His father’s legacy made Ketcham a sort of prince within the world of ABWE: the doctor with the “magical name,” as one missionary later put it, much beloved by the family of churches that supported the group. His father had co-founded the Baptist denomination that sponsored the missionary group, the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism its goal was to create a “militant, missionary-minded, Biblically separate haven of Fundamentalism.” Little known outside the world of Christian fundamentalists, ABWE is among the largest missionary groups in the United States, deploying more than 900 Baptists to 70 countries. He was Donn Ketcham, the 58-year-old chief doctor at the mission hospital in Bangladesh. The pastor asked Kim who had touched her.ĭonn, the pastor would soon learn, was not really Kim’s uncle. Yes, she had been touched, there and there, lots of times. But as the pastor gently persisted, she began to sob. “Kim,” he asked, “has this happened to you?”Īt first, Kim said no. The pastor dropped his pen and looked up.
Eventually, with feigned casualness, she pointed between her legs and said, “Is it wrong when someone does this-touches you here?” Kim ambled around his desk, picking things up, putting them back down. She found him in his office, trying to compose the next day’s sermon. So she decided to skip out of the church event-it was for little kids, anyway-and go see the pastor. She missed the jackals that called in the distance at night, and the elephants that sometimes crashed through the compound fence.Īs she thought about the mission, though, Kim felt troubled. She missed her friends, the dozen or so missionary kids everybody called “MKs.” She missed the menagerie her parents let her keep: goats, cows, a parrot, a monkey. For an adventurous and high-spirited 13-year-old like Kim, Indiana seemed dull compared to Bangladesh. Her parents were back in Bangladesh, working at the remote Baptist missionary compound where the family had lived, on and off, for five years. Her older sisters had taken her to a church event in their small hometown in Indiana, where the girls were spending their summer. It was a hot day in July, a Saturday afternoon, and Kim James was bored.
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