Dangerous Territory

by Amy Peterson

  I suppose when Heaven’s Heroes faced setbacks or heartbreaks, they just redoubled their prayers. They snuck past enemy lines. They did the next thing. I tried to pray, and I wanted to sneak past enemy lines, but I couldn’t even get back into the country. I had no idea what the next thing would be.

  So this was my next thing: I went to a gas station in Anna’s neighborhood where no one knew me, and bought a six-pack of hard lemonades and a pack of cigarettes. I took them onto her porch while she studied inside, wanting to do something that was authentic to how I felt. I didn’t know how to show God that I was really not okay with being barred from the country except by a small rebellion, so I slowly sipped a single drink and smoked two cigarettes that I had never learned how to properly inhale. With dry eyes and a stilled heart, I wrote in my journal.

  This is the information that was gathered later, bit by bit. It hadn’t been the university’s decision, and it wasn’t the local police, either. The order had come from the police in the capital, who told university officials they could not invite me back. Could this mean the police would be watching all the teachers from our organization now?

  But local authorities had been keeping an eye on Lisa and me even before the girls were arrested. I heard that Avril and John, two of my favorite first-year students, had been tasked with watching me and reporting back to the police. I wondered if Tina had been, too; I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want all my best friendships marred in my memory by betrayal.

  Rumors swirling around the town, Veronica would tell me, included one that I had been secretly fluent in the local language and a spy for the CIA. I thought back to the final party I’d attended with John and Avril—I’d been able to catch a few words, guess from context some others, and respond appropriately in their language. I’d felt like I was finally beginning to understand a tiny bit of the language. Had they interpreted that as me being “secretly fluent”?

  What would I do, now? Over the next week, my options became clear. Camille called me with an update: even if our organization could place me at another university in country, there was a good chance that my passport would be flagged and when I got to customs, the government would refuse to let me enter. I’d likely never be able to get another teaching visa in country.

  Still, Camille said, I could wait in America for one semester to see if things cooled down, and try to go back in the spring. Or the organization could free me from my contract altogether, and I could stay home. I tried to imagine what that would look like: I could live with my parents, I could move to Baltimore with my friend Mollie, I could buy a one-way ticket to France and live at Taizé. I wasn’t brave enough for any of those options. Or I was too worried that they were self-indulgent; I still wanted to be serving God, after all. And I wasn’t ready to lose everything I’d gained over the previous year—the friendships, the sense of vocation, the grad program, the assurance that I was doing what I was made to do.

  Camille called again. “You could go to Cambodia,” she said. “Their semester starts a little later, so it’s not too late for us to get you in there. And it’s an open country—it’s not illegal to be a Christian or to evangelize.”

  The team leader from Cambodia would phone me with details, if I was interested. I waited for his call.

  * * *

  I decided to fast from noon to noon one day, drinking only water, trying to discern God’s plan for me in the next year. When I woke up in the morning, after not eating for eighteen hours, I couldn’t get out of bed. As I sat up, my head began to spin, and I nearly blacked out, so I lay down again and waited. Soon I heard my mom putting away clean laundry in the hall closet.

  “Mom?” I called, but even my voice was weak. “Mom?”

  She poked her head through the door. “Did you call?” she asked.

  “I can’t get out of bed,” I said. Her forehead wrinkled. “I was fasting, and . . . when I try to stand up I black out. I’m supposed to fast until noon. I don’t know what to do.”

  Mom came back a minute later with a bowl of icy cold, cut watermelon. “Watermelon is a perfect food to break a fast with,” she told me. “It will rehydrate you, and it is easy to digest on an empty stomach. It’s also nutrient-rich. It has all kinds of vitamins and minerals and antioxidants.”

  My mom was a rule-follower to the core, but here she was telling me to break my fast before the set time.

  “I haven’t even fasted a whole day,” I said, embarrassed. “I used to be able to fast for thirty-six hours.”

