses and doctors who are willing to care for patients unless they are persuaded with a little extra cash.

The Kigoma Baptist Hospital is located on the outskirts of town, up on a hill, and is accessible by some of the worst roads known to man. It is a forty-bed facility with an outpatient area, a well-baby area, a dentist, a pharmacy, and a surgical theater that is remarkably well equipped and one of the few places in Kigoma that has air-conditioning. Even that is not sufficient to keep out creatures of the night if surgery is required on an emergency basis.

One night a man was brought for nighttime surgery with gunshot wounds that had occurred in the war that was raging in the Congo. Before they could get the doors to the surgical theater closed, a bat flew in and was flitting all over the area. After they chased it around for a time with a towel, it finally decided to go back out the door, and they were able to proceed.

The International Mission Board provided for some of the medical staffing at the hospital. Dr. Malcolm was the head national doctor, and a dentist and a number of physician assistants worked there as well. Dr. William Harrington, from Richmond, Virginia, was in charge of the hospital. He and his family were preparing to return to the States, so Corbin was taking over the duties of administrator and finance officer when we first arrived. We soon learned that there was a pharmacist in language school at Brackenhurst, Kenya, who would be coming to Kigoma to take over as administrator, but Corbin would continue as finance officer.

Patients who could pay for their medical care were asked to do so, but there was a very large indigent fund for those who could not afford care. Rumors often played a large part in the failure to dispense good medicine. Shortly after the hospital opened, a rumor went around town that the hospital was giving out old drugs. It always amazed me how quickly rumors could get around town. The missionaries, UN workers, and some businesses were the only people who had telephones. The real story was that the hospital decided to recycle some used drug containers, so the expiration date on the bottle in fact was out of date but the drugs had not expired. The next day, not one person showed up at the hospital for medical care! It took several days before that rumor could be squelched and before trust was restored enough for anyone to return for care. Needless to say, new bottles were always used after that incident.

We all suffered greatly due to the loss of so many children to malaria. Only one out of every five babies born lives to age five, not only because of malaria but also other ailments. One couple brought their very sick baby to the hospital with malaria. Because friends of theirs had their child diagnosed with an abdominal problem by X-ray, they demanded that their child receive an X-ray as well. They could not be persuaded that an X-ray was not the prescribed treatment for malaria. They became so incensed that they left the hospital with the child, who died a few days later.

Living in Africa, you have to deal with the problem of AIDS. We watched house workers and others die, and the lack of any knowledge about how the disease spreads broke our hearts. Many in the population have no concept of how AIDS is contracted, or if they do, their information is wrong as to the particulars. One elderly man swore he could not have AIDS because he only had intercourse with virgins. The Baptist churches in the area were beginning to present the program True Love Waits in the hopes that some of the young people would wait until marriage before becoming sexually active. Tribal customs often allowed them more freedom in their sexual relations, so it was very difficult to get them to change the way they had been brought up.

The hospital also had a small café called Billy Bob’s, in honor of Dr. Harrington. It was originally built to supply food to the patients, but it grew to accommodate doctors, nurses, and guests over time. When the hospital first opened, there was no food supplied, so each patient’s family was responsible for cooking food to feed their loved one. The café took care of that problem, and the patients’ nutrition improved as well.

Most of the local Baptist ministers had jobs in the hospital. Because their congregations could not afford to supply any kind of salary for them, having a job at the hospital was a way for them to provide for their families. Most of them had some seminary training, and most of them spoke fairly good English. They were always a joy to deal with, whether it was at the hospital or in some other context. The chaplain at the hospital, Alex, was the pastor at one of the larger Baptist churches and an accomplished tailor on the side. His wife, Anna, was in charge of Billy Bob’s. We became close friends with many of these men and their families.

One man in particular, Timotheo, was very special to us. He was the maintenance man at the hospital and in general kept the place running smoothly. Shortly after Corbin began working at the hospital, he started teaching Timotheo basic math principles because he was being sent to training school in Arusha to improve his job skills. When he went away to school, he dressed in ragged T-shirts and cut-offs and almost always looked very