Of Return to the Work Force...

After two weeks of unemployment, I have at last secured a job. I am returning to the world of construction, drawing upon my experience in that field, and it all begins Monday.

I put out seven or eight applications, mostly in the shipping and receiving world, but so far this is the only position that has been offered. There was a promising lead for a job driving a forklift, which I would have really enjoyed (and might still do once I begin school), but that failed to materialize in a timely manner.

In keeping with normal construction procedures the hours are relatively early, 7:30am to 4:30, but my first job is less than five minutes from our apartment. I have never actually applied for a construction job before, as my previous experience has been through my own projects, or through working with friends. It was nice to sit down in the interview and answer positive to the questions regarding my experience, "have you ever worked with metal studs?" "Have you ever done wooden framing?" "Remodeling?" etc.

The pay is decent, at least for this area, and they told me that once school starts they'll be willing to be flexible on hours. As the weather cools off and the bottom drops out of the mercury, I'll look indoors for employment, but for now being outdoors in a physically demanding job suits me just fine.

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Pulpit Helps Article # 3

Sixteen Months in Darfur Part Three
Jonathan Drake

[If you wish to read the previous to installments of this series, simply scroll down on my blog at http://lifeandtimesjad.blogspot.com]

Ten months into my time in Darfur, the war-torn Western region of Sudan, I was faced with a situation that didn’t necessarily shock me, but was, in a good way, warming to me. Faisal, the head supervisor of my three food distribution teams, came into my
office and sat down. I was accustomed to him coming in and sitting down, as my office was not a place that I preferred people to ‘hang out’ in, and thus create noise, and as such it was a quiet place to retreat to when the boisterous social
interactions of Sudanese people became tiresome.

“Mr. Jonathan…” Faisal’s addressing me in this way was something I had had to grow used to when I first arrived in Darfur. I was just shy of twenty-one years old when I stepped off that plane for the first time, and I suddenly found myself in charge of a group of men, all of whom older than me, who chose to call me “Mr. Jonathan.” Some were old enough to be my own father and it was something that I laughed at, and still laugh at, at first, but grew to be fond of. What first was a sign of respect out of duty, I was their boss, grew to become a sign of respect of our relationship as a bizarre family, struggling together to help the helpless. They called me “Mr. Jonathan”, and I called them brother, father and sister, literally.

Faisal is a man who, four months prior to my arrival, was driven from his village by the Janjaweed after two times of successfully defending their homes. He saw his sons gunned down, and his wife was brutally tortured, raped and left to die. His village was completely destroyed. At one point he pulled up his pant leg to reveal a nasty scar where a bullet had ripped through his calf. Yet in spite of these things, Faisal is the most joyful man I know. His laugh is deep, his smile is wide, and his face shines with some untold joy that I don’t find in many Christians here in the States.

I knew these things of Faisal as I pushed my computer back, taking a break from the piles of reports I was responsible for submitting to the World Food Program about our operations.

“Yes Faisal?”
“Mr. Jonathan, I have a question.”
“Yes sir…”
“I have worked with other NGO’s, and other international staff, and I have seen the way they are. I am Sudanese, I know my own people. I know the way they behave. All of those, they are people who get angry, who lie and who steal. It is nothing to them. But you…you are different. You and Mr. Andy, and Mr. Matt, and Mr. Dickson, and Mr. Coy, and Mr. Tim. You are different. You do not become angry with us, or with each other, you love us and you love each other. Why?”

The question of ‘Why?’ is one that we as Christians long for those around us to ask. Why are you different? When I hear that question I automatically think of when Peter tells us to “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have (1 Peter 3:15).” This is it. This is that moment. What do I do? Faisal comes from a cultural background that is as different than mine than Frito chips are from knockoff brand imitations (believe me, the difference is drastic). My understanding of the Gospel is rooted in my ‘grid’ of understanding, a grid that is shaped and formed from my youth, by my parents, my friends, my church experience and anyone I encounter. It comes from the joys and sorrows of my life, as trivial as they may seem in comparison to those in Darfur. My understanding of how to present the Gospel also comes from this root, and I feared, in that moment, as I had before, that what made perfect sense to me would completely fly by Faisal’s radar. Not that the truth of the Gospel is diminished, or its power, but that the way that it is understood would be different, and I was not sure how to break off from my personal ‘grid’.

