November 27, 2016
Kay Banta is a long-time WEI teacher and short-term missionary from Arkansas. She was a member of the first team of teachers that Bill McDonough and I led in Tirana, Albania in 1992 following the fall of communism.
Kay is a missionary at heart. Even though she teaches school nine months a year, she becomes an overseas missionary during the summer whenever possible. She has taught children and adults in Albania, Ghana, Guyana, Malawi, and Zimbabwe. The following picture was taken while Kay was on a mission trip in Ghana last summer.
Kay began teaching Dr. Adi Hunderawak on the Internet in August 2016. He is a 34-year-old pharmacist and cataract surgeon at Jimma University Hospital in southwestern Ethiopia.
Kay writes, “By Lesson 2, he was asking questions and was really hooked on the Bible. He never asked a single English question.”
Dr. Hunderawak wrote, “I grew up as an orphan. My mom and dad died when I was 7. When I was in the 10th grade, I really needed my mom and dad. I lost my academic intelligence because I was crying all night.”
Throughout his childhood and during his college years, Adi attended the Lutheran Church where he grew up as an orphan. He thought the ceremony was good, but when some of the priests did not practice what they preached, he became disillusioned. He looked upon their teachings as academic, not as spiritual and divine truth. He said to Kay, “It [their teaching] was not as clear to me as now your teaching is.”
Kay says, “He proceeded to study with me daily, and within a month said that he had been baptized as a child and asked if he could do it again. After reading the lesson on Acts 8, he said, ‘What prevents me from being baptized?’ Chills!”
Dr. Hunderawak wrote, “I want to be baptized like Jesus Christ was by being immersed deep into the water into the name of God, his Son, and Holy Spirit, because Jesus himself ordered this baptism.”
Kay contacted an Ethiopian preacher in Jimma by the name of Deggu Mossissa. On November 27, after studying the Bible with Deggu, Dr. Hunderawak was baptized into Christ in the baptistery pictured below.
Kay says, “Adi spoke of his joy in the kingdom and told me that my teaching was exactly like Deggu’s. He said that he wants to teach others and that I was like Philip to him. It is such a rare blessing from God to see the harvest so fast from this distance!”
“This week, Dr. Hunderawak asked for guidance in teaching his wife and their four-year-old saying, ‘We have a teacher.’ I am sending him some materials as well as advising him to start now with what he first learned in Genesis.”
