7

“Take My Baby!”

Two decades later, Ruth and I found ourselves confronting overwhelming need in Somalia. We distributed international aid and explored new areas in need of relief as others joined our small team. One of the core members of our growing team was a young man named J.B. He and I agreed to go on a scouting expedition into south-central Somalia. This was an area that had not seen outside visitors for many years.

One town we approached looked like an abandoned ghost-town: lifeless houses, darkened windows, dust blowing across empty streets. As soon as we appeared, however, a swarm of humanity poured out of homes and storefronts. Hundreds of emaciated villagers filled the street.

At the sound of alarmed and raised voices, I looked over my shoulder. To my horror, I saw my own hired security men cursing in Somali and swinging their rifle butts to ward off those in the surging mob who were trotting alongside and trying to reach over the sides of the truck to take our food supplies.

My initial instinct was to protest my men’s violent reaction toward the very people who we had come to help. But my frustration with our guards almost instantly turned to utter dismay as I realized that many of the people surrounding us were not determined to take our supplies. They were, instead, attempting to give us the most precious things that they had.

I knew enough Somali to understand the mother frantically running beside us, crying and begging, “Take my baby! All of my other children have died. Please save this one!” She tried to thrust her infant through my open passenger window. As I sat in shock, my driver reached across and hurriedly cranked up my window to prevent any other mothers from dropping starving babies onto my lap.

Our driver accelerated through the crowd. Somehow, we avoided running over any townspeople. Only when we were several miles out of town did we stop and debrief what had happened. On the one hand, it was clear that we might have been killed for the food and fuel that we had. On the other hand, I was overwhelmed with the desperation of those mothers. I wondered what I would have done if it was my family that was starving. Would I consider giving away my son if that was the only possible way that he would live? The question haunted me.

Our team was better prepared when we entered the next village. From then on, we entered inhabited towns only after sundown. Under the cover of darkness, we would find an abandoned building where we could set up camp out of sight. Early the next morning, we would leave the drivers and some of the guards with our hidden vehicles and a few of us would hike to the middle of town, to a busy gathering place. There, without our food or vehicles serving as a distraction or temptation, we could carry on conversations with people regarding the area’s recent history and inquire about its most serious needs. Once we gathered the information we needed, we could usually hike back to the vehicles without attracting more than a small following of young children who would watch us speed out of town before the rest of the community ever saw our vehicles and supplies.

As we traveled further, we encountered only more heartache. Some villages were completely empty. Evidently, entire populations had simply abandoned their homes and fled for their lives. J.B. and I found another village by following a trail of decomposed bodies, many just skeletons, lying alongside the road. I think we gained a measure of appreciation and loyalty from our Muslim staff for stopping and showing respect for the dead by digging shallow graves and providing a very simple, but religiously essential, proper burial for each of the first few scattered bodies we encountered. But the closer to the village we got, the more bodies there were. We simply didn’t have the time or the energy to bury them all.

I vividly remember J.B. kneeling in the sandy soil, scraping out a small depression with a bayonet, wrapping what was left of a bony body in rags, gently laying the shell of a starved Somali in that “hole,” piling sand and rocks on top, and then removing his cap to say a prayer over the man’s body. This is a scene that I still can see today: our Muslim guards watching a white man from America respectfully burying and praying over their dead. It is a powerful image. No doubt, it was also a transcending witness.

When we found our way to an eerily silent and empty cluster of huts, we began to understand what had happened there. The bodies that we had been finding and burying along the road evidently belonged to the men of this village on the verge of starvation—husbands, fathers, and brothers—who felt that they were still strong enough, or maybe just desperate enough, to set out in search of help for their dying families and neighbors. Most of them hadn’t made it very far.

The loved ones that they had left behind fared no better and probably didn’t live much longer. The lush green around the village gave it the deceiving feel of a tropical paradise. Birds were singing and flowers bloomed. The silent, grass-roofed huts of typical African stick-and-wattle construction told a different story however. The rough structures showed the wear of several seasons past—clear evidence of their abandonment many months, if not years, earlier.

The scenes inside of the huts were even more haunting. What used to be family homes were now unsealed tombs.

In one hut, we discovered the bodies of two girls about the age of my sons. One of the children lay in a bed, her hand holding a brush still entangled in her hair. It was as if she had died wanting to look her best. Her little sister sat slumped on the dirt floor beside the withered remains of an old granny who was still holding an old spoon that she had been using to stir what looked like green grass in a soup pot.

