MONGANGA PAUL

Time may have covered the life and death of Paul Carlson more professionally, but no testimony can take the place of this simple story told by his widow. She returns to Paul Carlson's birth and childhood, his early determination to be a doctor, and their meeting when he was an orderly and she was a student nurse. When Operation Doctor made an urgent request for doctors to replace those who had fled the now independent Congo, he applied for mission work there. Lois, and the two children, Wayne and Lyn, went to Wasolo in the extreme northeastern part of Ubangi Province, known as ""the forgotton place"" because of its isolation. But Wasolo was not so isolated that a Time-Life photographer did not find his way there, nor was it so isolated that the dread Simba, the rebels, did not reach it. Lois and the children were safely out, but Paul chose to stay behind to help and protect his people. He was taken hostage and eventually he was shot down in a Stanleyville street. Much of her information comes from his own Testament written while a prisoner, which was on his body when he died. Lois Carlson writes in unadorned prose; she gives little perspective on the political currents that transformed her life, and the drama rests only with her subject, not what she has done with it. Yet this plain, almost prim recital is the one that bears witness to all women of faith and comparison with Angeline Tucker's He Is In Heaven (McGraw-Hill- p. 737).