Mission Station Kihuiro, East Africa
By A. C. Enns
WITH farming, building, gardening, bookkeeping, medical work, teaching, preaching, and visiting, the foreign missionary has plenty to engage his time. Of late I have felt a keen burden for those fields that have not been entered. The present developments show that the end is rapidly approaching, and there is an enormous work before us yet to be done. Satan is not only trying to hinder the seed of the word from taking hold in the hearts of men, but here he forces Mohammedanism with great power upon the people, and still more desperately does he battle against us. It is indeed hard to keep up courage under the immense pressure of temptation. Leaving the conference in Europe, we came to the mountain station Vunta, where we had an out-school operated by a native teacher, and a mission house nearing completion. It was not exactly what might be called an easy place. It took about four months to win the confidence of the people. But after that, our work made rapid progress in every way, and when we were called, in June, to the Kihuiro station, which lies in the lowland at the foot of the mountains, we left a central school with over two hundred children attending, and three out-schools with an enrolment of two hundred eighty-nine children. We were called to Kihuiro to take the place of one of the workers who had to go to the mountains on account of poor health. Here the work has always gone hard. Of the two thousand inhabitants about sixty per cent are Mohammedans, all of whom are missionaries, teaching and baptizing from the day they themselves are baptized. The general idea is that Islam, the strongest religion, is the right one, and of course the only one worth following. Christianity is known as the religion of children, as most of our members are young people. The attendance on Sabbath consisted entirely of the youth and children. Our one-promising school of one hundred sixty-five had dwindled to an attendance of twenty or thirty. I had long felt a burden for the Kihuiro field, knowing that it needed a most thorough revival. We went to work at once, after seeking power from the Most High, and we can say that God was with us, that he sent angels ahead of us, and that he did a great work. Could we have beheld these spiritual forces at work, I imagine it would have been a profoundly interesting and inspiring scene. The attendance on the Sabbath has gradually improved, and the school work has been reformed. The old students had to be dismissed and new ones encouraged to come. But the Lord helped us, and to-day our school has a larger enrolment than ever in the past, the number, including those in the out-schools, being about five hundred. The Kihuiro school plays an important part in the work here in this field. It has provided a number of schools with teachers. Five of the six teachers at Vunta are from Kihuiro. There are three Kihuiro teachers at Vuasu, two at Friedenstal, and we still have seven here. This speaks well for the work done in Kihuiro. In spite of Islam, God has done a great work here, and has shown that he alone has his way among the nations of this world. Our work has been greatly blessed. The harder the battle goes, the clearer we can see that in his desperation the enemy is fearing defeat. On a recent Sabbath eight new converts made their covenant with God. Ninety or a hundred more are being prepared for baptism. The outlook for the future is very promising. Now is the time to do aggressive work, for soon will come the final rush for victory.