Years earlier, Robert had dedicated his life to care for Trish, his wife. Trish had Juvenile Diabetes, and required 24-hour observation to keep her alive. Robert was exhausted by years of waking every two hours to personally check her condition - he needed sleep. He had rigged a PC to monitor her vital signs, but was stymied for a telephone connection to call an ambulance when he wasn't there; he needed a special APL driver. He had posted a plea for such a driver a month earlier, and no one had answered. I had made such a driver the previous year, for a totally different application which had failed. Then I stumbled across Robert's plea. My failed driver just might work in his application; I sent it to him.
It was perfect.
I learned later that Robert's church (in Geogia) had called a special prayer meeting that Thursday evening; a last desperate attempt for an answer. When Robert returned home, my message was waiting for him. God's incredible Hand - I had no idea at the time what was going on.
Over the next two years, I grew to know Trish and Robert well - via VNET and phone calls. Eventually, Trish got an experimental pancreatic transplant (actually two of them, the first didn't work), and enjoyed a few months of reasonably normal life with Robert. But then e-mailed arrived entitled "Trish.loved". I knew what it said without reading it. The story of the eight years they had together is beautiful, and will be told, but it is not this story.
Trish died peacefully and happily in Robert's arms; after insisting that he promise to look for another mate. "God has a woman waiting for you," she had told him, and indeed God did.
A bit more than a year later, I answered the telephone to hear Robert ask, "You're a Whiskypalian, aren't you?" (refering to a joke about Episcopalians). I responded, "What do you mean by that?" (I'd learned to ask that of Robert.) He explained that he'd eventually followed Trish's last request and found Roni, who was Episcoplian, and the two of them seemed to be getting along well. He thought it might be easier for him, a Southern Baptist, to switch to the Episcopal church than for her to switch to Baptist, and he wanted information about the Episcopalians. I was, of course, happy to oblige. I heard no more from Robert, other than a notice of his early retirement from IBM, until the call I described at the beginning of this discourse.
And Robert began that conversation with, "How's Chukels?" so of course I responded with, "What do you mean by that?"
Robert explained that he and Roni had married, found themselves in northern Iraq (another story worth telling), and were beginning a ministry for the Kurdish children that Saddam Hussein's troops had so cruelly mistreated. He described the conditions and what they were trying to do. Then he asked me to come to Kurdistan and bring Chukels to cheer up the Kurdish children. "They have so little cheer," he said, "it would mean a lot."
My reaction was one of horror, but I did my best to hide it. I had no intention of spending my vacation in a war zone half-way around the world, but I didn't know how to tell Robert that. I mumbled something polite, and promised to pray about it, and then hung up that phone as quickly as I could manage to disengage from Robert. Then I deliberately forgot about the incident.
During Lent, I recall making special intention the God might tell me what the work He had given me to do was, but that prayer eventually faded.
Then sometime in June, I think it was, Lou was preaching the sermon one Sunday morning. She is a long-time, close friend of mine, and been ordained a priest on the previous St. Ambrose day. I normally listen attentively to sermons, but I can't recall anything about this one, because as she began preaching, a weight came upon me. Or maybe a pressure is a better description; something bearing down on me, and bearing down hard, hard enough that it made me cry. People sitting nearby became concerned and leaned over to ask what was wrong; I shooed them away. I did not want to acknowledge what was happening, but I knew, I knew.
I knew what it was and what I had to do. When it came time to go the rail for communion, I knelt there and said, "OK, OK, all ready - I'll go, I'll go."
I'm amazed at the many phrases in the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer that are pertinent and I had never noticed: in the prayer of thanksgiving after communion: "...and now, Father, send us out to do the work You have given us to do...", and the Deacon's final exhortation: "Go forth into all the world...", to mention just two. I've been saying and hearing those phrases all my life, but suddenly they were pregnant beyond any meaning I could have imagined.
Preparations were many, and took about six months to accomplish. One item was curious: money. I'd saved some money intended for a trip to Russia that had been cancelled; I received an unexpected bonus at work; and there were several donations from church members toward the venture. What was curious is that I had roughly twice what I thought I'd need.
Over lunch, I related the story of Robert and Roni, and how they were now in the No-Fly-Zone in northern Iraq. At this point, Georges became rather excited, saying, "Iraq is open again? Go on! Go on!" When I described what I planned to do, he said, "I'm going with you!" and I responded, "yeah, sure, Georges, sure." He insisted, "No, you don't understand, I'm really going with you!" and then he told me his story.
