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.