As I entered into the conversation, I knew that I had ten months of relating with this man. Although it is illegal for me to share Christ in Sudan, Faisal and I had discussed religion, usually in the context of both of us asking simple questions, and so I knew that he knew the Gospel, in a purely academic sense. I knew also that Faisal had had ten months of watching me as a man, in how I related to those around me. He noticed that the Samaritan’s Purse team was set apart. We showed love to each other, and then, he commented, we showed love to him, as a human being, by eating at his house, meeting his family, helping his people. He could see Christ in us, and he wanted to know what ‘that’ was.

I told Faisal the answer to ‘why’. I told him that when a man is made right before God, through the sacrifice of Jesus, he becomes the host of the Living God, and becomes the physical representation, the ambassador, of the fullness of the Godhead on earth. Having the Creator of the universe dwelling inside of you and living through you causes a man to live a holy life.

Faisal listened, as he had before, and he seemed satisfied with my answer. As a muslim, his concept of justice and forgiveness is different from mine, as a westerner, and I knew that the description I gave to him was not fully digested. But Faisal knew that what he saw was special, and his heart resonated with it, and he was seeking the truth. I recognized that, and thought of what C.S. Lewis wrote in the Last Battle, about the Tash warrior, and how Aslan rewarded the warrior’s truth-seeking heart when everyone else would have condemned him based off of outward appearances. It made me wonder about how we determine, as Americans, who gets ‘into heaven’, and that maybe, somehow, we have deviated from God’s true character.
Because of that, I am not worried that my Sudanese brother did not drop to his knees and say a pat prayer, sign a card, walk an aisle, raise his hand, and stand and say to the world, “I am a Christian.” I realized what it means for God to know the heart, and I figured that if I could see the desire for truth, and rightness with God, then God certainly could. I placed my faith in the character of the Lord, knowing that He knows the heart and rewards those who ‘earnestly seek Him,’ and that He will judge rightly towards Faisal. I realized that I could not be the judge, and that I could not apply my finite understanding of what it means to follow God to this man.

When thinking on this situation, even now, I apply the single greatest thing that I learned while I was in Darfur. I say, “I don’t know.” I learned, after seeing vicious evil, and having my world view turned upside down, that I could not, in good conscience, go forth and claim to know all that I claimed to know before. My world of ‘black and white’ truth was shaken up, and what I was left with was a rumpled patch of grey. The overarching truth that remained was that God is God and that what His word says is true, but beyond that I would not be as rudely dogmatic as I had been before.

Pulpit Helps Article # 2

Sixteen Months in Darfur - Part Two
Jonathan Drake

In part one I introduced you to, at least as best I could through the medium of written word, to the foreign world I encountered when I traveled to Sudan. Due to my experiences growing up I was not prepared for the mental, physical and emotional challenge that it was going to be. The cultures were just too drastic for me to have had anything that would have helped me to formulate valid expectations, and, in fact I was counseled, by a friend who also worked for Samaritan’s Purse in Sudan, that I should not bother myself with creating expectations because whatever I came up with would only be disappointed. It was good advice, and I entered the experience with a clean slate, as it were.

My work when I first arrived in Darfur, the war-torn western region of Sudan, was to travel with the food distribution teams to each distribution and monitor the goings-on and make sure that the standards were being met. We were given guidelines from the UN’s World Food Program, with whom we were partnered, and from whom we got the food. As a result of this job, I spent the majority of my first eight months out in the field, coming back to our base town of Nyala, the capital of South Darfur (Darfur being divided into three, North, West and South), only on the weekends, which in the Sudanese Muslim culture was on Friday. Living and working in the field had its major advantages, such as being completely immersed in the language, Arabic, and the culture and thus being able to learn the nuances much faster, provided, of course, you cared to learn. Sleeping under the stars every night was also quite amazing. Out in the desolate and unpolluted desert of sub-saharan Africa the stars are unimpeded by any unnatural light, making them sparkle and shine like I have never seen before, or seen since. Each night I was privy to a spectacular show of shooting stars, some igniting at one horizon and burning brightly until the other. Once all of the animals in the surrounding village quieted down for the night, something which took a while, there was a deafening silence that enveloped you and the heavens became a sounding board for deep thoughts. There is a lot of time to think when you are trying to fall asleep under such a canopy, especially when sleep came reluctantly due to the intensity of the heat, something which waned, but did not disappear at night.

