An inter-Mennonite newspaper, putting the Mennonite world together every week since 1923

EDITORIAL

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Four days before Christmas, a woman I went to high school with was killed in an automobile accident in the West African country of Mali. Though I did not know her as an adult, I had heard from others about some of the work she had been doing with the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control — some of the most important work I can imagine someone being called to do in this age of AIDS and looming global pandemics. Her death, an untimely caprice of fate and happenstance that befell her family in the season of joy and celebration, has caused me to ponder what any of us does with this one and only life we have.

Kellie Lartigue-Ndiaye was a year or two behind me at Bishop Byrne High School in Memphis, Tenn. I remember her as a slender schoolgirl with dark blonde bangs, a modest and unassuming daughter of a polite Southern family. Her older brother, Re’John — a shortening of an old Louisiana name, Honore — was in my class and is an architect with a firm in Memphis that designs impressive churches and other landmarks. The entire Lartigue family, as I remember them, always seemed to be about something in their lives. In retrospect, it seemed Kellie lived her life with such nobility because it was for the good of others.

After a term with the Peace Corps in Senegal, West Africa, where she met her husband, Karim, Kellie began her work in AIDS prevention in Rwanda. Amid the unchecked genocide that erupted there in 1994, she was rescued by U.S. Marines and continued her work with a volunteer medical clinic in Zambia. In 1997, she began her work in AIDS prevention with the CDC, an assignment that would take her to Mali, where she would help expand substantially the number of HIV testing and counseling centers. She also helped start the CDC’s Avian Influenza Group, which, according to her obituary on Christmas Day in the Commercial Appeal newspaper, “responds to urgent calls by countries for help detecting, preparing for and responding to outbreaks of AI H5N1.”

Finally, with her husband, she established a nonprofit, Jef Jel — Wolof for “give and take” — which establishes ties of mutual assistance between Americans and the remote village of Ndangane, Senegal.

This young woman’s life ended at an age when many people are just hitting their stride or struggling with the sudden realization that ambition and the fleeting passage of time do not always coincide. But already she had achieved more than many do over a much longer span of years. Learning of her death, and of the legacy she has left for her husband and three young sons to pass on to others, has caused me to consider my own ideals, and what little I feel I have done to embody them.

This editorial is the final piece I will write as a member of the staff at Mennonite Weekly Review. In January, I will join the staff at Good Books in Intercourse, Pa., as an editor and writer.

During my six years here, I have tried to use the space I have been allotted on this page to express some of the ideals I believe many of us share — about war and peace, the church in a changing world and the importance of protecting the environment. I have been warmly affirmed, occasionally chal-lenged and, in a few cases, roundly rebuked for holding views I once thought most people in the Anabaptist world would embrace.

It has been a privilege to use my voice in this dialogue, not only with our regular readers but with those who come across this newspaper online or by chance somewhere else. One can hope that at least some of the time, there was authentic truth in what was written here and that the gospel of peace, compassion and reconciliation was expressed in a way that might have made a difference in someone’s life. — Robert Rhodes