A New Christmas Carol

Lost in the news of Christmas week was a short Associated Press dispatch that Fred Hargesheimer died.

Doubtful many people knew who Fred Hargesheimer was. But like the character George Bailey in the Christmas chestnut It's a Wonderful Life, Mr Hargesheimer touched the lives of many, in the way that his life had been touched so many years before.

On June 5, 1943 Fred Hargesheimer was a P-38 pilot on a mission over Japanese-held New Britain island. Shot out of the sky by the enemy he parachuted into the jungle where for a month he survived until, near death, he was found by some local hunters.

The natives took him to their village on the island's coast and for 7 months hid him from the Japanese. They fed him and nursed him back to health. In February 1944 two Australian commandos engineered his pick-up by a U.S. submarine.

If that were the end of the story it would have been remarkable enough. But Fred Hargesheimer was more than remarkable. Sixteen years after his repatriation in the South Pacific he returned to the village of Ea Ea and the Nakanai people who had saved him. Moved by what he saw he realized the debt he owned them. It took him three years, but he raised $15,000 and returned to the village to build the first school for the impoverished residents.

Fred Hargesheimer was a salesman by trade, and apparently a pretty good one. Using his fundraising skills he would raise money and return to Ea Ea over several decades, building a clinic, a second school and libraries. In 1970 he and his wife moved to New Britain to teach the village children themselves.  A school experiment harvesting oil palm turned into a commercial venture creating for the first time a local economy for people who had only known only poverty.

Fred Hargesheimer died December 23, 2010 in Lincoln, Nebraska at the age of 94.

If, as Pres. Kennedy said in his Inaugural, here on earth God's work must truly be our own, then Fred Hargesheimer nailed it.

And as Dickens concluded in his Christmas Carol, may that truly be said of all of us.

Just thought you might like to know.