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As Carlson wrote to friends back home, there was some exotica as well: "The teen-age boy with hemoglobin of only 20% who looks as if he had been blown up with the helium gas used for balloons at the circus—only the skin of his leiTs is like old, dried, peeling leather"; the African whose homemade poo-poo gun had exploded and taken half his face with it; the difficult obstetrical cases, as for instance the pregnant patient who had to be operated on for a ruptured uterus. "The lady had come about 75 miles in trucks. When she got here, she had no blood pressure and a pulse of 180. We thank God that she is slowly on the way to recovery. And she paid the $1.75 that covered the surgery." Permeating Carlson's letters, and scored in his thin voice on the tape-recorded messages he sent, were a delighted wonder at the oddness of the Congo and a conscious attempt to sound matter-of-fact. He found it strange to be awakened by "the night sentry in tattered pants with a long spear" and asked to aid a child with meningitis. It was oddly lyrical to be "trudging single file through the forest on the little path" to the leper colony, singing Christmas carols. There was something more immediate about his surgery when the sun set in the middle of an operation and the sutures had to be made by flashlight. Throughout his letters, the phrase persisted: "But so life goes." For the family, the life was a far remove from Redondo Beach barbecues. The diet was bananas, papayas and pineapples; goats, chickens and an occasional antelope. Though missionaries from the Evangelical Covenant network occasionally visited back and forth, amusement was usually family style: games of Scrabble, hymn singing, reading. The kids raised cats and dogs; Wayne built a monkey cage. It was hardly the usual Schweitzer-at-Lambarene scene. Even when the rebels showed up, it was far from dramatic.
A month after the rebels took Stanleyville, two scruffy Simbas in a purloined truck captured the area. The rebels were underestimated by the whites who chose to remain—missionaries, officials, technicians, businessmen, employees of the Belgian-owned Societe Generate, which controls most of the Congo's business enterprises and is still making money.
Some Europeans played into rebel hands—for instance, the Belgian owner of a sugar mill who felt it was better to deal with the people in power than lose his sugar crop: from neighboring Burundi he continued to bring in supplies and gasoline, which the rebels regularly confiscated, thus gaining enough fuel to attack Albertville.
The rebels reassured the owner by formally signing for everything—they delight in mixing barbarism with bureaucracy—but before long, they held all the sugar workers as hostages and were manufacturing cannon in the mill workshops.
Foreign embassies had ordered all missionaries out of the north. Carlson took his family and his white nurse across the Ubangi River to the safety of the Central African Republic. But he himself returned to the hospital last September. He felt he could not desert his patients, and up to that time the rebels had not bothered doctors.