[Oe List ...] Rob Duffy's completed life

[John Epps via OE]

It's with a mixture of  sorrow and gratitude that we celebrate the
completed life of our colleague, Rob Duffy. His was a presence that stayed
true to the mission in some of the most extraordinary circumstances. I once
had the honor of traveling with him on a tour of Southeast Asia Human
Development Projects, and these were some reflections from that trip:

*24 April 1979*

This is being written in the village development project of Bontoa, South
Sulawesi, Indonesia. We’re in the meeting room, which is a shelter in a
field in the center of the village. We are in a driving rainstorm, with
fifty to one hundred kids running around playing soccer outside and twenty
or so more milling around and chattering inside the shelter; mostly girls
inside, mostly boys outside. A mangy dog, ants, and mosquitoes also
populate the dirt-floored, slat-sided, thatch-roofed structure. Rob's talk
is going on in sentence-by-sentence translation. And somehow it all feels
perfectly normal. At least one fourth of the little boys are stark naked.
Most of the young women – who are village leaders – wear heavy coats of
rice powder on their faces giving what to Western eyes is a ghastly pallor
to otherwise attractive features. It's not the look of a prehistoric
culture – the dress and the eyes (bright, lucid, and alert) deny that. It's
just other.

The rain is pelting now, and it sounds like a tin roof. Rob is yelling at
the top of his voice and is barely audible. If it weren't for the fact that
all ten of us around the table are furiously taking notes and the fact that
Rob is profoundly serious in dealing with the project issues, you'd say
that this is an impossible situation in which to conduct business. But it's
not. It's just other. Rob's presence made it clear that Otherness is no
enemy.


Our thoughts and prayers are with Ann and the family.


John  & Ann Epps
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wedgeblade.net/pipermail/oe-wedgeblade.net/attachments/20160516/09dc998f/attachment.htm>