Part V: What Came Next

[This is part five in a six-part series. If you haven't read the previous parts, I suggest that you go back to November 9 and start at the beginning, as each part builds on the next.]

After I had sat awhile in the garden, three young men, ranging in age from maybe 16 to 24, came up the walkway from the direction of the prayer gazebo. They came up to my bench and hung around, speaking in their tribal language, with just a smattering of Portuguese thrown in. I tried to ignore them at first, but they were really being annoying. They also made me feel uncomfortable. We have been warned over and over about the banditos–on the beach, on roadways, in town. One of our roommates–a long-term Pomba student–had been mugged in town on Tuesday, and had had her backpack stolen. They have warned us to carry as little as possible, not carry a purse or pack if we could help it, but we have been told that the Pomba compound, especially the part farthest from the front gate, is safe, so I had felt completely unconcerned about going off alone into the dark to pray. But I didn’t feel comfortable with these guys there, so I decided to leave.

I got up and walked about five feet away –- and then the Celt rose up, and he said, “NO. I am not going to run out of a quiet, prayerful place by people who are clearly not here to pray.” These guys were too old to be Pomba kids-–at least two of them were. But there are all of these young guys who hang out in Pomba and no one seems to mind. They are deemed safe by the staff. Maybe they’re members of the congregation. They could have been workers or visiting pastors (there for the conference), so I didn’t want to be rude to them, but I really didn’t feel like they were there for legitimate reasons. I suddenly wanted to stay and see if I could make them feel ashamed for disturbing a place of God. I also wanted to be able to describe them to Mark (the staff guy in charge of visitors) the next day since I suspected that they weren’t supposed to be there. So, I stopped, turned around and looked long and hard at each one individually. When I got to the third one (the leader), he said, “What is it ‘mana?” (They call all women ‘mana, short for hermana, sister, but they also call women older than themselves “mama” or “mommy,” so I wasn’t sure which one he was saying.)

I said, “Did you come here to pray?”

There was no answer, but a general befuddlement on their part. Finally, one of them said, “what?”

I said, “This is a prayer garden. A place of prayer. I came here to pray. What did you come here for?”

The leader said, “We live here.”

I didn’t know whether that was true, though I doubted it. “Did you come here to pray?” I repeated.

They didn’t answer but shifted uncomfortably. Finally, the smallest one (possibly a kid in his mid-teens) mumbled something like “yeah,” and even seemed to try to take on a prayerful attitude, somewhat bowing his head. The other two continued to just seem confused by my questions. It was quite dark by now, with the only light coming from the prayer gazebo, about 50 feet away. I was standing with my back to the light at the time, with the light on their faces, so I could see them relatively well.

And now is when I did something inexplicably stupid, something that went against my intuition and reason and better judgment. The only explanation I can offer is that the Celt rose up at this moment, saying, “It’s not right. You shouldn’t have to leave. They should leave. They don’t belong here. You do. You were talking to God in this place, and you shouldn’t have to leave.” (One of the more pious Celts on the planet, apparently.)

And so – it pains me to even put this in writing – I marched back to the bench and sat back down, on the end opposite them. My thought was to shame them for disturbing a place of God and to make them either pray (or pretend to) or leave. Two of them were already sitting, and then the other one sat down. So now I had these three fidgeting young men sitting next to me on this bench in the dark. I was uncomfortable, but the Celt was still there enough that I wasn’t really afraid. I had said I was there to pray, so I began to pray, silently–-but with my eyes open!-–for these three young men. I prayed that God would turn hearts of stone to hearts of flesh and that God’s Holy Spirit would pour down on them and fill their empty places, leaving room for nothing else. They sat in silence, with the leader closest to me on my right. They were probably trying to decide whether I was crazy. I think that in most cultures, even violent ones, a lot of latitude is given to crazy people and they are often left alone by thugs who prefer easier and more rational prey.

After about a minute and a half of silence, the leader says, “Hey, mommy.”

“Yes?”

“Give me the bag.” It sounded conversational, not demanding or threatening. It was almost like a suggestion.

“The bag?” I didn’t know what he meant.

“Yes. Give me the bag,” he said quietly, tossing his head back, pointing his chin in my direction, and that’s when I realized that he meant the small pack I had fastened around my waist.

I’ve had a lot of training in practicing sensitivity toward the cultures I’ve visited. We are usually taught about the accepted practices, friendly gestures, and taboos among the people we are going to meet. We’d been told that most Mozanians feel no shame in casually asking Westerners for anything–from our watches to our money to the clothes on our backs–and they’ll do this even upon first meeting us. You just have to get used to it and learn to turn them down in a kind, cheerful way. However, in this case, though the leader was using a calm conversational tone, I was definitely aware of my situation: alone on a bench in the dark with three young men, two of whom were my size or larger. The threat was there, though unspoken.

I turned my head toward him, looked him straight in the eye, and said very firmly and clearly, “No.” I suspected he would not like this answer, so I got up to leave. My plan was to walk confidently away, toward the light and activity of the prayer hut, but I stumbled on an uneven place in the big flat rock that had been used as a platform for the bench.

All three of them were up in an instant, grabbing for me. One grabbed my bag, which I think they didn’t realize was attached securely to my waist. Had it been on my shoulder, they would have had it and been gone. I reached out to try to defend myself, push them away, and get away when another one grabbed the upper part of my right arm and started pulling on me.

The one with my arm and the one with my pack were the leader and the other big guy, though I don’t know which one was where. The smaller guy was on my left and I didn’t consider him a serious threat. That was, until he pulled a machete out and swung it high over our heads, and then it came down towards me, toward my left thigh.

I cannot really capture what was going through my head. There was this calm, rational part of me observing the situation and thinking, “You can handle this. Just stop the kid with the machete.” Yet another part of my brain was thinking, “This is bad. You might not get out of this. This kid could chop your leg off. You could bleed to death!” And yet I didn’t feel panicky. I felt a completely irrational sense that I was still somewhat in control of the situation and might be able to get away, as long as I could stop the kid with the machete.

The machete would go up in the air, and I would see it silhouetted against the moonlit night sky, hanging above my head, just before he would swing it down and, with a loud “thwap,” it would make contact with my leg. I kept trying to grab his machete arm. Even with the one guy tugging on my right arm and the other one pulling on my pack, I felt like I could take on the kid with the machete and get it away from him if I could just catch his arm. I kept seeing the machete go up into the air, then swing back down toward my leg. The Celt was with me, and I felt strangely calm, rational, like a Celt calculating how best to defend himself against each enemy he meets in battle. The kid hit my leg, hard, at least four times, and each time, I thought, “This could be the one that severs an artery, and you will die.” But each time, as he struck, I realized that he had hit with the broad side of the blade, not the sharp edge, and I was unharmed (mostly). This is what made me feel like I could take him on. As long as I wasn’t cut and bleeding, it wasn’t too late, and I could grab his arm, twist it, and make him drop the machete. But after the first four blows, and while grappling with the other two guys – whom I wasn’t even looking at or really even thinking about now because my full attention was fixed on the machete and the arm that wielded it – I began to think, “This is a very serious situation. I think I need help. But how can I get help, when I can’t get away?”

And then my earlier thought came to me. It takes a lot more conscious thought to scream in a situation like this than I had ever imagined. I had always thought that screaming was a natural and instinctive reaction to a scary situation, but it is not; at least, it’s not for me. But in a completely calm and unfearful way, I screamed at the top of my lungs three times.