Grow Where God Plants You: A Memoir

By Dale G. Hooper

Grow Where God Plants You tells the story of a man, born sixth out of eleven siblings in a family that lived in a remote mountain community in western North Carolina, who settled on education as his pathway to discovering the wider world. As Dale G. Hooper made his way through high school, college, and graduate school, he began to hear God calling him to become a missionary. Answering that call, he served with Cross Culture Missionaries in Kenya in eastern Africa, for nearly three decades.
Now toward the end of his eighth decade, he has embraced a new challenge: writing a chronicle of his lifes journey for friends, family, and all who feel drawn to a globe-spanning story of a life-changing adventure. Hooper demonstrates his victory over the voices that his flooded thoughts with questionsIs my adventure of life good enough to write about? Who would want to read it?and doubtsYou cant write this book. Youll never finish it.
With an eye for detail and a keen sense of history as story, Grow Where God Plants You shows how one man responded to the soil in which Gods hand planted him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781532013119

Dale G. Hooper

Dale G. Hooper, the sixth of eleven siblings, grew up on a small, rocky farm in the mountains of western North Carolina. Longing to explore the wider world, he pursued an education, following that dream through graduate school. Along the way, he felt the hand of the Lord moving him to serve with Cross Culture Missionaries. In response to that call, he lived and worked as a missionary in Kenya for twenty-seven years.

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Copyright © 2017 Dale G Hooper.

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NIV - Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. [Biblica]

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-1310-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-1311-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017906099

iUniverse rev. date: 04/28/2017

Contents

Foreword

Part 1 Grow Where God Plants You

1 Leaving That Little Rocky Farm In North Carolina

2 My World Expands

Part II To Parts Unknown

3 Our Boundaries – The World

Appendix Celebration Services And Historical Overview 1994

Polly’s Dying Observed – A Life Celebrated –

Foreword

A S OLD AGE AND senility sets in, folks often have at least two things in common. First, they tell the same stories over and over when anyone’s around to listen, and second, they tend to embellish them with each telling. At this point in my life I have many, many stories, some worth telling and retelling. And some not, of course. There are a lot of stories I didn’t get to when I wrote the first book called a memoir. So I want to tie this one to that one as an extension focused on our time as Cross Culture Missionaries in Kenya for nearly 30 years. This book, as with the first one, has been done without the benefit of notes, files and journals.

Since doing the memoir, I wrote, with his permission and cooperation, From Rags… to Free Room and Board, a biography of one of my nephews, who recently had completed a 35-year prison term. The thrust of that book was to help the readers get inside the life of a child and see the cost of there being no parent, nor other adult, to give guidance and set boundaries in a young life. He was born in poverty and spent all his formative years getting by the best he could. It’s a sad story but one that needed to be told.

So I decided I needed to write the rest of the story, as Harvey used to say. Let me point out that much of my earliest years have faded out completely, or so I thought… .At times it seemed I had sleep-walked though those early years. Well, I’ve continued to recall since then, things I wanted to write about – especially stories that needed to be told. My children have encouraged me to write before I got too old to do it. So I decided I’d better stop stalling and get with it, since the days continue to roll by, seemingly faster and faster.

Much of this will be in chronological sequence to a large degree, but not altogether. But in this narrative it generally will not matter. In fact, some stories and events need to be pulled together as an on-going narrative. Much that I shall relate herein will involve many close family friends who were colleagues and have already passed on. It’s with honor and appreciation that I include them as a significant part of our family across so many years in Eastern Africa. Across all those years 27 tears my family and theirs formed bonds of friendships that I want to memorialize in these pages. My children and those of these families referred to me and other parents of the Mission affectionately refer to us as their Aunts and Uncles. Being separated from relatives back in the States for 3 to 5 years at a time, when these children were grown up and we all were back in the States, these ties stayed strong and enduring.

Our children, after a few years living in these foreign lands, had friends, spoke Swahili (the main language) across the three countries of East Africa – Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. This old German territory was Tanganyika before it became an independent state. Our children became Tri-Culture Children, a term a writer coined for such children. That meant they were American children by birth, and spent their early years in this culture. Then living for several years in an Africa culture, they began to think, behave, and adapted to that culture. But that second culture is a part of who they are, consisted of several other cultures, especially since there were many representative cultures in the schools they attended.

