A number of years ago, the missionary Catherine Rew did an oral history with her daughter Kathryn Rew Van’t-Wout. This is the final part of the transcript. Part one is here and part two and part three. See here for a biography of Catherine. I have added explanatory information in square brackets [like this].
What happened to Vera Peggler?
Vera got the work subsidized and then in ’59 she went back for furlough. That was 3 years after she came out. She went back. No, she had a furlough before and this was her 2nd furlough. When there was all the trouble at independence her Assembly thought that she shouldn’t come back so she didn’t return to the work.
Did she go on elsewhere as a missionary?
No, she was a bit older when she went out. Barbara Davis who became Barbara Fisher, she carried on the medical work for a year after until independence because she had to have a trained person or the work, we weren’t allowed to carry on. But then at independence she went back to Kasaji and got married to Terry Fisher.
So was there someone else there then?
There were just the African workers and they carried on and then in ’54, Vera was still there, ’54 , Dad was going to show slides but it was the magic lantern we used to call it, to the Africans about the work but he couldn’t get it to work. And he was standing talking to this African and … and showing with his hands. I wasn’t thinking any thing about it then all of a sudden it just hit me that I loved him. Just like that, it just hit me. So I didn’t say anything. This was a Saturday so I went back and got down on my knees and asked the LORD not to let me get hurt. Well, there was just 4(?) of us there. And then a week later, Dad sent me a note and told me that he loved me and … so he said that he had been going to speak to me the week before but the LORD stopped him. He gave him a fever that was the Wednesday and that was just before the LORD had spoken to me. He asked if I would wait for him because he wasn’t a commended missionary but it was when he was building the maternity and helping with the work there that he felt that the Lord wanted him to go back to train as a missionary.
So he went to the BTI [Bible Training Institute] in Glasgow ’54 and later that year I went home and went to Belgium to take the course over again. And all the different professors who were there asked me why I had come back because I had passed last time and they hardly asked any questions because I had passed their exam. It was the law one that I had failed but I had to take the whole thing. I was put in a French class for advanced French, not a beginner as I was the time before and I was 3rd in the class of about 40 so the LORD did help.
Before I went home, I had a letter from Dad, and he said, I had a letter in the February, and he had been reading and he said that God had said about giving up and he said that he didn’t think he could give me up. You know how you give up everything for the LORD; he said he didn’t think he would be able to give me up. And when I read that I thought that is just what God is going to ask you to do and then in April, he said that he just couldn’t go on, he felt that the LORD wanted him to give me up, you see. Well, I mean the LORD had prepared me and I knew it- I mean you feel unhappy when you think about it but that was what the LORD said. So we carried on. Aunty Elizabeth [William Rew’s sister] wrote and said to me that her dad had asked where he was going to go when he was coming back out, was he coming to Katoka? He said, yes that is where the LORD has called me. Dr Porter from Kasaji – they all knew about it you see – suggested I went to Luanza because they were wanting their school recognized by the government, but I said, no the LORD has called me to Katoka. So everyone was standing by waiting to see what would happen. So when we got back there, I mean, I knew whenever I saw him it was alright. He said he knew whenever he saw me that it was alright. I mean we had done what the LORD had wanted us to do. We had put the LORD first. Obviously the LORD wanted us to be together. So with all the trials and tribulations we have come through in Zaire and so on, we’ve known that the LORD has wanted us to be together.
And that was only the beginning… Katie Barclay is a historian at Queen’s University, Belfast.