Time to muse was both welcome and unwelcome. Welcome in that the full-throttle nature of our work did not allow for much time to digest what we were doing, and moments where we could think things through and put the pieces of the puzzle together allowed us to try and make sense of the madness. Unwelcome in that when you paused to think, the hugeness of what we were living in the middle of overwhelmed you, and the doors of emotion shattered under the weight of pressing awareness. Generally the work was fast-paced enough that the brutality of every day life around us could go unnoticed by our hearts, a disconcerting thought, but a necessity when a person could fall to pieces were they to dwell fully, and fairly, on the evil and suffering. The importance of being able to continue to work outweighed the luxury of feeling appropriately about the surrounding circumstances. Having been removed from Sudan for several months now I allow myself to think and feel, but I wouldn’t have dared while I was there. We were not robots, we just learned to gauge our reactions. It was stored until such a time when we would be able to properly deal with our emotions.

Much of the time I would think of the things that I had seen. I took many thousands of digital pictures, and in spending many hours trying to organize them I was able to rehash much of my experience and begin to develop opinions from them. When I first arrived in Darfur, I was naïve, and it was a several events that occurred during my tenure, the first a month after my arrival, that dramatically shook off my youth and made me to realize what it was that I was getting into.

We used a town called Marla as a field base as it was central to many of our locations. It was a rebel stronghold and was ‘home’ to roughly 13,000 people, the majority of whom were IDP’s (internally displaced people). On December 8th, 2004, I was driving the lead truck in our two truck convoy of food distribution staff on our way to finish a food distribution in a camp near to Marla. The road took us through that town and we had plans to stay at our compound that evening. At midday we approached the town, but less than two kilometers from Marla we encountered a halted convoy of troop transport vehicles stuffed to the brim with young and terrified looking soldiers. Due to the rebel control of the area we assumed they were SLA soldiers, but on closer inspection we discovered that they were actually Government of Sudan. Halfway up the convoy, which held roughly 500 troops, we stopped and I and my translators hopped out to find out what the situation was.

Before we found someone to talk to, and about a hundred yards from my truck, small arms fire erupted from the town, spreading rapidly in a half circle to our right. Immediately the wide-eyed soldiers began piling out of the trucks, loading their weapons and returning fire, running right by me. I stood shocked for a second, then, realizing what was going on, turned and booked it for my truck. No Olympian can hold a candle to my hundred yard dash back to the truck. Spraying sand like a madman I spun that truck around and quickly put the fight behind me.

Marla was burned to the ground. All of the residents were driven off, the wells were poisoned, possessions looted. The host population suddenly found themselves in the same boat as the IDP’s, with nothing but the clothes on their backs. In mere moments thousands had become destitute.

Attack helicopters strafed the village, and flew ominously around the area for days to dissuade hopefuls from returning.

I had never seen anything like this before.

My colleague, Dickson Hendley, was returning from a trip to the field when he was ambushed by the Janjaweed who opened fire on his trucks. Windows were shot out, and bullets barely missed Dickson and his staff.

A week before I returned from Darfur I lay awake in my bed around one in the morning, unable to sleep because of the heat, when suddenly a fierce firefight broke out just outside my window. Factions of a rebel movement had gotten into a drunken ‘brawl’ with Government soldiers, and the machine gun fire alerted all in the area to their disagreement.

These things, coupled with the constant display of suffering, challenged me to consider the things I believed about the world. I determined that I was not taught the reality about this world, at least in a way that made the reality real. The reality is that the world is overrun by evil people. As an American youth I knew that evil existed, but I had never encountered it. I had never seen it in the eyes of a man as I did when I encountered a Janjaweed scout. I realized that God has every right to smear us all for even allowing such men to persist, and that His mercy is far greater than we understand.

I realized that my understanding, as an American Christian, of the Gospel was limited, and that it was too naïve, too formulaic, and too ‘box-like’.

I realized that I did not have everything figured out, and that it is okay to say, “I don’t know.”

I realized that whatever “Christianity” is, it must be compatible in such a screwed up place as Darfur, and not just in the air-conditioned and cozy churches devoid of conflict greater than budget squabbles that are strewn and scattered across the States.

I realized that in this world there is no room for lukewarm, and it took such a drastically real place as Darfur to teach me that reality and honesty about life, and all that it encompasses (especially faith), is paramount. I was able to compare my life to the stark and contrasting background of war and determine what was important.

In my last piece, I’ll show you how these things translated into actual life, and how the love of Creator God, the Word of Life, was able to penetrate the hearts of the men around us.

