The Call Beyond Borders

A Mission Faithfully Finished: From Japan to Ukraine

In the early 1970s, Jacoba’s calling took her east, first to Japan, and later, in the 1990s, to the heart of post-Soviet Europe.

After completing theological studies at the Bible Institute of South Africa, she joined Neil and Peggy Verwey on the Japan Mission of the Dutch Reformed Church. There, amid quiet streets and paper walls, she taught English, studied Scripture, and discovered that humility could be a greater strength than certainty.

Japan changed her. It was there she learned the art of listening, the sacred patience required to teach hearts before minds. She had met and fallen in love in 1966 with a young man named Leon du Toit, a preacher’s son from Potchefstroom. They married in 1972, planning to return to Japan as missionaries.

But history intervened.

When the apartheid-era visa boycott came into effect in 1973, Japan closed its borders to South African citizens. Their shared mission collapsed before it began.

Jacoba and Leon stayed. They built a family, Leon pastoring, Jacoba teaching, their faith refined through detour. The dream of Japan was not lost, it was transformed. In 1995, after both Apartheid and the Soviet Union had fallen, they answered a new call: Ukraine. There, in Kyiv and beyond, they began again. No longer emissaries of empire, but witnesses of grace, teaching, building, healing, and believing in renewal amid rubble.

For nearly three decades, Jacoba’s work bridged continents, from Japan’s restraint to Ukraine’s raw resilience. She taught not only language and Scripture, but also what it meant to hold onto faith when the world fractured around you.

Her life became proof that calling is not cancelled by circumstance, it simply finds new soil.