He explained that he was born in Lebanon and spoke English, Arabic, Armenian, Kurdish - maybe more, I lost track. He told me how twenty years ago, he'd been in the middle east, overseeing the translation of the Living Bible into Arabic, and when that project was finished, he had cast about for other large language groups that might present an opportunity for another translation. Among others, he found the Kurds. The story he related was astonishing - another story that needs telling - but briefly, he'd entered Iraq and made contact with people who had already begun such a translation. He arranged for publication of the Gospel of John, which sold for some months in Iraq before Saddam's government threw him out of the country. The manuscript was smuggled out by others, a page at a time, over the next three years.
Georges settled in Boulder and began to publish a monthly magazine (called Reach Out) dedicated to evangelizm of Islam. He gathered scholars to polish the Kurdish translation, and after many years had finally finished and printed the New Testament. Now he needed a way to distribute them, but Iraq was closed to missionaries, and to him.
Until, that is, he came to lunch with me. He said, "I'm going with you, except I don't know how. I don't have funds for the trip."
I laughed at that, and said, "The money already been arranged, Georges, God has already arranged that." Now I knew why I had twice as much money as I needed.
Georges gave me a few hundred copies of the New Testament to take with me; he brought more. As it turned out, we traveled separately, but Georges made the arrangements for me; that really helped a lot. Since our joint trip, Georges has been back and forth many times. His ministry has grown many-fold, and he has sponsored many missionaries and medical teams going into Kurdistan - and since then into Bosnia. Georges himself has been invited by Immans to argue for Jesus in Mosques in the region, because of his knowledge of the Koran as well as the Bible.
I now know why I was called to Kurdistan: it was to take Georges!
Istanbul is a modern, western city. To be sure, there are many ancient sights (sites), but many European cities have those. I left Istanbul on a domestic airliner and landed in Diyarbakhir, the nearest major airport in eastern Turkey to the Iraqi border. I de-planed to a very different world.
It wasn't the stairway down to the Tarmac and walking to the terminal; lots of small airports in the USA do that. It was the armed guards that ringed the plane and lined that walk to the terminal, standing with rifles at the ready, that was my first clue.
A local company had been hired to meet me and provide transportation to the Iraqi border: a 150-plus mile taxi ride. It took almost four hours. Before we left Diyarbakir, I'd seen ox-drawn carts in the main streets and women doing laundry along the bank of dirty stream. I felt as though I'd gone back in time a couple of hundred years.
And we traveled through a war zone. We detoured around a bridge that the PKK had bombed the night before while I slept in Istanbul. (The PKK is the Marxist party of the Kurds, and they disagree with other parties in that the PKK espouses terrorism as a means of achieving their goals. All other Kurdish groups believe that terrorism will rebound onto the Kurds.) The Turkish army was everywhere.
On the way in, I was stopped six times. Each time my luggage was searched. They always wanted to open the big trunk, which contained my clown wardrobe and all my props. I had intentionally put the wig and shoes on top, and when they got "that look" on their face after opening the trunk, I'd show them my clown picture, and give the picture to them. It always got a laugh and a wave to close the trunk and proceed. Good thing, because all the bibles were under that clown stuff, and I'd have been thrown into prison if they found them. But then, my personal bible was in my briefcase, and that would have caused the same action. I was in God's hands and I knew it.
On the way out, I was stopped seven times, and one stop included a young soldier seated on a kitchen chair by the road. He held a Browning Automatic Rifle on his lap, and when I got out of the taxi, I was only three or four feet from him. That B.A.R. was pointed right at my gut, and when I moved, it moved. If he so much as sneezed, as John Wayne would say, "It don't matter; my fault, your fault, nobody's fault; I'd be blown clean in two."
That one worried me.
But back to the trip in. When we got to the border, near the Iraqi town of Zakho, the Turks stamped my passport as having exited the country, and I looked around for Robert. A hat that could only have been owned by Indiana Jones appeared, and the voice under it was the one I knew well: Robert. We picked up my luggage and used a military-looking bridge to walk across the river Habor. A sign read (in multiple languages) "Welcome to Free Kurdistan" and a very young Kurd with an AK-47 waved a welcome to me. Robert had hired a taxi (anybody with a car automatically runs a taxi service), which took us to Dohuk, fifty miles south. I was in Iraq.
