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Then the Goens heard about a crisis at Egbe Hospital, started by missionaries in 1952. Egbe's doctor had died of sickle cell disease, and the hospital was within two weeks of closing.

A rush of events followed: The Goens applied to the North Carolina-based agency SIM. The agency accepted them, and the couple raised their financial support within six weeks. Project MedSend, an innovative effort to get physicians into overseas ministry, agreed to pay the Goens' student loans while they served in the field. In 1999, they left for Nigeria.

Nigeria is Africa's most populated nation, with 140 million people and 500 people groups. One of those people groups is the Yoruba, a Christian farming people 23 million strong.

Another group is the nomadic Fulani, an illiterate, cattle-revering people numbering 27 million across West Africa and 12 million in Nigeria. The Fulani brought Islam here 1,000 years ago. Mission scholars classify them as unreached. The few Fulani Christians across Africa have faced persecution, even death, for embracing Christ.

In many parts of Africa, pastoral and agricultural tribes often compete for the best land for livestock or farming. Thus, Yoruba farmers and Fulani herders have warred for millennia, burning and killing in a feud that lasts to this day. At Egbe Hospital, most patients are Yoruba. Ailing Fulani usually seek their own traditional healers.

Patty Goen compares the attitude of the Christian Yoruba to Jonah's attitude toward Nineveh: "There was so much animosity, they didn't want the Fulani in heaven." She recalls that early in their hospital ministry a Fulani man sought treatment for his gangrenous foot. It was caked with cow dung that had been applied as a traditional remedy. Tracy Goen directed his Yoruba nurses to clean the foot. But hours later, the foot remained filthy. Goen cleaned it himself.

"You don't understand," a nurse told Tracy. "I found my grandfather chopped into little pieces by a Fulani. How can you ask me to take care of a Fulani?"

"This is what Christ would do," he gently replied.

But it took more than compassion to reach the Fulani.

In the course of using his veterinary training to help treat Fulani cattle, Goen was presented with a malnourished, nine-year-old Fulani boy named Jebel. A viper had bitten the boy, and his grandparents had brought him to Egbe Hospital. He was deathly ill and vomiting blood, so Patty Goen immediately administered the antivenin. Jebel had an allergic reaction, and two days later the boy's heart stopped. They resuscitated him with adrenalin, but then he lapsed into a coma and continued to get worse.

His family spoke no English or Yoruba, and no one at the hospital spoke Fulfulde, the Fulani mother tongue. The grandparents were anxious and mystified, and the Goens had no way to explain to them what was going on.

Unexpectedly, Babangida Abba, a Fulani Christian pastor unknown to the Goens, walked into the pediatric ward. (He said later that the Holy Spirit had sent him to the hospital, which he had never visited before.) Fluent in English and Fulfulde, Abba became the Goens' interpreter. Isa, Jebel's grandfather, said if Jebel survived the viper bite that the Goens and Abba could visit their camp. Within days, Jebel began to recover miraculously.

At a follow-up visit, Abba and Tracy began sharing the Gospel with Isa. Isa pulled Abba aside: "I know this man, Jesus," Isa said. "I have seen him in my dreams." In time, several members of his and other clans professed faith in Christ.

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November 2005, Vol. 49, No. 11