As a new doctor I schemed to volunteer in the world’s most poorest nation: Burkina Faso. Working at a SIM clinic in the village of Piéla, I overheard the MAF pilot mention making a flight to Djibo – a desert outpost in the north. There I met Ken and Joyce Elliot, an Australian couple, who established an new medical care center in the 1970s from the remnants of a mobile army field hospital. In his austere locale were many children, like the one I photoed below, so weak and malnourished the could not swallow and required a feeding tube. Also common in Djibo were adults with kidney stones and renal failure, all connected with the ubiquitous dearth of drinking water.
Ken and Joyce Elliot have continued these four decades working in isolation and blazing heat, serving Jesus and the people who He loves. Word now is that the Elliots have been kidnaped by a group aligned with al-Qaida. “The fact that he is a missionary, as I understand it, is not going to be good. [The kidnappers] will tend to see that as being not so much the good works he’s been doing since the 70s for the local people, but as being a missionary spreading the word of Christianity. So that will not be good for them.” Please read their account by the Bible Society and intercede, please, for this couple’s defense.