Tom Logan graduated from Stephen Decatur High School, in Decatur, Illinois in 1961. At 18, he took a solo hitchhiking trek through Africa (Ghana, Cameroun, Gabon, South Africa, Rhodesia, Kenya, Ethiopia) and spent two months with Dr. Albert Schweitzer at his hospital and leper colony in Lamberene, Gabon. On his way back to the States, he spent a month with Palestinian refugees and a month in a Jewish Settlement in a Kibbutz in Israel. Coming of age during the Civic Rights Movement, Tom attended the March on Washington in 1963 with his father and witnessed Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech. When they returned home, a cross was burned in their front yard. 

After graduating from Warren Wilson College in 1964, he worked for Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Green County, Alabama, and registered voters. He continued his education and obtained degrees from the University of Illinois in 1966 and from McCormick Theological Seminary in 1969. Later in life, Tom received an honorary doctorate degree in 2017 from the University of Livingstonia Malawi. 

In 1972 Tom and his wife Jocelyn moved to Cairo, Illinois and worked with the Egyptian Housing Development Corporation. In a year and a half, 150 homes were built on scattered sites with an interracial crew that was half black and half white. In the 1975, along with his wife Jocelyn, and Bill Covey, Shawnee Enterprises Inc. was founded. Between 1975 and 1982, Shawnee Enterprises, Inc. developed, and built fourteen low-income housing projects in ten Southern Illinois towns. These housing units are still managed by the organization and Jim Covey, Jr. The apartments are an asset to each community where the tenants are taken care of and the tenants take care of Shawnee. 

Tom and Jocelyn founded Marion Medical Mission in 1985. Its purpose is to share the love of Christ with the extreme poor in Africa. Marion Medical Mission has built 6 Primary Schools, and 2 schools for the hard of hearing. From 1990 to 2020, the major effort has been to provide a sustainable source of safe drinking water to rural African villagers. Safe drinking water means the children will no longer die from water borne diseases. The villagers are healthier, which enables them to work in their fields longer and produce more food to prevent starvation. There are currently over 43,000 villages in Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia that have wells built through Marion Medical Mission providing an estimated 5 million people with safe drinking water. 



The wells are built where the need is greatest regardless of religious beliefs. At each ‘Hand-over Celebration,’ the villagers are told their well is special because Christians from the U.S. shared the love of Jesus with them. These wells and their faith in a brighter future is the best defense against war and terror. Marion Medical Mission’s goal for 2020 was to build 3,000 wells covering 60,000 square miles in Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania providing an estimated 375,000 (225,000 children) of the extreme rural poor with potable water. Construction did not start till September (during the dry months), and in that time, 3,155 wells were built. 

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