Then they developed a real third culture without meaning to, since they schooled with kids from many other parts of the world, and adapted those into their own native culture. All my three children finished in a good high school, Nairobi International School, which had a mixture of students from many countries. Renee’, for example, finished in a small class of 25 students, representing 21 nationalities. A larger mission boarding school, just out of Nairobi, likely would have double those numbers in any given year. One her best friends was an Israeli girl who, upon graduating, returned to her home land and, as required, went into the Israeli army. Renee’s second best friend was a black girl whose parents were Danish.

This, in itself, was a remarkable part of their school experience. In a sense they became world citizens. Periodically, families returned to the States, about every 4 years, and many made stop-overs in European countries, as well as other African countries, and occasionally countries across Middle East and Asian. As a result we had exposure to many other peoples and cultures, and all of us enhanced our world views enormously, and became in a way citizens of the world. Our children especially became Third Culture Children. That is, they had first their birth culture. Then when we went to Kenya they became a part of that culture. Then, in moving back and forth, those mixed to become a Third Culture Children.

This made for some difficult adjustments upon our getting back into communities across our home lands. We and our children experienced some difficulties in settling into churches, schools, and communities. We often felt out of place, and even not wanted. In one urban large suburb I took offense at a black from West Africa being excluded from a choral group from churches preparing for a T V performance. He accepted the open invitation, but then was asked to leave because he was Black. My letter to the Editor expressed my dismay and offence at that treatment of a Christian student from an African country. Early the next morning I had an ugly phone call, first getting my identity as the writer of the letter, and then impolitely and harshly suggesting I should get back to Africa where I came from and let us settle our own local issues. So I was being rejected by my own people, in a way I never experienced in our adopted country. Our children often had a hard time in their home land.

Adapting to American life-styles, including focus on things, the way time was spent, emphasis on a local football team and knew nothing about world events. They likely had never been out of the county, much less another state or a foreign country. They didn’t mind being very ignorant of world events. This translated to our children being isolated by school mates, and perhaps by the community at large, and perhaps even the churches. So Third Culture Children didn’t really fit into any culture, but readily and easily moved between these cultures.

However, let me say these adjustments were temporary. All our children did well and handled the new situation OK, with only minor issues to deal with. Seldom were they ridiculed as being different. They readily adopted to new situations over and over. Even as adults they have a very different attitude toward those not born in the United States, and readily relate to folks like that. That’s a plus. From time to time, we has visitors from the States to teach our leaders for a week or so. And from them I often learned a thing or two. One of them taught me a lasting truth, a truth similar to the title of this book. It was a useful truth: God isn’t always looking for a man with ability but availability. The Lord may need to detect an ability when He finds a man available.

Finally, let me point out that the title of this comes as a result of my life developed around that idea as I found myself with assignments and tasks that I took up as an extra to my regular job. Over and over there were things that needed to be done and I was there, and God put these in my hands, and blessed in my doing them often far beyond what I could have anticipated just because I was available and willing to tackle a job. These two should not be thought of as one and the same. In my case a chance of serving may have shown up and I was needed. So I made myself available to learn what I needed. As a result sometimes I would make a genuine good effort to get ready, and did.

This is handy when you find God needs someone, and sometimes the task is urgent and the one in charge needs to get on with it. So God plants someone, and looks for that one to prosper and grow. We see that over and over here. It makes a good story to see the Lord at work in this way.

PART 1

GROW WHERE GOD PLANTS YOU

1

Leaving That Little Rocky Farm In North Carolina

M Y WHOLE WORK LIFE has been church related. Completing my formal education: first grade through high school, then college and university, then graduate school – that is, Seminary – for 3 and a half years, and then special courses and schooling – training as a Chaplain, special training in radio programming, Language and Orientation. This was the first requirement when we arrived in East Africa as missionaries – learning Swahili, the most widely spoken language across the region, and committed deeply to learning the culture of the people. And I was involved in other special courses and seminars, which I needed often through the years in my church-related work.