That sad setting looked almost posed—as if part of some surrealistic tableau of death—with the subjects engaged in the most basic daily chores right where they had lived their lives and where they evidently had waited together for death.

Taking in the scene, there seemed to be nothing to say. Walking back toward our vehicles, one of the Somali staffers sighed deeply and soberly offered a poignant observation. “You know, Dr. Nik,” he said, “they used to call Somalia a third world country. But now we are a pre-world country.” The emotional anguish that I heard in his voice was heart-wrenching.

Our expedition continued from village to village—many completely abandoned or inhabited only by the dead. Most of the people we found alive were just barely alive. It was clear from the emptiness in their eyes that they had lost all hope.

One village was full of grieving parents whose children had all gotten sick and died. We had nothing to offer them to ease their sadness and pain. Then a few days later, we found another village where the adults had all died of starvation after giving the very last of their food to keep their children alive. We transported the orphans from the second village back to the first village and prayed that there might be some solace in the instantly reconstituted families recreated there.

Two weeks into our trip, we were still hoping to reach more villages. However, the locals warned us that the roads ahead had been lined with land mines to limit the movement of opposing clans. The only safe way to go any further south or west, we were told, would be to stay off the roads and drive up the riverbeds. Since this was the “rainy” season, that too was a dangerous proposition.

At that point, we gave up our hope of completing a more extensive survey of southern Somalia. We left most of our supplies at a leper colony and departed for the coastal city of Kismayo. We knew of a sister relief agency there that could help us make our way back to Mogadishu. From there, we returned to Nairobi where we shared our heart-rending findings with representatives of the international disaster and relief community.

When I traced out our route on a map to show where we had traveled, which villages had been abandoned, where we had found people alive, and where the desperate survivors were closest to starvation, the international coalition seemed grateful for the information. They told us that our exploration party represented the first outsiders who had been in that part of Somalia since the civil war had begun in 1988—four years earlier.

What was most discouraging about that meeting was the immediate conclusion that, because of the dangerous conditions and the distance from Mogadishu, there was no way to establish distribution sites for any international response in the area that we had surveyed. Those at the meeting did, however, agree to provide some resources through air-drops where planes would fly low and slow over inhabited areas and literally drop bags of food and basic medical supplies into empty fields near the most desperate communities.

I was frustrated that we couldn’t do more, but I was encouraged knowing that our efforts would at least do some good. And that encouragement lasted . . . until I heard about one of the first air-drop missions.

Evidently, well-intentioned relief workers made the mistake of informing the people in one village of the day and time of the drop. Having seen how the people swarmed to surround our trucks, I could imagine the scene on the ground as the roar of the plane’s engines approached. What I could not imagine was the tragedy that occurred next. The townspeople poured onto the field and, in their excitement, attempted to catch the huge bags of wheat, rice and corn that came tumbling out of the back of the plane passing a hundred feet overhead. Scores were injured and some were killed trying to catch the relief supplies being air-dropped to save their lives.

With despair, I once again cried out: How can anybody even help to make things better in a place like Somalia? One single failure of forethought can turn a good attempt into a tragedy! What are we doing here?

Sometimes the problem is not the simple naïveté of well-meaning people. Sometimes the problem is the evil that would twist the best intentions into indescribable tragedy.

One morning our team delivered a truckload of food and basic health-care supplies to a small, shabby, war-ravaged village. We saw the anticipation on the faces of the starving children as we measured out each family’s allotment of food and presented it to the mothers. We saw hope resurrected in grateful eyes of parents who finally had reason to believe that they just might be able to save their children. We returned home pleased with what we had done, knowing that we made a difference.

Sometime later, we learned the rest of the story. Several days after we had been there, a neighboring clan attacked and overran the poor village that we had fed. After cursing and vilifying the poor villagers for having the audacity to accept our relief aid before those who “deserved it more” had received their share, the invaders stole what was left. Before leaving, the attackers abused the women and girls of the village and then tortured the helpless and humiliated men.

I felt physically sick when I heard what had happened. But I felt far worse when I learned that the villagers who we had tried to help were warning people in other nearby villages: “You better not take any food from those people. They will get you killed!”

My anger raged at an evil that could twist our best intentions into a wicked weapon and then blame us for the resulting pain. I realized that it is a dangerous enemy who can inflict deep wounds to the hearts and bodies of both those giving and receiving aid in a place like Somalia.

