(Art work and story by Trish Coffey)

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In my Writing Circle Tuesday this week [July, 2025], the prompt was to write a tribute to someone we admire. I finished it yesterday. I wrote about my father George Raymond Hill, raised in southern California on a ranch, survived World War II in the Merchant Marines, and was in French Cameroon. West Africa building the first college on the middle half of the continent.    

 

"He awakens with the dawn, springs out of bed, his mind full of the priorities of the day. He  gazes out the window. Whaaat? A gunman, with brown tinted ebony hands, holds a gun pointed at our house. He is wearing a short sleeved and short bottomed Khaki uniform. What the heck?! He looks in a different direction, another one, and then a third! Why? Who are they? What side of the war are they on? What’s happening?

 

"He hears a rustle from the far end of this metal house on stilts in the middle of the African jungle. His 13-year-old daughter must be up.  No! He hurries to warn her! Too late. She is already outside on the exposed deck looking in the fruit cupboard for what would make a good breakfast! He hurries to her back, put an arm over her left shoulder and a finger held vertically over her lips. She startles. Dad has never done this before. What’s going on?

 

"With the other hand, he points over her right shoulder towards the soldiers. She sees the soldier with a gun pointing right at her. He points in a different direction, another one, and another in a third direction. Her knees want to buckle. She trembles.

 

"He takes her shoulders, turns her around, and leads her in the kitchen door. He tells her to stay low so they can’t see what we’re doing and go sit on the couch. He goes to awaken the other three members of the family. His daughter urgently says she needs to pee, and he reluctantly tells her to stay low and get it done and come back.

 

"The whole family sits in the living room now, not much after 6:30 in the morning, wondering what’s happening. How can he protect my family? How can he diffuse fear and tension on both sides? They don’t even have locks on the doors!

 

"He has two guns, a 22 and a shotgun, but he joined the Merchant Marines so he wouldn’t have to point a gun at anybody, so that’s out of the question.

 

"How can he put everybody at ease to deal with this crisis so it doesn’t go terribly, terribly wrong? In a whisper, he tells his family to wait quietly, not move around much, not talk even quietly, just wait and wait. Nothing happens. Nothing at all.

 

"Well that’s not entirely true. Flies make lazy circles in the middle of the living room. The cat rubs up against each of our legs, purring, the geckos chase each other across the ceiling as usual, a spider has caught a fly that is buzzing vigorously in the windowsill as he wraps it up in spider silk.

 

"We wait.  At 10:30 in the morning. There is a heck of a hullabaloo, screaming storming up the steps, at least five soldiers bursting into the house, yelling at us in French and waving their guns at us with the fingers on the triggers! The leader motions for us to all sit on the couch designed for two.

 

"He sits in the middle, his wife on his left, his 13-year-old daughter on his right, his nine year-old son on his lap, and his two-year-old daughter on his wife’s lap. The leader points his gun at our family, ready to shoot! His team just disperses into the bedrooms, opening drawers, one by one throwing items over their shoulders into a pile in the center of the room, same with the closet, same with under the bed, looks behind furniture.

 

"The man looking in the master bedroom comes out, chest proud, waving two guns and a short wave radio. He looks hard at dad. You are a traitor. You are a spy. You have betrayed your country. He yells in dad‘s face!

 

"They moved to the storeroom opening all the 55 gallon drums full of perishable food stuff and kept dry with silica gel. Again, everything gets dumped out on the floor. What a mess!!! But we are alive, still alive. They glare and yell at Ray some more. He looks peacefully at them!

 

"They leave with the guns and the short wave radio. The short wave radio had been a gift from people in a US church so that the missionaries could communicate more readily with loved ones at home, but the soldiers don’t know that, and wouldn’t believe it if you told them.

 

"We knew the Africans and the French were at war for the independence of the Cameroon. Both sides wanted the missionaries to side with them and the missionaries claimed neutrality in the trouble. It was proposed that the missionaries build a fence around their communities and they refused. The French claimed that the leader of the Insurgence was trained in missionary schools, and it is true that he had gone to a mission school.

 

"Mission schools were the only schools in the country! Mission schools may have taught that all people are equal before the lord and that no man had the right to enslave another!

 

"Five people were shot in Duala. The international report was 500 people were killed. The French told the Africans that if they would come out of the jungle and go back to their villages, they would be given an amnesty and have no penalties. But when a few of them took the bait, they were put in pits of water up to their neck and were kept there without food until they ratted on their comrades in the jungle. The Africans soon saw white skin as evil and attacked.

 

"They threw rocks at our cars as we went through villages and hit the cars with white people in them with clubs. They couldn’t distinguish between American, German, Italian, Swiss and French white people, but it was easy to distinguish a white person from a black person! So all white people became despised people unless they knew them personally.    

 

"Ray Hill called 'gorilla paws' and 'the man who spit nails into the roof” (a story for another day) continued the task of building his college. He believed in education he believed in peace between people. He believed in his God and we lived."