Last year at this time, we wrote to you about the courage of the people of Alor, who were rebuilding their lives after a major earthquake destroyed thousands of homes on the island just to the north of us. Although they will be restoring their homes and churches for many years to come, by now life in Alor has pretty much returned to normal. They are tough people, self-reliant and able to absorb tragedy and get on with life.
This year, our ability to face tragedy is being tested again, this time by the sinking of a ferry as it crossed the straits between Timor and the neighboring island of Rote. The weather had been very unpredictable, and midway through the crossing a gale blew up, the ferry’s engines failed, and people began donning life jackets and jumping into the night sea. The rapid current in the strait scattered them in the direction of Australia. Over the next two days rescue teams managed to pull out 116 survivors. About an equal number are either missing or confirmed drowned. As I write, funerals are being held all over town for those who have a body to bury.
Juwita, a woman who works for the church’s microcredit agency, was the last to be found alive; she had been in the water for nearly three days, and her legs were lacerated from shark bites. She chased seagulls away that had been pecking at her head by calling out as an exorcist would, “In the name of Jesus Christ, BE GONE!” She says it worked.
I spoke with two of the doctors who had been treating survivors, and we agreed that a person’s faith has an important but unpredictable role in survival. Some, like the die-hard Juwita, trusted that eventually God would point the rescuers in her direction; others equally faithful surrendered themselves into God’s hands and drowned within the first hour, secure in the belief that “if we die, we die unto the Lord.”.
The church responded in many ways, from waiting with families at the harbor, the hospital and the morgue, to putting pressure on the insurance and ferry companies to give compensation for all who were aboard, not just the minority whose names were on the ship’s manifest. (Ferries are routinely overloaded; less than half the passengers had official tickets—the others just pay on board.) I quickly printed out the material I had developed for Alor last year and did an instant seminar on trauma counseling for pastors in town. We will be asking pastors to take both a pastoral and a “social work” role in the coming weeks and months as people begin to put their lives back together. The Synod’s diaconal office is gathering funds to assist in this process, especially to provide transitional support for the many families who lost their principal wage-earner.
Ten years ago this kind of response would not have been possible. The Synod had barely enough money to pay salaries and no experience in dealing with disasters. Typically they would just wait for someone from CARE or Church World Service to show up and gratefully accept whatever was offered. But since the East Timor refugee crisis of 1999-2001, a drought in 2002-2003, and the Alor earthquake in 2004, we have had plenty of experience with disaster. In addition, the people are just a little more prosperous (although why this should be so is a mystery, given the miserable state of the local economy), and the church is just a little bit better managed. As my colleague who runs the diaconal office said today, “Finally we aren’t just scrambling to respond to the unexpected. Maybe because we’ve figured out that in Timor, disasters are to be expected.”
Perhaps an even more important change in expectations is a change in what the church expects of itself. When we first arrived in 1983, the whole purpose of the church could be summed up very quickly: baptize the babies, bless the marriages, bury the dead, distribute the bread and the wine, and preach the Gospel for an hour every Sunday. Today, people still want worship, but they want contextual liturgies that incorporate local culture, sermons that give some guidance in how to deal with a changing world, and—Haleluyah!—they expect the church to speak out about issues of justice and to be there when people are hurt and in need. How well we do these things is still open to question. But at least we have better standards than we used to.
Fortunately we have no disasters to report in our family. Karen is still in Aceh working with the National Commission for the Prevention of Violence Against Women, monitoring the conditions of women among the 65,000 tsunami survivors still in refugee camps. Katie is in Massachusetts, painting houses for a living and looking into graduate school in soil science, and Sam is in his second semester studying biology at Earlham College. We still have a houseful of Timorese kids going to school in the area, although we are about to lose one. He has graduated and will be getting married, literally to the girl next door, before he begins his internship to become a pastor. Aunt Julie has recovered well from her tuberculosis and will be returning to her home in the mountains next week. The dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, and cows are all doing fine; we’ll harvest our peanuts by the time you read this and plant the rice field. If there were a Lake Woebegon in Indonesia, we would be just up the road from it.
We wish you all a thoughtful Lent and a joyful Easter.
Peace,
John Campbell-Nelson
John Campbell-Nelson is a missionary serving with the Evangelical Christian Church of Timor. John serves as a professor.
