Many years ago, when we served with ABWE in Bangladesh, I was drawn to the national school on the hospital compound run by Manik Roy, a devout and intelligent Christian, who had a vision for leading the sons and daughters of the hospital workers to Christ through education.

We developed a friendship, and I asked him one day if I might teach at the school to see how the students there learned. The experience was life-changing for me. I saw a form of education that I had no knowledge of except in textbooks. And I felt a response to my own teaching that was both gratifying and deeply humbling.

Here were students who had quite literally nothing but the shirts on their backs and the meager notebooks in their hands, overjoyed at the prospect of learning whatever it was I was willing to teach them. Did I say overjoyed? I meant desperate. As desperate as parched soil needs rain. Their desperation was driven by the understanding that it was only through education that they would ever escape the poverty in which they and their families were bound.

From that tiny seed of a day, I began to dream of returning to Bangladesh. Not for a year, but for a lifetime. I began to talk about it with others and think through its implications. When I had it all thought through, I approached the field council and asked for permission to present a proposal. If they would designate the national school as a legitimate area of missionary service, I would return to Bangladesh fulltime to lead that area of ministry.

I was sure that of course the field council would accept my proposal. It just made so much sense. Here was a mission field ripe for the harvest. Of course they would want me to come back and head that up. So when the chairman of the field council came over to our house to say that the field council had rejected my proposal, I could not process what he was saying. “We are not an educational mission,” he said. “We are a medical mission.” And that was that.

Except that it wasn’t, for I wasn’t the only one with that vision. Jim and Marilou Long, newly arrived on the field, had the same vision. And ten years later the two of them brought that vision to life. William Carey Academy has now stood for 25 years as a testimony to their perseverance and God’s good grace and today we had a chance to walks its halls and speak to its teachers as they prepared their classrooms for the coming school year.

And how is this for circumstance? The man that we hired as our National Director of the school and the other projects of our mission back in March of last year, is married to the daughter of my friend, Manik Roy, the director of the national school in Malumghat all those years ago. How wonderful is our God is to bring all of those pieces together! What a blessing it is to serve Him!

Our new principal of the school Dana, and her flat mate Natasha were gracious enough to invite us to stay with them during our time in Chittagong, and we gratefully accepted their kind offer. It gave us a chance to get to know them both a little better and for them to overcome their hesitancy concerning us as well. Both had been scarred by past associations with our mission, so we had a fair amount of bridge mending to do.

We were able to spend some time together with the members of our team and see their new classrooms in the building the Lord had provided. We also got to meet Peni, who heads up the Free School for the children of the slums who attend for a very minimal cost and get an education that keeps them off the streets and gives them hope for a brighter future themselves.

We also spent some time investigating other properties in the city as the school is badly in need of larger facilities to handle all the students who wish to attend. I was able to deliver a couple of workshops on classroom practice to the staff, and we got to spend some time with our national director Shankar, and his most gracious wife Lusia. Our time in Chittagong was such an encouraging visit, it did our hearts good.

August 2022