  “You don’t really have any extra fat anymore,” she observed. “You lost weight overseas. Your body doesn’t have any reserves.”

  All my reserves were empty.

  The watermelon tasted like grace, like a promise that I didn’t have to be good all on my own. It was the sweetest moment of the summer.

  * * *

  My parents’ church asked me to share for five minutes in the Sunday morning service. I didn’t really want to—it was theirs, not mine, and it was the church that had complained about my father-daughter banquet video. I disagreed with the church leadership on a number of issues, and I never felt freedom or grace when I attended with my parents. The church didn’t financially support me, though a few families in the congregation did. Despite my reservations, I agreed to share, though—because I loved my parents and because I knew that I had a story to tell. And anyway, this was what missionaries did: whenever we were invited, we shared the stories of God’s work in foreign places, we asked for prayer and money, we tried to help people see how big God was.

  This time, as I prepared my words, I carefully avoided reading any Scripture or giving any exhortations. They wanted me to share, to tell a personal story, so I would. And this time, hopefully, none of the men would walk out.

  That Sunday, I told the congregation what had happened. I’d been sent to a dark, dry, place with no Christian presence, and other missionaries had warned me not to expect anything. It usually took three years in a city before there was any fruit, they’d said. Nonetheless, I’d asked my supporters to pray that by the end of the year, I’d have two or three girls to disciple. One month later, a teacher fell and had to be put on bed rest. I took over her class, and that week, my new student Veronica knocked on my door and asked if I was a Christian.

  Through our Bible study over the next few months, Veronica decided to follow Jesus. She was so moved by the gospel that she couldn’t stop talking about it. She shared about Jesus with her best friends, and she showed the Jesus film to her family, who showed it to their neighbors, who took it to their ancestral village for all the people to see. By the end of the year, three girls had made professions of faith and been baptized by indigenous believers, and three more wanted to join a Bible study. I prepared them to continue studying together while I was gone for the summer.

  “One week after I came home for the summer, I got an e-mail,” I continued. “Veronica and the others were meeting for Bible study. A Christian from the capital took the train south to meet with them. But he didn’t realize that the police were following him, and—”

  Out of nowhere, I—stoic, controlled, rational—began weeping. I tried to regain my composure and spoke another few words, but that was as far as I got. I couldn’t stop crying, and I didn’t know what to do. Would someone come up and finish reading the words I had written to share? But no one moved. The pastor, still on stage, put his hand woodenly on my shoulder, murmuring something.

  I wanted people to come up, to surround me, to lay hands on me and pray. I wanted someone else to cry with me. I wanted them to need to hear the end of the story. No one moved. I closed my notebook and walked off the stage, back to my seat. The pastor said something like, “Clearly a very moving experience of the Lord,” and went on with the rest of the service.

  As the service ended and everyone began to migrate to the fellowship hall for coffee, no one moved toward me. I felt like they were giving
me and all my emotions a wide berth, like I was a wild animal that had accidentally wandered into a human space and everyone was hoping I would just wander out again.

  Despite the fact that the church was filled with families who had known me for a decade, only the missions pastor, whom I had never met, called me that week. He left an awkward message on my family’s answering machine. Not a single person asked if I was okay—but more significantly to me, not a single person asked to hear the rest of the story, the part I couldn’t tell for crying. How could they not want to know?

  Maybe to them Veronica was just a disembodied soul I had saved: some foreign heathen I had reached with the gospel, a statistic to brag about, a gold star on a chart. But to me, Veronica was a living, breathing girl: a nineteen-year-old with crooked teeth, long black hair, and a sincere passion for American boy bands. She wasn’t a soul I had saved. She was a friend of my heart.

