Give Me This Mountain, by Helen Roseveare

Helen Roseveare when she was a medical missionary in Congo

I have just finished reading Dr Helen Roseveare's autobiography, "Give Me This Mountain." It is a classic missionary life story, telling of Helen's teenage years, university life as a medical student and as a star hockey and cricket player, her conversion, and then her first placement as a WEC missionary doctor, in the Congo in the fifties and sixties, pre and during the independence struggle.

It is so honest, which is why I loved reading it. She writes in a real and lively way, so that you feel that you can see the sparkle in her eyes as you read it. And it is almost like following a modern-day blog, in that, she recounts so many of her thought processes and emotions along the way, and the mistakes she made, the struggles she had, her disagreements with other missionaries, her feelings of being the odd one out, of loving the Africans too much, or of being imposed upon too much, her feelings about being single, and much more.

It is also a fascinating account of how just a few missionaries, in a country with no trained doctors of its own (then), managed to set up several hospitals and training centres: Helen herself established and monitored over forty local clinics in the surrounding areas, among many other projects. She sounds like such an independent, gifted woman, much-loved by the Congolese she worked with and for, and yet often she apparently felt lonely and misunderstood, and according to her book she felt as though she achieved little.

This book culminates with the account of how the hospital and the missionaries fared in the violent days of independence. Many left, but she did not, and was captured at one point by Congolese soldiers and even raped. She does not go into that at all in the book, apart from hinting that she and the others all suffered physically at the hands of the soldiers. But her willingness to suffer and to stay in the country, to side with the people, to try to understand, is inspiring.

Helen Roseveare 

I am now looking forward to reading the second book she wrote, about her return to Congo only a short while after these events. It is called, "He Gave us a Valley."

I recommend this book to all you medical and missionary types out there. Maybe some of you already know it, it is a well-known classic - I am glad I finally came across it.