mission work in the troubled East African Nation and the region, BosNewsLife learned Tuesday, March 30.
Africa Inland Mission (AIM) said the Pett Memorial Fund was named after Warren Pett and his wife Donna who were killed March 18 when gunmen raided their Esther Evangelical School of Technology in the village of Aringa, about 310 miles (496 kilometers) northwest of Kampala.
A student, who made an attempt to warn the Petts of the danger, was also killed, AIM officials said. The announcement of the memorial fund came after an estimated 1,000 friends and family members gathered at Elmbrook Church in Brookfield, Wis. Saturday, March 27, to recall a couple whose faith in the words of one reporter "led them to exchange a two-story farmhouse and dairy for a simple, 12-by-12-foot home and a life of teaching the Bible and agriculture to African students."
The lives of Warren, 49, and Donna, 48, were cut short after seven gunmen holding students and staff hostage, demanded money and set thatch houses on fire, a fellow missionary of AIM, told the mourners. Elsewhere in the school’s compound, the gunmen found the Petts at their home. "They were each shot multiple times," Wolcott said. He added that a student was killed "while making a courageous attempt" to warn them of the pending danger.
Police have reportedly arrested a member of a local defense force in connection with the killings. Amin Aruma was detained March 20 about 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the training center, where Warren and Donna Pett and student Isaac were killed two nights earlier, the Associated Press (AP) reported. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni set up local defense units shortly after seizing power in 1986 to supplement the police and army.
BATTLEGROUND
Although investigations are ongoing, some news reports suggested that prior to the attack there was opposition among the mainly Muslim population toward the Christian facility. "Northwest Uganda is a spiritual battleground between non-Christian and Christian," AIM added on its Web site.
Despite the difficulties family members have told reporters that the couple never missed an opportunity to tell people why they sold their family farm and moved to a strife-ridden region of Africa. During a visit to an African river, Warren Pett "was more interested in talking about his Christian faith to an armed security guard than in watching hippopotamuses fight in the water", their son, Saul Pett, 27, was quoted as saying during the memorial service for his parents.
In interviews last week, the Petts’ three children–another son, Ezra, 24, and daughter Marita Verhalen, 28– and other family members recalled that the couple realized a decades-long dream when they sold their farm in 1997 and headed to Africa, where they served in Congo, Kenya and Uganda.
"DIFFICULT"
For Warren Pett’s father, Norman, 77, it was difficult at first to see his son give up a farm that had been in the family since 1901. "In the ’80s, when the thought first came up, I was quite disappointed in it," he reportedly said. "We were in debt, and I didn’t see how we could come out of it with the funds to live on." The Petts managed to sell most of the farmland, however, and their son Ezra still lives in the old farmhouse.
Their experiences as farmers apparently helped them to lead people to Christ. Timothy Ryder, an associate pastor of urban ministries who has worked in Africa, was quoted as saying that during his time in Kenya, Warren Pett led a Bible study for pastors in a mud-walled hut in a slum housing workers who sent most of their pay to their families in their home villages.
Although the men in his group were pastors, most had no more than a grade-school education. "The practical side of him made it possible to relate to them," Ryder said of Pett. "They could talk about crops and animals, and he would understand."
They are not the first missionaries to be slain in northern Uganda in recent years. In 2001, rebels from a faction known as the Lord’s Resistance Army shot to death a Sudanese Catholic priest in northern Uganda, the Sudanese Catholic Church reported.
