by Ray Norman
© 2015 by Ray Norman
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Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™
Scripture quotations marked ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from The New King James Version © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-0-7180-7803-4 (IE)
ISBN 978-0-7180-2715-5 (eBook)
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress.
15 16 17 18 19 20 RRD 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my parents, Bill and Lois Norman, who humbly taught me that seeking to follow God, and loving all people while doing so, results in the deepest satisfaction and greatest joys in life; and for my wife, Hélène, who has spent most of her life helping and showing me how to do just that.
CONTENTS
1: DESERT SOJOURNERS
2: TOWERS FALL IN THE SAHARA
3: A TENUOUS CALM
4: PETALS OF BLOOD
5: SOUL TRAUMA
6: WHAT NOW?
7: FINDING HEALING IN A HARSH LAND
8: THE QUESTIONS
9: THE IMAM’S REMARKABLE COUNSEL
10: PRISON VISIT
11: THE LAST LETTER
POSTSCRIPT: THE STORY CONTINUES TO UNFOLD
AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“There is no circumstance, no trouble, no testing, that can ever touch me until, first of all, it has gone past God and past Christ, right through to me. If it has come that far, it has come with great purpose.”
—ALAN REDPATH
I knew my chances of survival were almost nil the moment I saw the gun—and the expressionless look in the eyes of the turbaned Arab who had stepped out of the sand dunes next to our stationary, four-wheel-drive vehicle. My panicked thoughts and exploding emotions quickly converged on the survival of my ten-year-old daughter, Hannah, cowering in the seat next to me. When the man turned his aim from my head toward her, something rose up within me that was more than just instinctive protest. “No! No! Not my daughter!”
When my wife and I first came to the isolated Islamic republic of Mauritania to work among the poor, we asked God to mold us and use our lives in whatever way he saw fit for the sake of those we knew he had called us to serve and love. Over the years multiple circumstances had caused me to carefully reassess the risks and be reconciled with the fact that this work I loved so much could well cost me my life. But surely that commitment did not include the life of our daughter!
The same instant I saw the man aim at Hannah, I threw myself against the window to block the shot and heard the dull, thundering report of the gun as it shattered our world. Glass went flying everywhere. I felt the numbing pain of the bullet as it ripped through my arm, and I heard Hannah’s scream as she reacted to the chaos and horror of the moment. Before the gunman could take aim again, I slammed the idling car into gear and spun off just as he fired his remaining shots through the rear window into the back of my seat.
Once out of range of the gunman and thinking we were out of immediate danger, I turned to Hannah to comfort her and to see if she had been wounded by the flying glass shards. But my mounting hope of survival quickly crumbled when I looked her way. Choking back the dark fear that was welling up within me, I reached across her bloodied seat to see why she was clutching the front of her dress. As I pulled my little girl’s trembling hands away, I saw in the center of her heaving chest a deep, hollow, and jagged bullet hole—and flowing from it a steady, meandering stream of bright, crimson blood. It was then that my already shattered world fell completely apart.
Alone and surrounded by only the blowing dunes of the western Sahara Desert—and hundreds of miles from any reliable emergency medical facilities—my mind and heart groped frantically for a remaining thread of hope. Everything in me pleaded for a small measure of reassurance, or even a divine injunction to the surreal events of the last five minutes from the One to whom I had committed my life and soul. In a dry, rasping whisper of desperation, I forced words of protest up from the depths of my heart and out into the hot, dusty, desert air: “No, no, dear Lord! This is not the way it was supposed to be! Not my daughter! Take my life, but give me my daughter!”
1
DESERT SOJOURNERS
I will praise you, Lord, among the nations;
I will sing of you among the peoples.
For great is your love.
(PSALM 57:9–10)
IT WAS ONE OF THOSE FIERCEL HOT DAY SONL THE WESTERN Sahara can dish out in May and June. The temperature was a stifling 110 degrees Fahrenheit by late morning, and the Saharan dust hung thickly in the air, limiting visibility through the Land Cruiser’s windshield to less than two hundred yards. I was heading back to the office after visiting members of a microenterprise cooperative in a desperately poor settlement on the outskirts of Nouakchott, Mauritania. As I drove I had to negotiate the potholed remnants of one of the few paved thoroughfares in the town while dodging the odd donkey cart, a few heavily laden camels, and (far worse) several of the town’s hundreds of dilapidated, honking taxis—manned by turban-clad drivers whose opportunities for practice driving must have paled in comparison to their more commonly acquired skills in camel riding. The occasional gust of wind caused the sand and litter in the streets to swirl, much like snow during a winter storm, but it brought no relief and felt more like the blast from a furnace than a natural breeze. On days such as this, the fine, red dust would penetrate and settle on every conceivable surface, through the best-sealed doors and windows and onto everything from the teacups in the kitchen cabinet to the toothbrush on the bathroom shelf. If I left the windows down in the Land Cruiser during the short drive to the office, I would arrive with a thin layer of dust coating my eyelids, and my hair would have a reddish-brown tint matching the desert landscape on the outskirts of town.
