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Record W230648140

A Tribute to Marc Nikkel, Missionary to the Sudan (1950-2000)

2002· article· en· W230648140 on OpenAlex
Grant LeMarquand

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueAnglican and Episcopal history · 2002
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicAfrican history and culture analysis
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsTributeWonderReligious studiesRefugeeTheologyHistoryWifeFaithSociologyArt historyPhilosophy
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In 1995 I spent two days in Kakuma refugee a sprawling home to more than 50,000 Africans, most of them Sudanese, who had fled war and starvation at home. Everywhere I went in the camp children would run up to me calling Mak! I was rather puzzled by this behaviour until I realized that it was actually a case of mistaken identity. The only white person these children really knew was Marc (Mak) Nikkel. In fact everyone I met in the camp seemed to know Marc Nikkel, perhaps because one of the greatest joys of Marc's life was simply being with Sudanese, in the midst of their happiness, their struggles, their pains, their questions, their wisdom. Marc Nikkel was born in a Mennonite family in Reedley, California. He took a first degree at California State University's School for the Visual Arts, studying some anthropology along the way. He spent two short periods of nine months in Nigeria and Zaire and studied Mission and Theology at Fuller Seminary. During his time at Fuller he was attracted to Anglicanism and was confirmed in the Episcopal Church. He began service as a Mission Partner of the Episcopal Church, U.S.A. teaching Theology at Bishop Gwynne Theological College, Mundri, Sudan in 1981. His first letters home to his friends on his mailing list are filled with the wonder of new things and the joy of being a part of preparing people for service in the Episcopal Church of the Sudan (ECS).1 One of his favorite duties between terms was to visit cattle camp, the traditional traveling villages of the Jieng people. Here he learned not only their language but also a deep appreciation of their culture and traditions. Very quickly, however, his letters began to hint of the rumours of renewed war. After decades of civil war, Sudan had been living in a period of relative calm. New rulers and new policies discriminatory of the people of the Southern Sudan and especially of non-Muslims began to fuel the old fires. Life became more tenuous. His letters began to hint of the trials of being a Christian community in the midst of growing conflict. My wife, Wendy and I met Marc in 1986. He was on leave from Mundri, doing a year of study at the General Theological Seminary in New York in preparation for ordination. My wife (a physician) and I had presented ourselves to the Anglican Church of Canada as prospective mission partners and we had been asked to consider serving in the Sudan. The church brought Marc to Toronto to meet with us. After that day we had hopes that we would soon be Marc's neighbours, working together in the Sudan. A few months later Marc was ordained deacon and returned to the Sudan where he continued teaching and where he was ordained as a priest. It was not so easy for our family to get to the Sudan. With our first baby, David, in tow, our mission board diverted us to Kenya when it was realized that the skirmishes in the Sudan were actually turning into a new and very dangerous civil war. Arriving in Kenya in January of 1987 we were immediately adopted by the Sudanese community at St. Paul's United Theological College in Limuru. Together we kept track of Sudanese events. In July we heard the horrible news that the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA) had overrun Bishop Gwynne College. The students, with most of the staff and faculty had been evacuated to Juba, and the rebels had abducted four expatriates, including Marc. For almost two months no one received any news of their whereabouts. Then, just as suddenly as they had been taken hostage, the four were released into northern Kenya, the rebels having presumably made their point by drawing a bit of the world's attention to the plight of Southern Sudan. I saw Marc at the Nairobi press conference the morning after the release, still wearing his Sudanese robe, his jalabiyya, the only piece of clothing he had had for those two months. Upon his release Marc learned that his mother, Rosie, was dying of cancer in California. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.370
Threshold uncertainty score0.998

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.031
GPT teacher head0.244
Teacher spread0.213 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it