our family well for many years, but used to complain mightily when we would consume two loaves of fresh bread at one sitting and call for more. For his part, Haider served the DeJong household as a houseboy. Everdine DeJong, who taught him English and a few other things besides, eventually saw that Haider had real gifts. She told him he was wasting his time as a houseboy and sent the stripling over to the hospital to train as a practical nurse. And, with his head start in idiomatic English having grown up with the DeJong boys — Keith, David and particularly Ed — he was a quick study. He became the lead nurse-trainee of a core group that included ‘Abbâs Ridâ and Ibrahîm. It must be understood that the American Mission Hospitals in Kuwait were the only game in town from 1913 up until the mid-1950s (a hospital for men and another for women). Kuwait’s Shî‘ite community was the Mission’s most fertile recruiting ground for helpers prior to when nurses and doctors from India came in great numbers particularly in the early 1960s and Kuwaitis began to feel the onset of oil prosperity. Haider quickly graduated from being a practical nurse to become my father’s scrub nurse. Dad was a great teacher and saw that Haider never avoided a challenge. On heavy days, Haider would take over basic operations. My father once told me that Haider’s hemorrhoidectomies were among the neatest and cleanest he had ever seen (and he had seen a lot). Late in 1951 Stanley Mylrea returned to Kuwait for a farewell visit. Our family was in the US on furlough. Christmas was celebrated (with the Bosch family in ‘our house’) and quite suddenly Mylrea was struck by a heart attack. He was given a special room near our house to recover, and Haider, ‘Abbâs and Ibrahîm were his nurses, taking turns on shift. On the evening 3rd, of January 1952, Haider was going off duty when Mylrea stopped him at the door. “You know, Haider,” he said, “when we thought your father was dying I sat by his bedside and nursed him through his crisis.” He sighed, “Well, now it’s your turn to sit by my bedside. Thank you.” And Haider never forgot that. Mylrea died that night. It was a bonding moment. Then came Kuwait’s first X-Ray machine. I remember that black monstrosity. The first procedure was a fluoroscopy of the ruler’s, Shaykh Ahmad al-Jâbir’s, hand. He was delighted by the display of his finger bones flexing around on the ghostly screen. Haider (again) took over and learned on the fly under my father’s tutelage and by reading the instruction manual. When the time came for building the new X-Ray unit with a larger and more sophisticated machine, Haider was sent off to India’s Vellore Christian Medical Center to study radiology under Dr. Ida B. Scudder who declared him to be stellar material. When he came back having picked up a smattering of Tamil along the way, he became Kuwait’s first X-Ray guru. But some time thereafter his white blood cells started to drop alarmingly. He was then whipped off of the X-Ray machine and moved over into administration under my mother’s supervision. By then he had become the Mission’s (and my parents’) chief advisor on all sorts things. He gave of his intuitive wisdom to my parents and to a score of other missionaries. In effect, he became the Mission’s advisor on issues ranging from church expansion to reconfiguring the Mission’s program for literature distribution (in effect, inventing the ‘Family Bookshop’) to sorting out family problems to Muslim-Christian relations in Kuwait in an ever more complicated political environment. With a foot in both worlds, he was absolutely invaluable.