A Story For An Image.

Two mutes led us through the winding, sullied roads to the top of the muddy hill. It seemed like it would never stop raining. I sighed; there was really nothing else to do. The camp continued on forever, an entire people made homeless. The sight from the ridge revealed yet another valley filled with ripped tarp hovels. In such places you would think the world must have gone mad. On the side of the hill five bearded men worked diligently on nailing thin sheets of plywood to a small frame. Doctors Without Borders had supplied the resources for the construction of toilets for the 22,000 Rohingya refugees. The metal on the outhouse roofs contrasted starkly with the black plastic which filled the surrounding hills.

Turning back to the interior of the camp we descended into more of the same; more tarps, more mud, and more crushing passivity. A rising wind grabbed at corners of the tarps and snapped them like sails in a gale. The scream of a playing child or yell of an angry mother were the only sounds that broke the weariness of inaction. Men sat everywhere.

At times I thought, “If I don’t go on it will stop,” like the man who reads half a book and thinks if he quits that the story is finished. What he doesn’t realize is that each page adds a greater depth to the characters; just as each face I passed by revealed more about the camp than I knew moments before. Every successive sight begged the question, “What is it to suffer loss, to be permanently wounded, hopelessly defeated?”

Ducking inside a tea shack my interpreter and I found the 10 by 16 foot plastic room already crammed with men trying to escape the rain. Their stares were filled with curiosity and resignation and sorrow. A space was made for us on one of the plank benches. Other men who had seen us enter crowded around the entrance. I was like a traveling circus, something to relieve the tedious boredom for a few hours. But I would not stay long, and life in all its complicated horror would continue.

I listened for a long time, each man shouting in turn to be heard over the din of rain beating against the black tarps. A gray-bearded man with bloodshot eyes began, propping himself up by his arms. The empty space where his right leg should have been gave him the look of half a man. He spoke of home and fear and death and the depths of evil to which man sinks. His story was echoed by others who recounted torture and brutalization and tire-burnings and senseless hate. I asked another man, Omar, to tell me his life story, and where he came from. Omar’s answer did not match the wrinkles of experience that creased his brow and grew out of the sides of his troubled eyes. All he said was, “I don’t know, I can’t remember.” He had no beginning, nothing to which he could connect his later life – and how does one relate a life without a seed, a source, a commencement?

The travail had not ended since the arrival in the camp. An aged man with black eyes told me he had buried his son that morning under a grey sky and without tears. It was then that I realized the tragedy I shared with these men and with God. Sitting there in the presence of a human being, awe suddenly seized me, and I pitied him. Evil had done its work, though. Hate had still prevailed. Sin, in all its terrible complexities and distortions had corrupted the pure image of God placed in him. My heart ached. I’ve seen what we have done to that image, how we have wounded and marred what was put inside of us as good and right. When human beings turn their back on God and embrace the distortion of the image place inside of them, where is God to be found? Something resembling God was buried in the red clay with the son, suffered silently with hunger, screamed with the playing children, and shouted loudly the story of injustice. God is the mute, the amputee victim, the father, the aid worker, but he is also the torturer, the military guard, the corrupt official.
In that unbearable moment of reality I grieved for the huddled men in the tea shack, but I grieved also for humanity because I realized how sick we are. Reaching out, I placed my hand on the shoulder of God’s image and said, “I’m sorry about your son.” The father broke internally, the black eyes softened, the proud face fell and the bony shoulders sagged with age and grief.

Tell me, how does love respond to that?

Love doesn’t shut its eyes; it bears witness and endures the sights it beholds. A face grants permanence to statistics and desperation to prayer. Love delivers all these internal sighs to God. It longs for someone to be fed as much as you long to be fed, clothed as you are clothed, sheltered as you are sheltered.
It was finished. The circus was over. I rose and left the tea shack, the men, and the camp. Glancing back on that stretch of exhausted earth I sighed. The last thing I saw were the shiny metal roofs of the toilets on the hill. Could a glimpse of hope look like a toilet? Perhaps. But injustice will happen again tomorrow, it is a constant in life, like a memory.