For years now across the country, pre-school has been an essential part of schooling. In many districts it is required that a child must have been enrolled in kindergarten [preschool] or he cannot enter the first grade. That was not a requirement when I started school. In fact, there were no preschools. A child just jumped into first grade and tried to move on. Good thing, I guess, for I would have likely failed, and maybe never moved on to second grade. But there must have been stuff to be learned, building a foundation for the long education experience ahead. The fact is, this probably crippled me for at least the next six grades.

The primary school was across the road in a 3-room white wooden building. Toilet facilities were out-houses, for girls and for boys, way out on the perimeters of the property. And no running water inside. Sometimes some of the boys were invited to walk down to the country store to tote a couple of large buckets of water back for school use. Teaching six grades in three rooms made for crowds of noisy kids. a nearly impossible job for a single teacher handling two grades… well, trying to. Likely, not much teaching and learning got done, and certainly Common Cause and Every Student Succeeds were not working concepts in those days. All these decades later there is still discussion about the workable guidelines for school standards. It’s a wonder that I ever got out of the First Grade, much less going on to schooling for an additional 25 years of formal education without failing a single course.

But the problem was my pre-schooling was the now well-known and popular home schooling, and I got a bunch of that. And to a large degree it was effective. It included knowing the story of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which story I knew by the time I was six years old. I had watched and learned the entire story when I was five and six years old just watching Mother paint the entire story on a 30-foot paper scroll before I went to first grade. And I didn’t read the book ’til I was in college. This may have had unintended consequences in early Christian development. I was not introduced to books to read, though there were always books around. Much later I developed a love for reading. All through my adult years, I’ve been an avid reader.

First, let me explain the household I grew up in. It started in the typical way. Mother and Daddy grew up in the same river valley community. Not densely populated community, and had about three or four different sets of Hoopers. Some of these however were related. Some didn’t know if they were or not. Years later one of my siblings did an extensive genealogy study, and guess what… Mother and Daddy were third cousins. That might have poisoned the well, but as far as we know it hasn’t hurt us much. Well, I guess, maybe a little. Like this. . . .

For years when completing paper work of one kind or another for enrolling in school, or opening a bank account, or such, it often called for giving your mother’s maiden name. So I wrote that in, and handed it to the authority requesting it. Then it was handed back with the explanation what this means here is your Mother’s name before she was married. I handed it back with, Yes, I know what it means and that’s what I wrote. No, no, I mean before she was married. I know! That’s it! So that’s the way it often went for some minutes until I figured how to fix it with just four words: My Dad married his sister! That nearly always closed down the talk, especially if I grinned just a little… and looked a little embarrassed. But the truth is: I’ve never found any evidence that this diminished the mental ability of any of us. Most of us never knew this fact ’til years later.

H OWEVER OUR FAMILY DREW attention across the years. I’ve been in conversation with folks, and may have mentioned my siblings. Often someone would have the nerve to ask, How many sisters and brothers do you have? With a pause, as though counting, I’d say, "Well, let me see… .there were five of us boys and each of us had six sisters. Say that again (now with hands up counting). So I’d repeat. Then, the response, Good grief! That’s a lot of kids! With surprise, Really? Maybe you have miscounted. Six boys and each had the same six sisters! Ok… I see! That’s 11 in all! Right? Right!"

You see, they had a big passel of kids (by any measure), a lot of kids, and the more that came along, the more they needed to take care of all the chores required more hands. I remember one of the older girls saying to me several times, Daddy, should have stopped before there was so many. [She could say that since she was near the top of the count; so she meant, I’m sure, he should have stopped after just a few after her.] So I asked her once: Well, where do you think he should have ended it? About half way? I asked. I was number six, with 5 older and 5 younger; so I’d not be around. So that’s the way the conversation went for a few minutes; but she couldn’t say exactly who among us was unnecessary. So that halted the subject for a time’til she then brought it up several times more over the years.

At our house in my early growing up years, Christian nurturing was kind of scarce. We knew ours was a Christian family – sort of. We regularly attended the Baptist Church on the main and only road in the community on the other side of the river. It was not a long walk on a path up the river to a swinging foot-bridge… maybe a mile-all-told. Or, we might all pile into the family car, a small black Ford that could haul 3 in the front seat (Daddy – always the driver – Mother, and one small child) and