  Maybe that conservative, straight-laced Bible church had focused so long on knowing right doctrine that they had forgotten the passion of the Psalms, emotions I was only beginning to understand. Maybe they were just so unaccustomed to public displays of feeling that they had no idea how to respond. Maybe they had never practiced the cry of lament, preferring to focus on easier emotions. Maybe they believed they had nothing to give me. Regardless of the reason, as I walked out of the foyer and into the warm, humid sunshine of an Arkansas summer, I felt emptied out and alone. I had given all I had in that sterile sanctuary, and not a single person responded.

  21

  Choosing Cambodia

  Part of the joy of missionary life is to learn to know (through the most vital of missionary biography) the starry souls who shine now in other skies, and there were some shining like that among us then. But as a company of people set apart for a special purpose, we were, it seemed to me, just dim. There did not appear to be anything burning about us. We were decorously smoldering, we were not vehement flames (were we aflame at all?) and I knew that I burned most dimly of all.

  Amy Carmichael, Gold Cord

  All year I’d been recording my dreams in a journal. That summer, I dreamed about flying.

  In the dream, I was living under an oppressive regime and was about to be forced into marriage with a man I didn’t love, but I didn’t feel worried. Before the wedding, I was assigned to a task with a small group of men and women. We were strapped to a bungee cord anchored to the moon, and then rocketed into space. When the rocket’s fuel ran out, we began the free fall back to earth, safe because the bungee cord would catch us before we could crash.

  I guess it wasn’t actually a dream about flying. It was a dream about being in free fall. Mine had begun.

  * * *

  The day after I fasted, Veronica had e-mailed, telling me that a lot of people in town were saying I was a CIA agent, and that the order to fire me had come from the capital, not the local authorities. Some of the teachers in the capital were under surveillance as well.

  Her words confirmed in my mind that I shouldn’t try to return to the country. I didn’t want to put anyone else in danger. I would either stay home or go to Cambodia.

  The team leader from Cambodia, a Khmer-American named Davuth, told me over the phone that they would be glad to have me join them. Their team of eight teachers—six singles ranging in age from early twenties to mid-fifties, and one young married couple—all lived in Phnom Penh and taught at the Royal University of Law and Economics. If I joined them, I’d teach fifteen hours a week from the beginning of October to the first of July.

  I e-mailed my prayer supporters about the two options, my heart still so heavy with anguish that I couldn’t feel anything at all as I considered the alternatives. Should I just stay home? Or should I go?

  Could I summon the energy to invest again? As the summer drew to an end, I fell into depression, staying in bed too long, not eating enough. Without any structure to my days, any work that needed to be done, or any role I was supposed to fulfill, I was aimless and sad. Everyone around me had started school: my sister had flown back to New York, and Anna was busy with med school. Lisa, Jack, Rebekah, Adam, and the other teachers had already flown back to Asia, and I heard little from them. Even Veronica and I decided not to talk as much, to try to protect her safety. Everyone was moving on, their work continuing without me.

  I just wasn’t sure I could do it all again: new country, new culture, new language, new city, coworkers, students, foods, markets, friends. I’d invested so much last year, and now, while working through the grief of all that I’d lost, I was supposed to invest all over again? I felt like a boyfriend I’d fallen head over heels for had broken up with me, and now a new guy was asking me to fall in love with him. I wasn’t sure I was ready for another relationship.

  Beyond that, I now knew how hard life overseas could be. What had felt like a grand adventure the previous year felt more realistic, more like a sacrifice now. A year earlier I’d been full of wonder, anticipation, trust, wanderlust—and while I still sensed those things, I also knew what it would actually feel like to be away from my home, family, and western familiarity for a year. I knew how hard it was to learn a language, to begin to read a culture, to constantly adapt, remaining open-minded and cultivating new friendships. A year in a new country is a physically, emotionally, mentally demanding commitment. Travel had lost some of its mystic appeal for me: life overseas becomes daily life, just like day-in and day-out life anywhere, full of the mundane necessities of sleeping, eating, and working.

