Ministering to the least.
(Reflections of the Boxing Day Tsunami 20 years on.)
In Luke chapter 10, we read that Jesus is challenged by a lawyer who wants Jesus to give him a working definition of the word “neighbour.” Jesus does not give him a definition he just tells one of His most famous parables, which we know as the parable of the Good Samaritan.
In the parable, a Jewish traveller is beaten up by robbers and left for dead by the side of the road. Some very learned and influential Jewish people walk by and do not help the man but leave him suffering on the roadside.
Late in the day a Samaritan, a cultural enemy of the Jewish people, a Samaritan, a man who would have been so hated that he would not be welcomed in any Jewish home and would have suffered under Jewish persecution, comes by and feels compassion for the Jewish man on the side of the road.
But a Samaritan, who was on a journey, came upon him; and when he saw him, he felt compassion, Luke 10:33
The Samaritan tends to the man's wounds and provides him with food, shelter and medical care at his own expense.
(Often, in the Gospels, when we hear the word compassion, it is immediately followed by an act of mercy. A merciful act is a benefit that one does not deserve.
After telling the parable, Jesus asks the lawyer who the neighbour is. Without specifically identifying the Samaritan, the lawyer says, “The one who showed mercy toward him” (Luke 10:37). To which Jesus replies, “Go and do the same.”
In this story, the Jewish guy was what I would identify as “a least” person. Someone vulnerable, and in need, who cannot care for themselves or survive without our assistance.
A new job.
In 1998 I was appointed the National Director of YWAM Australia’s international mercy ministry charity, Australian Mercy. As I looked at my new job, I was mulling over these verses and God spoke to me about Him wanting to be represented in people's lives when they were experiencing the worst day of their lives, these people I saw as included in the category of “least”. I saw disaster relief as an obvious avenue to fulfil this desire in God’s heart, but I didn’t know how to move forward.
About this time, I received an email from a guy in the US who was trying to set up a YWAM-based international disaster response ministry and needed help. After a lot of emailing, I travelled to the US to meet with him and we set in motion a plan that we would recruit and train an Australian-based team and he would do a US-based team and we would deploy into disasters together.
Cracking the code
It took us 5 years of training and research to crack the code. In 2003 I was part of the first Australian / US team that deployed into the Iraq war. After Iraq, the disasters kept on happening and the Australian teams kept on deploying, but I could not deploy every time as I had an international ministry to run. We had a leadership structure that oversaw the day-to-day running of this ministry. After Iraq, my next deployment was into the Boxing Day Tsunami.
Aceh
You see, there was a civil war going on in Aceh. The Acehenese wanted to secede from the rest of Indonesia and become a radically Islamic state. The Indonesian Army had turned off the emergency communications system so that the Achehenese militias could not use it to coordinate attacks against them. The army had turned off the emergency communications, the Tsunami had hit and no one knew. So everyone Everyone had to play catch up! As I was watching the horror of the Boxing Day Tsunami unfold in the news, I received a phone call from a friend in Norway, named Steve. Steve was putting an international response team together to go to Aceh and he wanted me to arrange an Australian contingent. Our Australian disaster response team had just returned from a disaster in the Philippines and could not go as they were debriefing. (Our policy was not to do back-to-back disasters with the same team.) The only person I knew who could possibly go was me, I prayed and asked God, what He had to say, and He said “go”. I sat down with my wife and explained to her what was going on, she said was happy for me to go. So it looked like I was going but I had no team.
I phoned a friend in Perth who was a nurse and she agreed to go. Over the next 24 hours, I started receiving phone calls from people I did not know but could see how they were connected to organisations and ministries I was familiar with, all wanting to come, soon we were 8, and we all came from different parts of Australia. I agreed with Steve that we would all meet in Medan in Indonesia as it was the closest international airport to Aceh. Dates were set, tickets bought and we were off. There were going to be others joining us from Norway, Canada / US, and Thailand, but the largest contingent was from Australia. I flew into Singapore and went to the gate where the Medan flight departed, and there, was my Australian team. We all hugged, introduced ourselves, prayed and boarded the flight to Medan.
The man of peace
Airlines are notorious for losing baggage. Upon arrival in Medan, the airline I discovered, had lost my medical pack.
In Matthew 10:11 Jesus tells the disciples when they go to a new place they should seek out a worthy person, or man of peace and stay with them. Our man of peace stumbled into us at the airport.
I was talking to the airline staff about my lost medical bag and trying to work out where it was and a man approached me, he was a Dutch businessman who spoke Indonesian, and he offered to translate for me. Soon we ascertained that no one knew anything about my lost medical bag and we would have to wait to see if it turned up on another day.