Pulpit Helps Article # 1

Sixteen Months in Darfur
Jonathan Drake
12-14-2006

In November of 2004, I stepped through the door of a plane and into a world drastically different from my own. I was raised in a conservative Christian home, was homeschooled all of my schooling years and lived in a beautiful and comfortable part of America, the Appalachian Mountains, in Boone, North Carolina. I approached life from the perspective of someone who had never experienced suffering, true hardship, or had ever really had anything not go my way. My family had gone through some lean years, when my father was switching careers, but we had never not had food on the table, we’d always lived in a comfortable house, surrounded by loving friends and family.

Thus, when I stepped into the sweltering heat pulsating from the sunbaked tarmac of the Nyala airport in South Darfur, in Sudan, I was totally ill-equipped and unprepared for what would soon become my life.

In 2003, the world became aware of potential genocide occurring in the Darfur Region of Sudan, the largest country in Africa. To boil down the complex issues to a tangible point, Arab tribesmen, known as the Janjaweed, were being aided by the Sudanese Government, based in Khartoum, in their marauding and systematic attempts to exterminate African tribes. Aided being defined as training, equipping, supplying and even fighting in conjunction with, using Russian Hind-24 attack helicopters, Antonov 12 bombers, etc.

Black tribes villages were burned to the ground, women were raped, men and children murdered, farms destroyed, and the surviving people fled for their lives, abandoning all earthly possessions. It is estimated that around three and a half to four million people were displaced, becoming IDP’s (internally displaced persons). Fleeing to areas considered to be safe, the IDP’s formed large camps, congregating around water points and existing villages. This, in turn, put huge stress on the local economies and Darfur, already a strenuous place of survival, was plunged further into poverty and hardship. The international community was slow in responding, but Darfur soon became the ‘hot spot’ for humanitarian work and hundreds of non-government organizations (NGO’s) showed up on the scene to help alleviate suffering and keep people alive.

Franklin Graham’s organization Samaritan’s Purse, arrived on the scene in September 2004 with a small group of expatriates to set up a project in the food distribution sector, partnering with the United Nation’s World Food Program. Operations were based out of Nyala, the capital of South Darfur and a city of close to a million people. Throughout the course of my time, the project grew to include an emergency education project, a water and sanitation project, non-food item distributions (shelter material, cooking utensils, soap, etc.) and women’s protection projects. I was hired in October for the food program and arrived on the project in early November, having signed a year-long contract. For the first seven months I was out in the field six days a week, managing our Sudanese national food distribution team and monitoring our monthly food distributions that serviced over 80,000 people.

At the end of those seven months our Food Program Manager left the project and I, being the only other staff member involved with the Food Program, became the manager by default. My responsibilities suddenly doubled, as far as workload was concerned, but the magnitude of the consequences of my decisions as Food Program Manager climbed to a point that truly terrified me. I realized that my decisions, my work quality and my ability to ‘get the job done’ directly affected the survivability of what became over 100,000 people.

During my tenure I learned to keep extensive journals, recording, real-time, the events that were happening around me. Here is an excerpt, taken from March, 2005, that might help you picture a food distribution:

“Our work has been started and has seen already almost two hours of progress.. Order and organization do not come naturally to the locals and we have had a nightmare of a time trying to impose it. At every distribution we set up a large perimeter and only allow registered people to enter. Most camps know our system well enough and are easier to manage. However these people have provided the greatest challenge so far…For about 45 minutes it was utter chaos. Imagine 5,000 people all shouting and pushing to get in. Madness, sheer madness. These people [due to their tenuous situation] are thickheaded and narrow minded and have few things on their minds other than survival. To survive you must be the strongest, the most cunning, the most cut-throat even. Weakness means death.

Gazing out over the crowd I was struck with the realization that I am the sole white person for many miles. There is a boy staring intently at me. Kind of annoying actually. You'd think I would be used to it but there is a point where you long to be ordinary and to not stand out like, well, a white guy in a sea of black people. I have a great view of the scene. I'm perched on a pile of wheat sacks 10 sacks high. From here I can see everything. I face West and directly in front of me is the waiting area. It is about 75 yards long and 15 yards deep. A rope on the edge keeps people out and they are lined thick along all points. At three points we have tables where my guys are checking people in.

Thirty or so men work quickly in carrying the food out and their behavior reminds me of a stirred up ant's nest. Constant chatter clutters the airwaves…kind of inspiring, this whole scene.”

