Memories of Africa

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This article was published 12/06/2023 (660 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Betty Eichhorst had just finished taking a shower in her little house in Mahadaga, Upper Volta. She went into her bedroom to put on her night gown and returned to the bathroom to find a viper in the spot where moments ago she had been standing. She took off her flip flop and thwacked the snake repeatedly. Then she ran out the door to get the night guard that was on sentinel duty to dispose of the body. This is one of the many stories from Africa that Eichhorst shared with The Carillon.

“We were protected. The Lord protected us,” she said.

Mahadaga is 500 kilometers from the country’s capital Ouagadougou. It’s located in the bush with unreliable roads into the village. It had a landing strip for a bush plane to deliver supplies and transport people. Eichhorst was stationed there as a nurse for 22 years with the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM).

After nursing school, she decided to join SIM and go to Africa to do good and spread the gospel. She hoped she wouldn’t have to go to West Africa though.

“I met with the mission board when I was studying French (1953) I said “I hope the Lord never sends me to French West Africa.” When they asked me if I was willing to go to French West Africa because they needed nurses there, so I sort of hesitated and they realized that I had hesitated…

“Before that I told the Lord whatever the mission board says I’m going to accept that as His will. They asked me to go to a French country and I said yes I would go and that meant I had to go to France to study French in Paris for seven months, because the country was under the control of the French government and they wanted us to study French in Paris not in Canada.”

As she was learning French, she was asked to chose one country from three choices: Benin, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), and Niger. She chose Upper Volta and after arriving in 1954 she had six months to learn the Gourma language.

“Those people were animists. If someone was sick, they would take an egg and something like a porridge that they would pour out onto the ground and crack that egg and kneel and pray in a certain direction where they had a fetish, where their clan worshipped, and ask for help for that child’s illness. That was the only medicine that they had,” she reminisced.

Doctor visits were relegated to one to two visits per year which left Eichhorst to do a lot of medical care without a doctor’s supervision. It also meant she had to combat people’s superstitions and lack of knowledge regarding Western Medicine on her own.

“This was totally new medicine for them. A man came and said his arm was sore. If I don’t give him anything he’s not going to understand, so I decided to give him some aspirin. When I gave him the pills he said it’s not my stomach that is sore it’s my arm. He wanted something to rub on his arm. So, I said, ‘When you hoe your field where do you get your strength?’ He looked at me and smiled and realized he had to eat some good food to have strength and so he took these pills. And they just had to get used to this kind of medicine.”

When she had to give a child an injection the mothers would run out with the baby until they understood that it was effective medicine.

“This one case I had a girl who had such bad diarrhea and vomiting she was unconscious. We had to give her fluids and when they saw what this needle did for this girl they realized it’s good medicine… So, they (thought) if they didn’t get an injection they weren’t getting medicine.”

She said there were many epidemics in the area such as whooping cough, chicken pox, meningitis, and measles. She also treated things like snake bites and tropical diseases like malaria. She said drugs such as penicillin were rare and only given out if she thought it might save someone’s life.

“It was a wonderful drug, they had never had anything like that and so that’s why everything seemed like a miracle to everybody because of how quickly everybody was healed.”

And new drugs that healed people was best demonstrated with the decline in leprosy in the area. Leprosy was rampant, according to Eichhorst.

“You could smell it before you could see the person you knew you had a leper there. Their fingers just decayed. Their nerve is killed and (their finger) gets shorter and shorter and falls off and their face is disfigured. It’s a terrible disease. So, when we gave them the sulfa drugs… when it came out even the French doctors or any doctors didn’t know how to give it, the dosage and whether to give it regularly or give a lot at one time.

“We ended up giving six tablets once a week and we had to make sure they swallowed it (at the clinic) because we didn’t know what they were going to do with those tablets. Whether they were going to give it to their babies, their children, if they thought it would (help them). They didn’t’ know how powerful our medicine could be.”

She said she would treat 200 lepers in a day.

Another story she shared was of a man who had a bowel obstruction and came to the clinic for surgery. There was no doctor to perform the surgery and there was no way to get the man to another clinic.

“If I can’t help you then God can help you,” she told the man. “So, I prayed for him and while I was praying for him I could hear a plane coming in. I know our SIM plane had a landing strip behind the dispensary, but this was the rainy season and we didn’t keep it up and the grass was high so I knew no plane could land in that grass.”

But the plane was one that could land in tall grass and it did so without incident. The pilot was transporting someone to another town and had to land in Magada to repair the plane as it was losing altitude. So, they fixed the plane with plastic tubing and the plane took the man with the bowel obstruction to a hospital where he could have his surgery. He came back alive.

“We just had to depend on the Lord to provide and open the way and show us what to do. The Lord did miracles by guiding us and helping us in the nick of time,” she said.

After 22 years, Eichhorst decided to hang up her nurses uniform and spread the gospel to the other ethnic group in the area – the Fulani. She spent the next 38 years preaching God’s word to the Fulani.

After 50 years of working in Upper Volta, the government there gave the Ordre du Merite to Eichhorst for setting up the dispensary clinic in the area.

“That was a highlight. It’s something I never expected,” she said.

In 2001, Eichhorst retired when she was 73 and returned to Canada. In 2002, she went back to Burkina Faso for six months to missionize with the Fulani. She would return to the country 14 times before finally returning for good to Canada in 2016.

“As I came home, and really wasn’t going back anymore, I thought about how the Lord had been. I can’t praise him enough. It was so perfect. Every stage of my life the Lord just led so perfectly. There’s a psalm, ‘As for God, his way is perfect’ and I really believe that.”

Originally from Yorkton, Saskatchewan, Eichhorst moved to Steinbach at the age of 90 from Abbotsford, B.C., to be closer to her siblings. She said it was a natural thing for her to go to Africa and that there were so many needs there that she is thankful she was able to meet those needs.

“It’s wonderful to see these people who would have died if you’re not there (living). It’s just wonderful to be able to serve the Lord that way. I have no regrets. I’m so thankful for how my life turned out.

“I was never married. If I was married I would not have done what I did. I knew God wanted me to do this work, especially once I started (working with the Fulani). I felt that I needed to carry on that work and if I hadn’t, I don’t think I would have the results that we have now.”