Hero

I think I just found my earthly hero. His name is Greg Mortenson, a man born a year before my father who lives in Bozeman, Montana, with his family and a story I just can't shake. When he was thirty-five and I was still in grade school, in 1993, he tried summiting Pakistan's K2, a peak in the Himalaya second in height only to its renowned neighbor in Nepal, Mt. Everest, yet much more difficult to traverse. An avid climber and trained nurse, he had been asked to be the expedition medic for the trip. His only reason for not completing his summit bid was that he and another teammate risked their own welfare to carry one of their injured expedition members down the mountain.

The state of total exhaustion that the rescue left him in became fodder for the next leg of Mortenson's life journey. As he mistakenly stumbled into the remote Pakistani village of Korphe, the country's last human outpost before unyielding peaks swallowed hospitable landscape, he was taken in by its leader and given the rest he so badly needed. "[That] evening, he went to bed by a yak dung fire a mountaineer who'd lost his way," relays his biographer David Oliver Relin, in the book he co-authored with Mortenson called Three Cups of Tea. "[The next] morning," Relin continues, "by the time he'd shared a pot of butter tea with his hosts and laced up his boots, he'd become a humanitarian who'd found a meaningful path to follow for the rest of his life" (2).

A meaningful path to follow for the rest of his life. Among the many nearly-unbelievable details from Mortenson's biography, this statement to me is the most gripping and amazing. It resonates so intensely with me because deep inside, this is what I want most. The young mountaineer was at a crossroads in his life as he descended the Himalaya's Baltoro glacier back towards humanity. I can identify with the youthful longing for adventure he must have felt at that moment and the uncertainty of what his next step should be. He needed a calling, something far greater than himself that he could devote himself to with reckless abandon, just as he had devoted himself to climbing. And so do I.

Nothing meaningful is ever easily accomplished, however. Mortenson's task proved to be physically, socially, and spiritually demanding, one which required painful endurance and rigid self-discipline to fulfill. Having witnessed children's classes being held without a proper schoolhouse nor a teacher, Mortenson purposed within himself to provide a school for the Korphe village through whatever means it would take. Three years and several nearly-impassable roadblocks later, he returned to carry out his word. That one promise birthed in him a passion not only for the region, but for education for the poorest of the poor, that launched his advocacy for Pakistan.

Mortenson's purpose in Pakistan is to build unbiased schools, especially for impoverished girls, in the country's most needy areas. "It is my vision," he writes in his acknowledgements, "that we will dedicate the next decade to achieving universal literacy and education for all children" (333). Along with providing education, he also seeks to relieve humanitarian needs for displaced internal refugees. One such refugee, left homeless after the 1999 Kargil Conflict between Pakistan and India, petitioned Mortenson as they crouched together underneath a blue tarp that shaded the hot sand and served as a makeshift shelter outside Skardu, the regional capital of Baltistan. "We need food, medicine, and education for our children," the refugee pleaded. "This is our home now. I'm ashamed to ask for so much, but no one else has come" (220).

No one else has come. It's a jarring accusation for those of us sitting in our comfortably coiffed homes half a world away. No one else was so willing to risk his comfort in order to reach out a hand of healing? No one else cares enough to stoop in the sand and listen? It reminds me of Jesus' parable of the good Samaritan: One man, caught by thieves on a fairly busy road and left for dead, was stepped over and around by all of the elite religious leaders of his day because he was considered unclean and unworthy; to touch him in any way would prove uncomfortable. Yet a Samaritan stopped his journeys and knelt down in the dust, soiling his own clothes to care for this strange man, because he had compassion. Scripture says he "showed mercy" to the wounded man and Jesus Himself asks us to "go and do likewise" (Lk 10:27). Mortenson, it seems, has taken Jesus up on His offer.

The reason I can't shake Mortenson's story is because it stirs me to respond. Whether this man is a believer in Jesus or not, his actions are biblically sound. To His servants who cared for the needy and most forgotten, Jesus asserts in Matthew 25: "Inasmuch as you did it to the least of these, My brothers, you did it to Me" (25:40). What Jesus applauds, Morteson is doing. What stops me from doing the same? "I am challenged this day to live my life worthy of the call of Christ," I posted to my Skype account just after finishing the book. Indeed, it arouses me in very meaningful ways--ways that may just find me crouched in a hot, dusty corner of Earth pouring out a cup of cold water to a man who "can offer [me] nothing... not even tea" (Mortenson 220).