I could never have imagined, or been prepared for what such an event would have been like. Being exposed to suffering and desperation on a level not easily found in America caused me to rethink a lot of what I had grown up believing and expecting to be true. Even the heat, a constant and persistent aspect of life there, contributed to the mental ‘wrestling’ that took place, as it made me very aware of my circumstances, even when I was away from a distribution, resting in the ‘quiet’ of my room in Nyala.

Over the next two articles, I hope to share with you some of my ‘wrestlings’ and include you in on some of my resulting paradigm shifts, using some of my experiences and the personal lives of some of my Sudanese friends to provide context. I thank the Lord for my encounters and look forward to being able to share some of the things that I learned through them.

Of Syriana...for real this time...

I just realized that I said Of Syriana in the last post, but completely forgot to make mention of what I intended.

Syriana is a film of deep implications and possesses a dark charm that compels the viewer to rethink the way world politics is handled, that is, of course, provided that the viewer currently possesses a way of thinking about world politics and the way they are handled.

At first glance the easy reaction is to do the film the gross injustice of brushing it off as one more attempt by Hollywood to raise its star-studded fist (George Clooney and Matt Damon for starters, Christopher Plumber and Bill Cooper as well) and paint an over-imagined landscape of intrigue with the US Government at the helm of deceit and evil. If you don't like this country, then leave. We all have felt that way at some point or another towards the entertainment elite.

However, when viewed through the perspective that this country is not at all the lone saint and champion of all that is good and sacred, that there are evil men afoot, and that things are not always what they seem, then Syriana rises above the usual political protest clamor and sets itself apart as the spokespiece of 'mostly-truth'.

I say 'mostly-truth' because I am not so naive as to believe that every aspect of the film is true to fact or reality.

So what is it about? Oil/US Government interests clash with oil-rich Middle East Royalty, who is bent on reform of his country, which would be at the detriment of Western willpower. It provides a glimpse into the mind of the violent Muslim (as opposed to the peaceful Muslim, they do exist), and into the workings of behind-closed-doors US foreign policy of the last fifty years, with a focus on king-making and CIA assassination programs.

It is intense at times, of great depth (and sometimes a little difficult to follow) and 100% worth watching and digesting. It isn't a mind vacation.

There you have it. This is what I intended with 'Of Syriana'.

Of Marriage, Syriana and Corn Fields...

We're back from our honeymoon. Which means Sara and I are married. The whole thing is rather difficult to realize. Marriage was so much looked forward to, thought about, talked about, and planned for, and to suddenly be married...it is kind of weird. Good weird. But still weird.

Our wedding took place on a beautiful day. Warm and sunny in the morning, a hard rain in the afternoon, then more sunshine. It worked out nicely for pictures in the morning, which we had done before the ceremony. The rain worked out as well, as it cooled off the afternoon. Then it cleared and dried up, again working in my favor as our get-away vehicle was my motorcycle. I don't mind riding through inclement weather, I have certainly seen my fair share, but riding off in a torrential downpour kind of puts a damper on the carefree nature of the whole thing. It was perfect though, and the slow ride through the pelting shower of birdseed proved a painful and prolonged experience, prolonged as we discovered birdseed in every place imaginable.

Seconds after riding away we both realized the same thing. We forgot the key to our apartment. I had left it on my key ring to my truck, which my Dad was going to use that evening. Talk about stupid. There was no way in this life or the next that I was going to turn around and go back. How anti-climactic...so Sara called her brother John. Twenty minutes later he met us with the key, intensely embarrassed and prepared with the greeting, "This is awkward. I was never here. This didn't happen."

Two weeks later we're back from the honeymoon, presents are opened (thanks, everyone), things are unpacked, apartment is organized, life is getting to normal. I'm in process of finding a job and preparing for school, and we're focusing on settling down into a manageable routine. It is different getting used to living with a woman in the house. It isn't the same as living in the same house as your Mom. I mean, I never got a pillow in the face when I snored before. Actually, I don't snore...Sara does. :-)

Anyway, life is good.

Justin Lonas, a good friend, is the editor of a publication called Pulpit Helps, and he recently requested that I write some articles about Darfur to spice up his, admittedly, rather boring magazewspaper (it's kind of a cross-breed). Justin is doing everything he can to revitalize Pulpit Helps, but is hindered by the age-old irritation of staunch adherence to tradition even when it is clear that the tradition is detrimental to spiritual health. Oh well, such is humanity.

I wrote three articles, and they were published March, April and May. Over the next couple of weeks I'll post them here, but for now I'll sign off and wish you all a happy day.

Regards,

Jonathan