But It didn't work. I'd have to pause, and give the interpreter a chance to say what I said. By the time he'd finish, any rhythm I might have established was long gone. I'd almost forgotten what I was doing, so I knew there was no way my audience would remember. Plus I had no idea how accurately he was rendering what I'd said, and usually that mattered a lot. A slight mis-translation could ruin the whole message.
(Remember the famous English-Japanese computer translation of "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." It came out, "The liquor is good, but the meat has spoiled.")
I decided to abandon the message and just entertain - after all, the original call was to "bring cheer to the children." So I did highly visual routines that needed no translation, or routines where the clown needed help naming colors, or counting. I'd get the Kurdish chiildren to teach the dumb clown how to count in Kurdish, or what the colors were. It's basic clown anyway: "Adult in Trouble." Children get a big kick out of an adult in trouble; one who needs help, especially help from the children. It works with American children; it works with children anywhere, everywhere.
And it worked with the Kurdish children. It worked with the peshmerga (freedom fighters) protecting the children; they'd laugh and smile at the antics of the clown. After one performance, Roni came up to me and said, "You know what? The message is coming through anyway!"
Sometimes one of the Kurds would ask me why I was doing this crazy thing - leave my safe home in America to come cheer up their children in a war zone. At first, I didn't know what to say. Then I realized that simple truth couldn't go far wrong, and I would tell him: "God put a burden on my heart for Kurdistan, so heavy a burden that it made me weep. I was crying for the Kurds. I had to come." And the Kurd, Christian or Muslim, would nod his understanding.
And that is what they were; I imprinted the back side of the photos with my name, address, and telephone number. Here at home, they are literally my business cards.
But I was baffled when the children in the streets began to call me
"Chook-less! Chook-less!" whenever I would appear. I'd correct them, "No,
no, Chuckles, Chuckles," but to no avail. To them, I was "Chook-less."
Then I looked again at my cards; "Chuckles" is a foreign name to these Kurdish-speaking children and they naturally pronounced the latin letters phonetically: it did say "Chook-less." Therefore I changed the clown's name, and the next batch of cards were printed "Chukels". I've changed my Land Rover's license and all name badges to read "Chukels", spelled the way it sounds.
For example, Massoud, father of a Kurdish Christian that worked with Robert and Roni. I'd always heard that when a Muslim converted to Christianity, his family immediately disowned him - sometimes even tried to kill him - but not so in this case. The younger Kurd was still beloved of his father and accepted in the home, just he had always been. But Massoud's son is another story. This is Massoud's story. With his son interpreting, Massoud told me that he had been conscripted into the Iraq army three separate times.
(Iraqi soldiers kidnap Kurdish men for use as cannon fodder, forcing them to fight in the most dangerous areas of war. Many died in the front lines of the recent war with Iran. The Iraqis tell the conscript that if he runs away, they will go back for his family and kill them all. Of course, the Kurds have dealt with such situations for millenia; the family simply disappears into their beloved mountains until the young man comes back. So the conscript goes AWOL at the first opportunity - and takes his weapon with him. That is why every Kurdish male owns an Russian-made AK-47 semi-automatic assault rifle.)
Massoud told me that each time he was forced to go into battle, he secretly removed all the bullets from his weapon. He said that if the Iraqi officers had caught him doing this, he'd have been shot on the spot, but he did it anyway.
"Why?" I asked increduously, "surely you wanted to at least defend yourself!"
Massoud smiled and replied, "I removed the bullets from my gun because each time I was convinced that this day I was going to die. I was not going to stand before Allah and confess that my last act on earth was to shoot at another human being."
I am deeply humbled by this man's simple, strong faith.
The second man is the father of our interpreter, who (the father, not the interpreter) had been a professor of English at the University of Dohuk before Saddam's troops destroyed the campus, and now was old enough that he was retired. The professor spoke flawless English and was highly educated in Kurdish history and Islamic lore.
As a devout Muslim, the professor was in the Mosque every Friday morning
without fail. As a man of learning, he was well aware that the Holy Books
of Islam include not only the Koran of Mohammed, but also the Book of Moses,
the Psalms of David, the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Gospel of Jesus - other
words, the Bible! As such, this professor was delighted to learn that Georges
and I had brought with us several hundred copies of the Gospel of Jesus
(New Testament) printed in Kurdish, and, to my last knowledge, had given
the New Testament to over 150 of his Muslim friends, as one of the Holy
Books of Islam!
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