I have many good memories of my friend and former colleague George Whyte, who died in a car accident a long time ago now, just before Christmas in December 1996. Here are some of them. I still take the time every so often to remember a great person to know.
George found the world a funny place and he tried to make it funnier. When I was first new to Labé, Guinea, where we lived and worked together, he was showing me around town when we came to a field with piles of laterite boulders. George explained to me in all seriousness that those piles were altars and that we hoped to convince the people here that such altars weren’t necessary anymore. The boulders were really waiting to be loaded by hand onto dump trucks because there were no loaders available.
In those days in the late 1980s, the road from Labé to the capital Conakry had lots of old road equipment abandoned along the road, just left to rust by the side of the road wherever it had broken down. George would explain to anyone in the car with him that in French these pieces of equipment were called “bornes” and there were a thousand of them along the road, and that this, in fact, was the origin of the card game Mille Bornes (Touring).
George didn’t like having to stop too often to have people use the bathroom while he was driving. He explained to me, “I just thank God I have a 500 kilometer bladder.”
The following is a story about George that language helper Oury Pilimini would tell. One day George was driving Dr. Hannes Wiher and Oury from Labé to Conakry. George was driving quite fast on the very curvy road and was also swerving around the potholes on the road between Labé and Pita. Both Oury and Dr. Wiher were getting somewhat carsick. Finally, Dr. Wiher said to George: “Monsieur, il faut choisir le bon trou ! (Sir, just hit the right pothole!)”
In the early days when we were in Guinea, the police in Conakry were continually stopping us for some supposed violation of the law and then asking for some terribly small bribe of 50 cents or a dollar’s worth of local currency. George said that one day they stopped him and told him, “Monsieur, your car is TOO DIRTY!” Later, when local kids in Conakry were continually offering to guard your car against theft and also to clean it while you were in a store or business or restaurant, George would warn them, “This car must be kept DIRTY!”
George and C&MA missionary Jack Campbell became good friends and were always together when they were in Conakry. The C&MA mission director Mel Carter found tall and eyes-wide-open George and short and droopy-eyed Jack an odd couple and called them “Mutt & Jeff.”
There were often groups of missionaries from other countries who would, of course, speak in their own languages when they were together. I don’t remember any phrases from other languages, but George would learn some sentence in another language and then interject it into their conversation with no warning and no explanation. One such sentence in German was “Der Taschendieb ist hinter dem Bahnhof (The pickpocket is behind the train station).” He had another sentence in German about a helicopter that I’ve forgotten.
West Africa in the 1980s was full of Peugeot 404 sedans and 405 station wagons, many being used as group taxis both within and between towns. We soon came to expect that in the taxis at least the door handles would be broken off on the inside of most doors, so one would have to open the door from the outside.
George told a story about how he and Rhonda had gone out for dinner during their time in Abidjan with a French couple. George said he asked the Frenchman what he did for a living, and the Frenchman replied that he designed door handles for Peugeot. George would get a very strange look on his face, and after a long and pregnant silence, just ask, “What can you say?”
Once George and I traveled together to Freetown, Sierra Leone, for a conference. Assemblies of God Missionary Pastor Eli Chiarelli, a Canadian, rode with us. George put in a Willie Nelson cassette tape. Pastor Eli listened a bit and then said, “I don’t think he’s a Christian.” George changed to another cassette tape of Mozart’s Requiem. After a few minutes Pastor Eli asked what music this was, and when George told him that it was Mozart’s Requiem, Pastor Eli wanted to know if we prayed for the dead. We didn’t play any more music after that.
George was the Field Director when I was first in Guinea for this combined Christian Reformed World Missions and Christian Reformed World Relief Committee joint effort. We had a meeting to make the CRWM budget for the next year, and George suddenly said, “Something’s wrong here! Someone has spent $10 on Evangelism!” (We were all in language learning and little else.)
George did an excellent retelling of a sermon by one of his seminary professors at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, a “Just by chance” version of the story of Esther that started each new turn in the story with the phrase “Just by chance” to counter the claim that God was not present because the Bible didn’t mention him.
George will always be missed. I look forward to our reunion. --Dave Wierda
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