The Dutchman asked me who we were and what we were doing in Medan, I said we were a disaster response team heading to Aceh. He asked where we were staying, I said we were going to look for a backpackers' hostel. He invited us to go to his place for coffee and he would see what he could do to help. “I play golf with some people”, he explained. So we all got into taxis and went to his house, and drank coffee for a while. After about an hour he came into the lounge and announced that we and the others who were on their way were to stay for free at one of Medan’s finest hotels. The owner played golf with this guy and was happy to help. Soon we were at the hotel and we had a prayer meeting in my room. We needed to find transport, supplies, rice, aid we could give the displaced people and medical supplies. We went out to supermarkets and stores in Medan and began buying stuff. The hotel staff were amazed as our rooms began to fill with boxes of stuff.
A male nurse on our team named Nathan, and I went to the Red Cross in town to ask for their help and to see if they had supplies we could take with us. When we got there the manager showed us into a large room filled from floor to ceiling and packed out to the walls with relief supplies, water, rice, clothing, noodles and plastic sheeting, it was all there. “This” he said, “is stuff we have to send to Aceh but we cannot do it, we have searched Medan and there is no truck to take it there.” Then he said with a wry smile on his face. “If you can find a truck you can have it.”
Find me a truck
Nathan said, with a cheeky grin, “I have to go back to the hotel, I will bring people back here in an hour, you arrange a truck.” The only thing I could think to do was to ring a friend in Jakarta and ask for his advice. So, standing outside the Red Cross offices, I made the call.
My friend was incredulous. “You want a truck, in Medan?” he exclaimed, “I don't know anyone in Medan who owns a truck, but I do know a guy who owns a trucking company, I will ring you back.”
A few minutes later he rang back, the owner of the trucking company would donate to us two trucks for 2 weeks with drivers as long as we paid for the fuel. When did we want them? I asked if we could have them today, and could the first one come to the Red Cross in about 20 minutes.
I cannot tell you how quickly the Red Cross manager’s jaw dropped to the ground when in about 30 minutes two SUVs full of people and one dirty big green truck pulled up outside his front door, he was shocked “I did not think you could get a truck,” he said … “but you did promise” I reminded him” … he agreed. I said we would take one of his staff with us and that truck could have a red cross logo on it, to this he readily agreed.
Medical supplies
As the team loaded the truck Nathan came back, all the other overseas team members had arrived and were at the hotel. We were very short on medical supplies. As the crew loaded the truck we went back to the hotel in time to see generators, water pumps blue plastic pipes and all kinds of hardware being taken in the elevator to one of our rooms. The Hotel told me that our second truck was parked around the back, I asked them for a room for the drivers, and then asked if there was a medical warehouse in Medan - they said yes and within a few minutes a hotel vehicle was taking Nathan and myself out to it.
The guy at the warehouse spoke some English and Nathan asked if he could look over his shelves, the man said yes and Nathan started pulling box after box of medication and medical supplies off the the shelf. As each trolley filled I would take it to the desk for the man to process. He asked what we needed so much stuff for and I said we were going to Aceh. He said, ”I will give you a discount because you are helping our people.” There was a mountain of stuff on the counter to be processed. As the man was processing it a well-dressed man came out of one of the offices and asked about the stuff on the counter. The man sorting it all said we were taking the supplies to Aceh. The man opened his wallet slapped a big pile of money on the counter and said “Here is my donation to the cost of these supplies”. It came to 50% of our order.
The next morning the second truck was loaded and we thanked the hotel management for their kindness, got into our SUVs and headed to Aceh. Our one point of possible trouble was an Army checkpoint about an hour away and the word was they were not letting people in because of the war. We prayed and we headed off. When we came to the checkpoint there was no one there, the gate was up, so we kept on driving.
We arrive in Aceh
Aceh was hours away and when we reached the city it was obvious that it had been hit by an earthquake, buildings were destroyed and people filled the streets, the closer we got the city centre the greater the damage. Soon there was nothing, we were looking at a huge area full of debris that had been flattened. Few buildings were standing and there were bodies everywhere. A horrid stench filled the air.
The Indonesian army was bagging over 1,000 bodies a day and dumping them into hastily dug mass graves. The UN was just arriving so we checked in with them, they said, “You can see how it is, just find a place somewhere and dig in.”
A large refugee camp was forming around a large mosque near the university, our translator had previously worked in that area, so we went there. Aceh was still suffering aftershocks from the original earthquake, and when these happened the people would run around terrified shouting “tsunami” and calling out to Allah for help.
We were offered one of the few standing houses nearby but chose to live in our tents near where we parked the trucks inside the refugee camp. This seemed to give the refugees a sense of calm. When the aftershocks happened, we told them it was ok there was not going to be another tsunami.
