Barbara Kapenga served a two-year term as a junior/senior high school English teacher with the Peace Corps in Chad.
Mission Profile: Barbara Kapenga
MINISTRY
EDUCATIONAL
LOCATION
KHARTOUM, SUDAN
PARTNERS
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH IN THE SUDAN and
EVANGELICAL CHURCH IN THE SUDAN
Barbara Kapenga has been a Reformed Church missionary since 1981. She has spent most of that time as a teacher in both north and south Sudan. Her present responsibilities include coordinating a TEE (Theological Education by Extension) program and teaching at Gereif Bible School and at Nile Theological College in North Khartoum, Sudan.
Sudan is the largest country in Africa--about equal in size to one-third of the continental United States. Northern Sudan is primarily Muslim; southern Sudan is primarily Christian and animist. Since 1983 a second civil war has been raging in the southern and western states of Sudan. Many people from those regions have fled to the capital and other northern towns in search of food, jobs, education, medical help, and peace. This has created unique opportunities for evangelism in the north and resulted in the rapid growth of congregations there.
However, this has caused a crisis in leadership, as there are not enough trained clergy or laity to go around. To meet this challenge, the Presbyterian and Evangelical churches, with whom Barbara is associated, opened a Bible school (where instruction is in Arabic) in 1985 and a theological college (instruction in English) in 1992. The Bible school, college, and TEE program provide educational opportunities at different levels and in several languages for evangelists, pastors, Christian educators, teachers of religion for public and private schools, and lay leaders.
For Barbara, Sudan was not a strange assignment. She was born in India, but her home was in Oman, where her parents, Jay and Marjory Kapenga, served as RCA missionaries for nearly forty years. After graduating from Kodaikanal International School in South India in 1972, Barbara completed an undergraduate degree in religion at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. She next served a two-year term as a junior/senior high school English teacher with the Peace Corps in Chad. In 1980 she received a master's degree in religion from Yale University.
In 1982, after a seven-month "internship" in Egypt, Barbara was appointed matron of girls and religious education instructor at the Malakal Institute of Education. Early in 1984, however, she left south Sudan, along with other missionaries, because of the civil war. For a year she taught at Al Raja School in Bahrain, but returned to Khartoum in 1985 at the invitation of the Presbyterian and Evangelical churches there. Barbara has been serving in Khartoum since that time except for a two-year break (1989-90) to get a master's degree in teaching English as a foreign language from the University of Florida.
Birthday: September