I dealt with shock every time I entered or left Somalia. It was like traveling to another planet, except that the trip took only a few hours.

Going into Somalia was like stepping into the world of the Old Testament.

In Somalia, I would wake up in an insane and hostile place, a hell in the grip of evil, a world without enough food to make it habitable, a world where children could not go to school and where few of them lived until puberty, a world where parents did not expect to watch their children to grow to adulthood.

And, then, perhaps that very evening in Nairobi, I would go to bed in a different, saner world (a world that seemed more like heaven) where my wife and three sons celebrated my return at a family meal with some special dessert. This different, sane world was a place where my boys attended school, where I would referee their basketball games, where we had doctors and hospitals, where we had lights and electricity and running water and grocery stores and gas stations and so much more. I simply could not reconcile the fact that I was living in two different worlds that were located not only on the same planet, but on the same continent, in neighboring countries.

I am not certain that it was a healthy way to handle the disconnect, but I eventually learned how to flip a mental switch the moment my plane lifted off in Somalia. “I’m headed home to Ruth and the boys!” I would tell myself. Then I would slowly let down my defenses and relax. In the same way, I would flip the mental switch whenever I took off in the other direction. “I’m returning to that other world again!” I would tell myself. My senses would instinctively go into hyper-alert status in order to focus once more on the challenges of working, living, and staying alive in Somalia.

That transition wasn’t always quite so instantaneous. The reconciliation of my two worlds was not quite complete. I came to realize this whenever I found myself having two almost opposite emotional responses to the most common kinds of family interactions. For example, if I overheard my boys arguing, I would feel indignation begin to swell inside, and I would want to lecture them about how grateful they should be to live in Kenya instead of Somalia where most of the children their age had died or were on the verge of death.

At other times, and sometimes just seconds later, I would look at my sons and I would suddenly feel so blessed and overwhelmed by emotion that I would begin to weep. I would want to snatch them up in a bear hug and smother them with kisses.

By this time I had made dozens of trips into and out of Somalia—staying in-country from a few days to several weeks at a time. We tried not to worry the boys with details about what we were doing, but they were certainly aware of the situation in Somalia.

After my survey trip to southern Somalia, however, having been reminded of how dangerous our work was, I felt the need to hold a serious family conference to share something close to my heart. Ruth and I gathered the boys: Shane was thirteen, Timothy was eleven, and Andrew was six.

I looked at my sons and I said,

“Boys, when we lived back in America, even before you were born, your mama and I had to answer a very important question: Were we willing to live our lives for Jesus? You know that your mama made that decision as a little girl. And you’ve heard me tell the story of how I was eighteen before I decided that I would follow Jesus and live my life for him. Then before your mama and I got married, we made certain that we agreed and we decided that we were willing to live for Jesus together—as a couple and as a family.”

“Later, when we were thinking about being overseas workers, we had to answer another important question: Were we willing to GO with Jesus and live our lives for Him in another part of the world? We came to live in Africa after we said another ‘yes’ to that question.”

“Now, we’ve come to live in Kenya so we can take food and medicine to help feed and save the lives of many thousands of people—children, parents, entire families—who live in Somalia. The reason we do this is to show God’s love to the Somali people who have never had a chance to know about Jesus and His love for them. But because these Somalis live in a country that is such a hard, dangerous, and bad place right now, your mama and I have to answer another very difficult question. We have always said that we were willing to live for Jesus. Then we decided that we would go with Jesus. We’ve said yes to both of those questions.”

“But now, we have to ask ourselves, Are we willing to DIE for Jesus?”

We didn’t want to frighten our sons. We made certain that they knew that we did not expect to die. They knew that we certainly didn’t want to die. We assured them that we would take every precaution that we could to protect ourselves. But after experiencing the conditions in Somalia, and understanding the stakes, we wanted them to understand the seriousness of the situation. We wanted them to know just how important Ruth and I believed it was to do what we felt Jesus had called our family to do. We were not really wanting our young sons to be willing for their dad to die; rather, we wanted them to let Jesus reign. We wanted them to trust Jesus with every detail of our lives.

As determined as we were to be obedient, it’s a good thing that we didn’t know then what that commitment would mean in the months and years ahead. If I had known what was coming, I am not at all sure that I would have had enough faith at that point to make the choice to stay the course.