  Before making any decisions, I did my research about Cambodia. Its people were 95 percent Buddhist. Roughly the size of the state of Oklahoma, it was bordered by Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. The temperature rarely dropped below 80 degrees. I learned that a thousand years ago, Cambodia had been a powerful, culturally and artistically rich society. And I learned what had happened in the 1970s, when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took over the country, how they had systematically killed all the educated Khmer people—doctors and lawyers and teachers—moving everyone else out of the cities and into the country. Trying to create a truly equal, agrarian society, the Khmer Rouge banned private property, religion, and travel, and shut down schools and hospitals. Men, women, and children worked in the fields in identical black clothing, even identical haircuts.

  In less than four years, a quarter of the country’s population disappeared—killed by starvation, sickness, or the hands of the Khmer Rouge.

  Along with those lives, the Khmer people lost much of their culture, religion, and artistic heritage during Pol Pot’s reign. The Khmer generation in college now had grown up with as much influence from the Disney Channel as they had from their ancestors. Since the eighties, aid organizations from around the world had poured money and resources into the country to try to reverse the effects of Pol Pot’s genocide. Due to corruption that still existed in the government, most of that aid money stayed in the capital city, Phnom Penh, while the countryside remained underdeveloped and poor. Phnom Penh’s newest industries included Gap and Nike factories. The city was cosmopolitan, filled with French, Australian, Indian, and American expats, restaurants, and bookstores.

  The first Cambodian church had been planted among rice farmers in the countryside in the mid-1920s, and Bible translation had only been completed in 1999. Since the eighties, missionaries had worked freely in Cambodia. Now, I learned, an indigenous Khmer church, less than a century old, was growing throughout the country.

  The English language had been illegal in Cambodia from the time of Pol Pot until 1990, so the country lacked infrastructure for training English teachers at any level. For the previous four years, my organization had been helping develop an English curriculum for the Royal University of Law and Economics. Teaching there, we were able to influence the upper echelons of Cambodian society, investing in future lawyers, politicians, judges, and business people.

  There were great needs in Cambodia, to be sure. But could I summon th
e energy to invest again? I didn’t want Cambodia to be my rebound.

  And besides, I’d started to remember the things I loved about Little Rock: the way the moon hung yellow over the Arkansas River, then rose white and high, like a baseball headed for the outfield. The first red leaves in the Ozarks, the first nights of cool, dry autumn air. I loved movie theaters and fast food, fall sweaters and road trips. I loved watching my little brother play live music with his band and I began to imagine the things I could do if I stayed home. I could visit my sister in New York, I could be there when my brother ran for student council president, I could bring Anna coffee and scones while she memorized facts about bones and muscles and tissues.

  In the days after I e-mailed my supporters about the choice, some of the weight lifted mysteriously from my heart. Lists of pros and cons found a home in the trash can. I knew what I was supposed to do. I could go. I would go.

  * * *

  As soon as I stepped off the airplane, everything felt right. The concentration of heat, the dusky fish-sauce scented air, the smell of exhaust and cheap cleaners hanging heavy in the humidity. I turned to my traveling partner Kelly and smiled. “It smells like Southeast Asia,” I said happily. She grinned. We hoisted heavy backpacks onto our shoulders and headed toward customs.

  I’d met Kelly and Patrick in the airport in Los Angeles. Actually, I’d met Kelly before—she had led the informational session about our organization that I’d attended two years earlier. She remembered seeing me there, with Charley, and seemed unsurprised when I told her we were no longer together.

  I hoped Kelly might be someone who could understand my grief. I was walking into this new place openly bleeding and clutching my wounds—as soon as my parents had left me at the airport in Little Rock, I’d started sobbing, still unable to process the fact that God had answered all my prayers in the previous year and then ripped that life away from me. I worried that my new teammates would expect me to jump passionately into this new life and service in Cambodia, when I still needed to grieve. I felt defeated and exhausted, inadequate and unprepared for the next year—but I didn’t want everyone to see how needy and emotional I was.