Nouakchott, the capitol of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, was sprawled across the salt flats and undulating dunes that marked the thin, transitional line between the Sahara Desert to the east and the Atlantic to the west. In this teeming town of one million (nearly 40 percent of the country’s population), half of the inhabitants were first-generation migrants who in recent years had reluctantly abandoned their failing pastoral livelihoods to the desert’s southward encroachment and moved to the city in search of food and work. They occupied the expansive and ever-growing shantytowns that surrounded this old French-colonial outpost.
Mauritania, land of the Moors, is a little-known desert country in the Maghreb region of western North Africa,
situated between Morocco to the north and Senegal and Mali to the south. On its western edge are two thousand kilometers of empty coastline where the great dunes of the Sahara Desert drop into the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. The northern two-thirds of this arid land consist of endless dunes and rocky plateaus peppered with isolated oasis settlements, while the southern fringe falls into the marginally cultivable Sahel zone that borders the southern Sahara across Africa. The country is peopled by various ethnic groups steeped in their rich traditions and cultures: the dominant Arab-Berber Moors—a light-skinned and historically pastoralist people who speak a dialect of Arabic (Hassaniya)—and a number of minority black-African ethnic groups, mostly farmers who occupy largely the southern fringe.
In the Middle Ages, the area of modern-day Mauritania was part of the cradle of the Almoravid movement, which conquered and spread Islam throughout North Africa and into the southern half of Spain. As French-colonial interests spread across North and West Africa in the late 1800s, Mauritania eventually became a French protectorate, then gained its independence in 1960. In the years following its independence, the country experienced a series of conflicts with both Morocco and Senegal, several devastating droughts, and a succession of coups d’état that resulted in the establishment of military governments and somewhat authoritarian leadership. For most of its existence, Mauritania has largely depended on its drought-prone agriculture as well as coastal fishing and iron ore mining in remote desert outposts. In recent years it has been caught between seemingly competitive desires to preserve its traditions and deep Islamic heritage while engaging effectively with a rapidly modernizing and secular world—largely for the sake of improving the lives of its historically marginalized population.
Mauritania is a harsh land with rampant poverty. I thrived in this place, but for many development and humanitarian specialists working in Africa, this was one of those posts at the end of the line, a hardship post well known for its isolation and the plethora of challenges that came with it.
As I headed back to the office that day in 2001, my heart was filled with gratitude, and I seized the opportunity of a few solitary moments to reflect. In the midst of the heat and chaos of our daily lives, I was happy, deeply happy. With perhaps the exception of my childhood days spent romping through the rainforest behind my parents’ missionary bungalow or cooling off in the river that ran in front of it, I could not recall another season in my life when I was so fulfilled. Hélène, my wife of French origin and a petite, unpretentious woman, was a loving and caring mother who had sacrificially accompanied me through six countries and across four continents as we sought to fulfill the calling on our lives. I had two happy, wonderful, and rambunctious children whose life experiences thus far had taught them that when it comes to laughter, fun, and intimate relationships, no boundaries need be set by color, race, culture, or even religious faith. I was right where my heart had called me to be: caring for my small family, serving among the world’s poorest, loving my Muslim colleagues and neighbors, and trying to play a small part in making this hurting world a better place. Winding through the chaos of Nouakchott’s streets that day, my feelings could best be articulated by Frederick Buechner’s powerful words on vocation in his book Wishful Thinking: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” As I drove on, my thoughts wandered back over the journey that had brought us to this remote corner of the globe.
American blood flows in my veins, but I was raised under the African sun, a sun that burned indelibly into my heart its sorrow and laughter, its fears and hopes, and its passions and beauty. One of three children of loving parents who worked as career missionaries, I was reared in the bush country of Nigeria and Ghana, where I reveled in the adventures and new horizons of each day and where much of my free time was spent roaming the tropical forest or the open hills that surrounded the mission stations.
When the sun was shining, as it often was, I was constantly outdoors—playing soccer with the village boys or joining them on a hunting trip in the nearby bush country or, best of all, joining them in my own dugout canoe for a fishing trip on the river that ran in front of our home in southeastern Nigeria. At an early age I was seized with the discomforting notion that life seemed a bit short if one were to adequately pursue all the adventures that it held—whether it was exploring the valley beyond the hills on the horizon or finding time to sit under a shade tree and listen to stories from a village elder about life in Africa “before the white men came.” I packed my days full, trying to squeeze as many adventures as I could out of each moment.
