WELCOMING THE ENEMY

by Sarah Corson

It was midnight. Before retiring I walked out on the porch where my fifteen-year-old son was sleeping. I was leading a team of seventeen young people, including two of my own children, on a three-month work assignment in a jungle area 200 miles from the nearest city in a South American country. Four years before, my husband and I, with our four children, had first come to this area at the request of the village people to help them start a church, build a fish hatchery and develop other forms of appropriate technology to meet basic human needs. After the church and appropriate technology center had been established we moved to work in another country. This summer the village had asked us to return to experiment with a vegetable protein project.

When we received the invitation, my husband was already committed to a project in Haiti for the summer. We decided to divide up for three months in order to work in both projects. My husband took our fourteen-year-old Karen with him to Haiti while our fifteen-year-old Tommy and sixteen-year-old Kathy went with me leaving our nineteen-year-old Christ to take care of things at our headquarters in Alabama.

The air on the porch was chilly, so I laid a blanket across Tommy’s cot, then stood a moment looking out across the fishponds that were bringing hope for more food to our village. The light from the moon made a rippling path of white across the water.

 

Suddenly I heard a crash. Turning quickly I could see in the moonlight that a soldier had slid into our water barrel. I was paralyzed with shock as I looked out over the clearing that separated our temporary home from the jungle. About thirty soldiers were rushing our house.

Our host country had just held elections, not the usual custom and the military did not agree with the results. It had taken over one week before, exiling the newly-elected president and repressing any resistance, real or imagined. Since we were in such a remote frontier village, I had not expected the fighting to reach us. While I stood there, frozen in fear, watching the soldiers surround our house, the message our neighbor woman had brought me that day flashed through my mind.

“Sister, keep your team in the house,” she had urged. “I just came from the market over near the military camp. I overheard two soldiers saying the Americans were to blame for the resistance to their takeover. They said they would not rest until they had exterminated every American in this zone.”

Since we had not been involved in political activities in their country, I thought that she had misunderstood. I did not think that we would be suspected of participating in such resistance, but now what the neighbor woman had warned me about was taking place before my eyes. Evidently, the soldiers were intent on carrying out their threat. If they wanted to kill us, there was no way to stop them.

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Reprinted with permission of Sojourners, P.O. Box 29727, Washington DC 20017

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