Stories

February 24 marked a bleak milestone in Ukraine. One year ago, Russian troops entered the country’s Donbas region, and news agencies began reporting the sound of gunfire, explosions, and armored vehicles pouring across the borders.

In September 2022, armed gangs gained control of a main fuel terminal and blocked the major road connecting Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince to the whole southern peninsula. As hijackings, kidnappings, and fuel shortages increased, David Carwell ’92, country director of Mission Aviation Fellowship, kept flying, using fuel reserves to transport missionaries, relief workers, and cargo by plane.

Tyler Thompson ’10 has always loved two things: a good story and a good story told on film. In 2005, after graduating from high school in Fremont, Illinois, he had planned to study film at Columbia School of the Arts. But his sister, Ashley (Thompson) Anderson ’07, then a Moody Bible Institute student, suggested a different plan.

As Martin Simiyu studied at Moody Theological Seminary, he was restless. “My heart was beating for Africa and for my village and for the people I left back at home,” he says. When he learned about Moody’s history of organizing short-term mission trips for graduate students and professors, Martin and two other students suggested a visit to Kenya and Cameroon.

The day after Labor Day in 1993 I sat in the provost’s office interviewing for the professor of Jewish Studies position at Moody Bible Institute. Dr. Howard Whaley greeted me warmly, then cut to the chase: “With the Jewish Studies program being so small and Lou Goldberg retiring, this would be a good time to end the Jewish Studies major.”