As we were setting up one of the Mullahs approached us and asked if we could help him. He took some of our team to the mosque hall. It seemed that the army had stacked bodies inside the hall and they could no longer use it as it was unclean and there might be spirits there. Could we clean it for him as Christians are not afraid of the spirits? Under his supervision, some of our team cleaned the hall wall, floors, ceilings and the grass outside where bodies were also stacked. With the hall cleaned refugee families were now permitted to cook there.
Allah sent the earthquake
The Mullahs had told the people that Allah had sent the earthquake to punish them for not being devout enough, and they were not to cry or grieve because that would be disrespectful to Allah. (The common belief that Allah had sent the Tsunami had slowed the response of Indonesian emergency services into the area. As no Muslim wanted to go against Allah’s will.) The people were very much aware that the help they were receiving was coming from what they saw as Christian countries.
A good cry
Not being allowed to grieve was difficult for the people. One lady had lost her husband and her small children in the tsunami and she would walk around the clinic area with tears leaking out of her eyes. She would then wipe them away and put on a brave face. After seeing her do this for about a day, one of the American girls in our team walked up to this lady put her head on her shoulder and started to cry the Indonesian lady could not hold back her tears and the dam burst and she started to howl and the American girl would just howl with her. When the Mullah asked what was going on, we told him that we thought our friend was upset at seeing all the suffering and that the kind Indonesian lady was comforting her in her sorrow. The Indonesian lady and our American team member bonded hearts that day. It is an incident that I will never forget.
Soon the UN was set up more NGOs were arriving and Australian Army doctors were in Aceh as did the media. The media came to our camp and promptly told Australia that the amazing we were doing was being done by another agency.
The teacher
People were still being freed from the wreckage. A man and his wife were brought to us, they had been trapped in different buildings for days under steel framing. The woman’s back was badly cut and the man’s legs had lost chunks of skin, being submerged in tsunami water for so long meant infection was going to be a serious problem. Both of their adult sons had perished in the tsunami. I was treating this guy's legs and my friend, the nurse from Perth was treating his wife. The Mullah came over, it was time for a service and we had to stop treating people in the Mosque grounds. We had to make these two walk to some utes we had outside the gate and finish treating them there.
The man I was treating was a teacher at a strict Islamic school, he was one of the guys who had been teaching that Muslims should keep away from Christians and that they should obey strict Sharia law. To the strict Moslem, we were very much the Samaritans in their midst.
After treating him, I said to him that I wanted him to come back to the clinic in 24 hours as I was concerned about infection in his wounds. He didn't come back.
A few days later we were running a clinic in another refugee camp several miles away and he was there. I called him over and took off the dressings, his leg was hopelessly infected. I took him into the clinic and debrided the wounds, cleaned it all out, disinfected the whole area and put clean dressings on. He asked us to have coffee with him so about an hour later he took us to a nearby house where we sat and drank coffee together. Through our translator, he asked if I was a Christian, and I said “Yes I was”. He began to cry and he said, “You have given me hope.” Someone had given me some cash to give to someone in need who came my way in the outreach, it was equivalent to a couple of hundred Australian dollars. I reached into my pocket and gave it to him and said, “I can never replace what you have lost, but this might help you to get by until you can start again. You need to know that there is a God in heaven and that he loves you with an everlasting love.” This man began to sob deeply. Before leaving we prayed for him and his wife.
Over the months that followed, we sent more teams to Aceh and managed a hospital in the region until the Indonesian Dept of Health could take it over. I did not personally return there as I was still managing an international ministry. However, a team we were about to send was going to the second refugee camp, so I sent them a copy of the photo above, (of me with the teacher), and I asked them to look out for him, give him the photo, and let him know that I was praying for him and his wife and asked them to look at his legs. They found him and when they gave him the photo he got excited and said to them “That is Dr David”. He then showed them his legs and it was all perfectly healed with little scarring. “Dr David knew exactly what he was doing,” he beamed. “Dr” David had never been so relieved in his life! To be clear I am not a doctor but did train as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT).
And so we come back to least. The people of Aceh who were affected by the tsunami were very much least people. They would not have survived without our help. Those caught in disasters and resident of refugee camps are very much least people.
I have worked with refugees in various stages of their journey for more than 30 years. One refugee I knew, who had lost their husband in tragic circumstances and been tortured and raped by the Burmese Army, said this to me when I was visiting her in a refugee camp in Thailand.
“It does not matter what you think, or what happens to you in life, God is still God and He is good.”
True Good Samaritans are those who are often perceived as being threats or bad guys. But Jesus is adamant here, God does not want us to love our friends, he wants us to love our enemies, if full hearted and practical ways.
The words of Jesus in Luke 10, remain a challenge to us. Today, right now Jesus is saying to us all, as he said to the lawyer all those years ago. “Forget the semantics, you know exactly what I mean when I say ‘love your neighbour’, … now go and do the same.”
