May 15, 2004

Letter 22

In early May, we hosted Lora’s mother and father, as well as her aunt and uncle. They were only here for a few days, but they packed a lot of adventure into that time, sometimes more than they wanted. Just renting a minivan and cramming all eight of us into it was a bit of an adventure. We considered it a quick introduction to village life, where there is no privacy. Grandpa Bud and Uncle Gil shared the task of driving us around the island on the rough old road, U.S. Highway Number One, built by the army in World War II and not resurfaced since. The four guests stayed in our house (which could be considered an adventure at the best of times!) and we moved across campus temporarily to an unused staff house.

The girls hiked the visitors all the way to Sara Top, a little waterfall with a pool where we like to swim, and brought them safely back again. Our local friends were impressed that people in their seventies could walk that far!

Where the water was too shallow to row, he climbed out and pushed us along until we reached our goal, the wreck of a fighter plane that had run out of fuel just shy of the runway. Back at the museum, we read the story of the pilot’s visit to the museum, a couple of years before he died in 1994. There was a picture of him, sitting in the old cockpit, on the wall behind the rusty bullets and the faded Coke bottles.

The following day we visited Takara Village and walked along their beach, collecting shells. We were followed by the inevitable cluster of children that tags along with visitors. Grandma Pat and Aunt Irene were surrounded by kids who marveled at their pink skin and pure white hair. At Takara, such a look is quite exotic!

The guests were then off to Tanna to visit a volcano, where you can peer down into the crater, and a traditional village where the people still wear nothing but “grass” skirts.

We all worked for about half a day showing the guests how to make a traditional feast. By the end, we were tired and we smelled like wood smoke, but we ate some very good food.

Last weekend we took part in an HIV/AIDS awareness march. Maki Okada, the health/PE teacher from Japan, initiated and organized it. She hoped to recruit a few students and several staff members to walk from Onesua School around our island to gain publicity for HIV/AIDS prevention. Vanuatu, at this time, has only one officially confirmed HIV positive case, but the potential is here for a complete catastrophe. The generally relaxed, South Pacific attitude toward sex, the lack of a tradition of self-determination for women, and the low level of health care in general could result in an epidemic like that in sub-Saharan Africa.

Maki’s idea was infectious! For the whole month of April there were community members training every morning and evening. Typically, Lora and the girls are the only people out along the coast road at sunrise, but they were joined by grizzled old men (like me!), overweight women, skinny little students, and even mamas and papas from neighboring villages.

Friday evening saw a community dinner, lights out at 7:00 p.m., and wake-up bells ringing at midnight. We stumbled into the Jubilee Hall, all 240 of us, got our tee-shirts, prayed, cheered, and started . About sixty marchers, mostly the older boys and the young men, headed off around the west coast, a distance of about 70 kilometers to Vila. Maki went with them. The rest of us went east, about 60k.

It was a remarkable journey. The first few hours were by moonlight, taking advantage of the coolness of night. The students sang hymns. Gradually the line strung out as informal groups found their own pace. Frogs chanted from swampy places along the road, and we saw an occasional meteor flash overhead. Villagers, warned in advance of our approach, were out along the route to shake our hands and offer us freshly squeezed lemonade by the light of kerosene lamps. That’s a lot of kindness at two or three in the morning! Buses shuttled back and forth along the line of marchers, carrying packs and offering aid.

The sun rose into a clear sky, and we kept walking. By now it was becoming hot and sweaty work. Most walkers took advantage of a quick bus ride now and then to rest, to avoid a hill, or to catch up to the main body of marchers. Kinsey kept up with the lead group and finished the entire route without a ride. Lora and Emily caught a ride after walking a marathon, and I was picked up after I lagged too far behind. Each of the four of us walked farther than we have ever walked before. The entire group reassembled at a village outside the capital city, and marched the last 10k into Vila. We sang songs, carried signs showing the words AIDS in the shape of a toothy shark, and chanted the slogan “No letem AIDS i swim long Vanuatu!” The march finished with a picnic at the Presbyterian church, where we met the marchers from the other side of the island. We saw a play about Captain Condom and sexually transmitted diseases (I like to imagine some actor’s resume reading, “I played gonorrhea in 2004!”), listened to various speeches, and heard an elementary school choir led by their teacher, a former student of mine. We closed with prayer.

There is a lot of time to reflect while walking that far. I was very grateful for the excellent health care, including five knee surgeries and a heart valve replacement, which made this walk possible for me. I thought of those who do not share that blessing.

I was grateful for the buses, which offered me escape from this physical challenge any time I chose. I thought of those who have no escape from their struggles.

I thought about AIDS as a metaphor for our time: perfect faithfulness casts out fear, even the fear of death.

I thought about our obsession with athletics and how we reward our sports heroes with money and fame. The real heroes are not performing in front of cheering crowds. They are in hospital beds and physical therapy clinics, overcoming obstacles and setting records and breaking barriers every day, in the silence of their own pain.

I wish each of you excellent health, by your own choice. Exercise. Set personal records. Shake hands with strangers. Support the real heroes, the ones next door. You will have a remarkable journey into dawn. Don’t forget to begin and end with prayer.

We’ve been thinking about the war in Iraq. The use of modern media has brought it to all of us, even here in the South Pacific. I’m sure that you have seen our footage of “smart bombs” precisely destroying “targets.” We tend to prefer these film clips, since they are so much more sanitary, so much more polite, than the opposition’s video of a hostage execution with a knife. I’m not sure that the dead people in either scene would appreciate the distinction. If we accept killing as a rational exercise of our government’s power, as a reasonable path toward achieving our policy goals, then why the fuss? War kills. So-called “rules of engagement” are only followed when they are convenient, when they give “our” side an edge. For example, when we were desperate enough in the past, we have bombed civilian targets, and we still refuse to promise not to use nuclear weapons as a first-strike option. We want our opponents to feel that fear, that insecurity; we use terror as a tactical weapon. All warriors do.

World War I was not “The War to End All Wars,” even though that was its slogan, its justification. The greed of the allies as they divided up the spoils laid the groundwork for World War II, an even greater catastrophe. I pray that we can set aside our “national interest” at this time of attempting to profit from Iraq. Our greed for oil, if it’s allowed to shape the reconstruction of Iraq, will only prepare for greater disasters in the future.

This is a time to remember Lincoln’s words, “with malice toward none, with charity for all, let us seek to bind up the nation’s wounds.” I think of the “nation,” in this case, as all of humanity. We have won. We can confuse reconstruction with our own goals and drag this process out over a century of carpet-bagging and hooded executions in revenge, or we can walk with those in pain toward a dawn that can only be imagined from here. We will need to walk a lot of extra miles to show our neighbors that we love them. The goal is not American dominance, with crippling military expenditures forever. The goal is a last Veterans Day, fifty years from now, when only a few old men and women limp down the street in a final parade. Maybe they will visit some small museum somewhere, and sit in a corroded cockpit one last time. Maybe they will meet the marchers from the other side and share a tired meal.

Love and peace,

Bruce

The 2004 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 101