Excerpt from draft of "Apostle to the Pygmies – The Doctor Jerry Galloway Story”
On October 12, 1980, I wrote my first letter home upon my arrival to Zaire, Africa. This was the beginning of twenty-seven years of letter-writing to family and friends about sharing my experience in the mission field. I was once again a student, this time to learn Lingala. This was the dominant language for about one half of the population of Zaire, however, the Batwa used their own unique language that I would also have to learn to be able to communicate with them.
The first few weeks of my new life were spent with Zairian Brothers who attended a Jesuit college in Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire. The brothers were warm and open and had touched the depths of my heart. Their prayerfulness and oneness humbled me, particularly since I came from an individualistic society. The Brother’s motto of “one heart, one soul” was very much in evidence.
The mode of travel in Kinshasa commonly included riding in buses, with everyone jammed in like sardines. Almost no one was able to get their own seat. The Zairians were surprised to see me on a bus, as white people typically travelled by car.
During a tour of Kinshasa, I went to Mama Yens Hospital to see some friends of one of the Brothers. They had been in an airplane crash and only three of the thirty-seven students on board survived, and two patients were badly burned. The situation at the hospital was even worse than when I was first there with the Peace Corps several years earlier. The patients only received one meal a day and it consisted of just rice and beans, so I gave them some money to go and buy canned fish.
I decided to visit one of the parishes in the slums. Two young priests lived there in a small house, similar to what the locals lived in. There were no beds, no refrigerator, no stove, no water and no electricity. The young men ate only Zairian food, which consisted of manioc, rice, beans, fish, caterpillars, ants and monkey meat.
The little children loved to teach the “mindele” (whites) their language of Lingala. I noticed that, like children everywhere, no matter how miserable their existence seemed to be, they always had ready smiles on their faces.
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