Ray Harkema, born in the Netherlands, immigrated to Canada with his family when he was two years old. A few years later, the family again changed countries, eventually making Byron Center, Michigan their permanent residence.
Jayn Alliece Roettger, born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was introduced to Ray after high school by a friend. They married in 1968. Both accepted Jesus as Savior at an early age.
Babies started arriving a year later and continued until they had four beloved children: Theodore, Heather, Joshua, and Elijah. Life was ordinary and busy, filled with church-related duties, kids’ sports, musical activities, school functions, and the everyday business of working and raising four children as well as remodeling a century-old farmhouse.
Then something extraordinary happened. At a church missions fair, Ray and Jayn felt a surprising urge to leave home and country, join a mission, and help where their gifts and talents could be used. This urge felt very personal and deep to both Ray and Jayn, and their children expressed it as well.
Specifically, Ray and Jayn felt called to the country known at that time as Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, and an organization called African Christian Mission. Over the coming months, they raised financial support, sold their home, stored some belongings while selling others, purchased and packed up household goods for a three-plus-year term, and began learning Swahili.
In the field, Ray and Jayn went to work in many areas under the umbrella of “logistics.” Caring for a varied host of mission vehicles, Ray also helped with various building projects, turning a giant old swimming pool into a brick church building for Sunday school; made endless plumbing, electrical, and water supply systems repairs; and worked on a guest house for outstation families and a hospital in the Ituri rain forest.
Jayn went in a different direction, helping teach women’s groups, acting as purchasing agent for missionaries who lived in the jungle and could only get food and supplies via their small mission plane, supervising the guest house staff, teaching in the local prison, and hosting a myriad of events.
Life in Zaire was different every day and not easy. Malaria, amoebic infections, worms of several varieties, Hepatitis, food poisoning, and tropical sunburn were common while things like a cold or sore throat were not. Then there were other unexpected experiences: various officials always asking for “gifts” of money, food, or baby clothes, depending on what you had on your person.
One had to be prepared, especially when traveling internationally by plane or car. There were plenty of unusual happenings, like being arrested for “smuggling,” inadvertently taking a wrong turn and being held at gunpoint by soldiers, or having your vehicle seconded by a military officer to take him somewhere he wanted to go.
Yet through all the difficult experiences, something deep and abiding grew in Ray and Jayn’s hearts toward the people and the country of Zaire. Every day they met loving people, kind, helpful people; always patient with their slow progress with the language; impoverished beyond comprehension, yet happy and often even generous. For example, there was the elderly woman who gave her offering of a live chicken, which she walked down the aisle of the church on a string, and which was then killed, plucked, cooked and served to them after church by the pastor’s wife. Or the elderly women who took turns carrying five-gallon cans of river water on their backs up from the valley below so they could wash their bodies and clothes while they lived with the pastor and his family in a remote mountainous village. While Africa, like any place, is populated by those who strive to step on others as the only means to success, the heart of the people is amazing, entrepreneurial, and hardworking, often walking shoeless many miles a day with no food until night, if at all.
For many reasons, Ray and Jayn could not reurn to Zaire for a second term. Their two oldest children were entering college, and they were not prepared to drop them off and leave. Zaire, with its bordering countries of Burundi and Rwanda, was about to implode. Ray and Jayn found themselves at home again, dealing with reverse culture shock and longing for their simpler though unusual life in the heart of Africa, where faith in a prayer-answering, promise-keeping God was all that was dependable.
Now they are returning to the Congo, to the same town they left behind in 1989, to resume work with the people they have held dear for almost three decades.