During the long rainy season when tropical downpours could last for days at a stretch, I made sure that time was not wasted. The nearby river would flood its banks, transforming our yard into a veritable liquid playground. Usually my younger brother, Russell, my older sister, Jo Ellen, and I were out frolicking in our rain boots or paddling the washbasin around the deeper parts of the flooded yard like a cumbersome canoe. Such outings were followed by the ritual of pulling our boots and wet clothing off while checking each other meticulously for the many leeches that invariably attached themselves to us during our rambunctious play time.
If we weren’t playing outside, we would spend endless hours entertaining ourselves indoors in inventive ways: building forts and castles with furniture and sheets, dressing up in our parents’ clothes, devising complex games of hide-and-seek, or just sitting on the porch watching the huge tropical trees of the rainforest bend and wave under the wind and rain while we munched freshly roasted peanuts and told stories to one another.
Since much of my youth was spent in rural areas without television, comic books, or peer-induced perceptions of heroes, my admiration was often focused in those formative years on my missionary-doctor father. After homeschool or on Saturdays, I would often join him in his small clinic and watch him patiently and lovingly tend to the needs of multitudes of sick and hurting people, many of whom had never been to a doctor, much less had a personal encounter with a white man. He was often called in the middle of the night to help a village woman with a breech-position birth or to try to save the life of a fevered child with advanced malaria.
The eyes and heart of a child are perhaps the most discerning when it comes to matters of true affection, and I well remember at that young age being deeply aware of the genuineness of Dad’s love for the people he felt called to serve. But it was only years later that I really began to understand the source of that love.
One of the more formative memories I have of my father is of the morning after he had been brutally attacked in the night by thugs seeking to rob the coffers of the small bush hospital in northern Ghana. He had been beaten, stripped of his clothing, and left tied to a barbed wire fence a few miles out from the village. Early the next morning, with blood still seeping through the bandages on his arms, back, and head, he came to my room and gently explained what had happened. It was already a chaotic morning, but sensing that I needed some time with him, he asked me to join him on an errand in the village. As we drove he explained that one of the bandits had been caught, and Dad had been asked to come to the jail to identify him.
As we approached the small jailhouse, we were shocked to see it surrounded by a large, angry mob—some brandishing sticks and machetes—calling for immediate justice against the man who had attacked their doctor and put the hospital at risk. They quickly quieted as Dad and I worked our way through the crowd to the jail. Dad asked the policemen if we could have a few minutes alone with the assailant, and the moments that followed are forever etched in my memory.
In that small jail cell we found a trembling, frightened, and already badly beaten man. As the crowd jeered outside, he begged Dad for help. Dad sat with him, attempted to learn something about him with a few questions, and gently tried to calm his fears. The man claimed to have a Christian background, so Dad read to him a few assuring passages of hope from a small New Testament, and he prayed with the prisoner and gave hi
m the copy of the Scriptures from which he had read. As we left he urged the policemen to do all in their power to protect the prisoner and beseeched the crowd to let things be and return to their homes.
Dad always demonstrated to his children that justice does not have to preclude mercy and compassion. But on that day I saw this principle extended well beyond familiar boundaries. It slowly dawned on me that I did not have sole, privileged access to Dad’s mercy. In spite of the gravity of the sin, and the personal harm inflicted on my father, Dad demonstrated (to the prisoner—and to me and those around us) that the man who had attacked him was still a person of value both to Dad and to God, and worthy of receiving some measure of mercy and hope in spite of his self-inflicted circumstances.
During those years at the missionary stations, we lived primarily on local food, and we ate well. Our diet most commonly consisted of fresh fish caught in the nearby river, prepared in a delicious traditional stew of red palm oil and okra, and served up with local yams. One morning, however, when I was still quite young, my mother surprised us with a jar of purple grape jelly she had hidden away since our last trip to the United States. She had baked fresh bread, and as we sat down to breakfast, she warned me not to let my eyes get bigger than my stomach and end up wasting our precious jar of American jelly. I was halfway through my third piece of jellied toast when I realized I should have heeded her wise words. I couldn’t finish that last piece.
Later that day when I was playing alone outside, I heard an unfamiliar noise near an old barrel in which we placed garbage for composting. I slipped behind a nearby tree, and as I peered around I recognized the young woman whose back was turned to me—a physically and mentally disabled woman I had often seen begging in the nearby village. Dressed in rags and holding an infant in one arm, she quietly rummaged through the garbage until her eyes obviously fixed on something. She reached far down into the barrel and gingerly withdrew her prize—my half-eaten piece of toast with that wonderful, purple jelly spread across its surface. I remember watching in stunned silence as she carefully removed specks of trash stuck to the jellied toast and ever so tenderly began to break off small bits and feed them to her child.