Sunday’s Bible class at Wilshire Baptist Church began like many others: with a word for absent members. For Linda, fighting cancer. For Betty May, struggling to walk.
Louise Troh needed a whole prayer.
As she prepares to emerge from an Ebola quarantine Monday, two worlds wait for Troh.
There’s the northeast Dallas church and its class of mostly white retirees, where Troh spent Sunday mornings reading Bible stories before her confinement 21 days ago.
And there’s Troh’s family from the crippled West African nation she fled more than a decade ago — where her daughter died in childbirth this year, and where the man she meant to marry caught the virus that killed him.
“No one deserves that much suffering,” said Craig Keith, the class’s teacher.
Troh walked into Keith’s classroom for the first time last fall — a bright 54-year-old mother and grandmother with a deep West African accent.
“Here’s this woman from Liberia in a Sunday school full of mainly white and retired people,” Keith recalled. “God works in mysterious ways.”
Troh came with three Liberian teenagers whom the class had reached out to help. The girls have since drifted from the church, Keith said, but “Louise stuck.”
Through weeks of parables and prayer, Troh became a regular face at the back of the room, near a wall of clustered crucifixes. Sometimes, she came by herself. Sometimes, she brought family members who filled two rows of seats.
Her two worlds were starting to mingle.
“She always asked for a prayer for the people of Liberia,” said Max Post.
Post remembered a morning this spring, when Troh told her classmates that her daughter had died. She made it through the story without breaking down.
After a long civil war that drove Troh from the country, Liberia’s health system started failing even before the Ebola outbreak. Troh’s daughter, nearly due to give birth, had called her mother from a stretcher. The hospital would not admit her without cash.
“She was bleeding, and she was afraid,” said Laurie Taylor, who runs the Grief and Loss Center of North Texas, which is housed at the church.
Separated by thousands of miles, Troh stayed on the phone with her daughter while her son-in-law searched for cash. Finally, her daughter fell silent. Another phone call informed Troh that she and the baby were dead.
“Louise was very distraught,” Post said. “And she’s certainly not over it yet.”
About half a dozen Wilshire members went to the memorial for Troh’s daughter. Liberians and Baptists crammed into her two-bedroom apartment in Vickery Meadow.
That was months before the man who came from Liberia to marry Troh, Thomas Eric Duncan, lay dying of Ebola in one of her bedrooms. Before workers emptied the apartment, burned nearly everything she owned and buried the ashes. And before her three-week quarantine.
In his Sunday sermon, Wilshire’s pastor compared Dallas’ “state of panic” over the Ebola case to Israelites who wandered the desert, fearing God had forsaken them. Troh and her family “have nothing, and yet people are blaming her,” the pastor said.
In the classroom above, Post couldn’t help but think of Troh as he listened to parables.
In one, an ailing woman had been deemed ceremonially unclean. Shunned and embarrassed and “cut off from life,” she braved a crowd to seek acceptance.
But by and large, the class’s prayers were simple.
“More than anything, we’re going to pray that she’s in that back row again next Sunday with us,” Keith said.
