Daily bread in southern Sudan

Our team of Missouri missioners was kept busy 12 hours a day. For the other 12 hours, we were glad to return to our compound.

This tall-grass enclosure with several mud-and-grass guest houses, a common room and service buildings, came to be home. Rick, the carpenter promoted to master builder, was my roommate. The extreme dryness that was a curse by day was a blessing by night. We did not have mosquitoes (malaria delivery systems), so we soon threw off the stifling bed nets.

We would sit up in the dark, around a dinner table that had been carried into the open air. We had a whole new world and a new adopted family to discuss. A lull in the conversation led my eyes up to the huge, silent heavens, more loaded with stars than anywhere else I have ever been. I felt so small and yet, curiously, more a part of this beautiful little blue, green and brown planet than ever before.

Our compound was tucked between the two larger compounds, that of the Cathedral of the Diocese of Lui, and that of their hospital, staffed and funded by The Samaritan's Purse (Read Luke 10:29-37 to refresh your memory of the meaning of this strange name.) Peter was the overseer of the guest compound, and he saw that his staff of two women and two men kept us safe and comfortable, clean and well fed.

How humbling it was to realize that they were sleeping with one eye open outside our huts. They were up before daylight, boiling water for our coffee, heating the huge drum of water for our sponge baths. It amazed me to realize they stood ready to put themselves between us and any harm or danger that came our way. So deeply runs the privilege and duty of hospitality that they would rather die than see their guests die.

"No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends." Jesus said that. Our Moru guests enacted it.

Only those who've camped in the rough have any idea of the great lengths our caretakers went to provide us with 12 hours of comfort and safety. Hardest to understand was the generosity of our hosts when it came to food. We knew more than 90 percent of the children were malnourished.

We knew that civil war and drought created the need for families to daily decide who needed most to eat and who could afford to go hungry. Yet, morning and night (and noon if we weren't traveling), our caretakers arrived with white rice (imported) and large red beans. Sometimes there was homemade wheat bread, a rare treat in the Sudan. It is delicious served with stone-ground sesame seed butter and backyard honey. Sometimes there was a Sudanese staple, stoneground sorghum seed, rolled into a big, floppy tortilla.

We had a great laugh watching a young man chase down an old, wiry rooster one afternoon. His days of ruling the roost were over. He tasted so rich and nourishing, even if he was tough and stringy. Tomato sauce, scrambled eggs, small potatoes and mixed garden greens were rare treats. Our hosts spared no expense.

Since returning three weeks ago, we have certain news that the last of the stored food in many of the villages we visited is exhausted. Even if rain comes, it will be many months before any crop can be harvested.

Extreme poverty has grown in this generation from 42 percent to 47 percent. This means almost half the people do not know where their next meal is coming from or if there will be one. When they pray, "give us this day our daily bread," they know only God, at work in the hearts of God's people, will provide it.

The Rev. Bob Towner is pastor of Christ Episcopal Church in Cape Girardeau.