Lost Boys

Meet John Bul Dau. He doesn't live in Korea--nor, in fact, anywhere in Asia. He's not from my hometown or any of the places I have ever visited. I've never met him in person, but his story is compelling. He's a very tall, black man from Africa who currently lives in Syracuse, New York, with his wife and daughter; how he got there is miraculous. He has written a memoir on the subject called God Grew Tired of Us. "They call me a Lost Boy," he writes. "[B]ut let me assure you, God has found me" (7).

I had heard of the Lost Boys of Sudan in passing, but I had no real understanding of what the term meant. I had no real interest in learning about them, either, safe and provided for as I was in my own homeland. I bought the book early in 2008, thinking it would help in a research project about unreached people groups. I was grossly unaware of why the book was written at all and remained painfully blind to the conflict Dau's people faced. The research project eventually took off in a different direction and his book sat forgotten on my dusty, overcrowded bookshelf.

I spied the book again in the hands of a friend in Seoul one recent Sunday. I mentioned how I had the book at home but had never read it. She firmly pushed it toward me and urged that I take it, though she had not yet read it herself. I took the book from her, if only to give me material to read on the subway ride back to Byeongjeom, and started it that night. I found the story so captivating that I finished its 287 pages in 8 days.

The book starts during a midnight shelling raid on Dau's childhood home, a southern Sudanese village named Duk Payeul--a raid which forever altered the course of his life. Scrambling to get outside the hut full of sleeping children that he had been resting fitfully in just moments before, he was pulled to safety by a man he presumed to be his father. For the next hours, they watched and listened together as their village burned. This was 1987, the start of a great civil war for Dau's country and a fourteen-year journey for himself. "I have wondered, more times than I can count," Dau writes in his introduction, "if my friends or I would live to see a new day. Those were the times I thought God had grown tired of us" (7).

From Duk Payeul, Bul Dau traces his path on foot across southern Sudan and into an Ethiopian refugee camp just across the border, called Pinyudu. Along the way, he and the man who rescued him--who wasn't his father, but instead a close family friend named Abraham--encountered first three, then a group of nineteen, then eventually uncounted thousands of young refugees heading towards the camp. Most of these young people were boys under the age of eighteen, just like Bul Dau; girls and adults like Abraham were scarce in the group indeed.

Here was an entire generation of orphaned boys resting on Ethiopia's doorstep. The civil war that led them there pushed them further and further away from their villages and eventually out of their homeland altogether. These child-refugees settled safely in Pinyudu for a peaceful few years, but their conflict was far from over. The government who sponsored raids on their villages pursued the displaced multitude yet again, this time from the Ethiopian side. Bul Dau and his friends were caught off guard by the suddenness of the attack and fled with whatever meager belongings they couldn't afford to abandon, wanted fugitives on the run in a place that should have been their refuge.

While reading I realized with devastating certainty that events that fell upon these Lost Boys happened to my generation. Dau was 13 in 1987, the year his government fired on his village and scattered his family; my twin and I were only 3 and my older brother almost 5. In the refugee camps he relocated to, Dau was among the oldest of the boys; countless thousands of others made the trip as six- and seven-year-olds. By 1991, some of the children who struggled into camp could have been my exact age!

As I devoured page after page of his story, I could identify myself with John in very meaningful ways. I have felt the disorientation that he felt as he endeavored to survive in a country not his own among a people not his own. I have worshipped the same God that he worshipped among his fellow refugees as he danced and sang in his native tongue. And I have lived in the same timeframe, though swaddled in peace while he was shrowded in conflict. Our experiences are not so far removed from each other as what at first might seem. John Bul Dau is my peer, in every sense the word carries. What challenged me the most about his narrative was his unwavering faith in Christ. "War would come to us," he writes in his first chapter, speaking of his native southern Sudanese people. "[B]ut God would be with us in our hour of torment and make us powerful again" (36).

The LORD was surely with Bul Dau and his fellow refugees on their painful sojourn. Though they struggled through such devastating hardship, Dau witnessed the LORD provide for their needs and watch over their care through agencies like the UN and World Vision. As the Lost Boys trekked on foot through hostile southern Sudan, on their way to yet another refugee camp, water and food supply trucks followed them. It was amazing to read how the hand of the LORD rested on them as they journeyed. They had to walk through the difficulty, but God made sure they did not walk alone! While they covered the five hundred miles from a makeshift home in Pochala, Sudan, to refuge across the Kenyan border, Dau and the other boys sang a song in Dinka en route to safety:

"As we go through this wilderness,

We thank you [Jesus] and worship

Because your words we have listened to."

Yes and amen, LORD. Yes and amen.