I am not just crying, I am sobbing.
I am standing in front of a solid wood door with metal bars across the window. Even if it wasn’t locked I would not be strong enough to open it. I am five years old, maybe six, but I know three things with absolute certainty. I know that the reason why I am being bullied is because I am the only foreigner in kindergarten. I know that eventually the principal will get tired of my noise and give in to my demand to phone my parents and ask them to come get me. And I know that my parents will say no.
After I was transferred to Harmandali, memories of my early years in Mexico began to surface. My parents had moved there as missionaries just after I was born. As part of their ministry they took in around twenty Mexican young people every year to live in our home while they finished high school. It was like a large, extended family—very large, since I was also the oldest of seven kids. At the same time, to be the only Americans in a small city brought a lot of negative attention for me as a young boy, and for much of my early life I was an outsider. Like salt on a wound, these early memories intensified the pain I felt in Harmandali.
BUT THEY WEREN’T THE MAIN THOUGHTS that I was concerned with. The only contact I had was with the guards. Some were more talkative than others. From asking them questions I pieced together that Harmandali was mainly home to refugees and people from other countries who didn’t have the correct papers. Most of them were Afghanis, Pakistanis, and Africans, all held there awaiting deportation. They were allowed out three times a day to eat and then go to a courtyard to get some fresh air and to smoke.
What most frustrated me was that all of the people held at Harmandali were free to leave at any time. All they had to do was agree to be deported, and they would be taken to an airport and put on the next plane home. Few of them did, however. They all wanted to stay in Turkey, or at least move on to a better country than the one they’d fled.
Not me though. I was the only person there who could not leave.
The guards were also perplexed. This had not happened to an American before. But in addition, there was something different about my case, and none of the officials who ran the place were willing to give me even a scrap of information about what was going on—if they even knew. Everyone from the guard at the gate to the director seemed to be nervously following strict orders about me. It was clear that Ankara was making all decisions—big and small.
I SPENT HOURS EACH DAY looking out the window. I figured out that the rooms on the other side of the corridor opened onto the courtyard in which people walked and talked, but I was glad to be facing the front of the building. It meant that I could keep a lookout for Norine. Just seeing our van let me know that she was still in the country, that I was not entirely alone.
She came every day. As soon as it was light I’d stand sentry, my eyes locked on the point in the far distance where she would come over the crest of a hill and follow the narrow road that snaked its way up to the parking lot opposite the center. I would see the van come up the final hill, then lose it from sight.
Norine wasn’t always allowed in to see me. I’d wait, sometimes as long as two hours, desperately hoping that my door would soon open and a guard would tell me that I had a visitor.
Most days my door remained silent and locked. When she was not allowed in, Norine would drive to a spot across the valley and park for a while. She—and usually others from the church—would get out. Without my glasses I could only recognize people by their shape, but I knew they were praying for me.
I’d keep my eyes locked on the view outside until the van slowly drove away. Even though it ached not to be able to see and hold her, at least I knew that she was safe and still free. How I longed to be in that van driving away with her!
One day, just when I’d given up hope that I’d be allowed to see her, the door opened. A guard was holding a slip of paper, gesturing at me to come and take it.
It was a note from Norine.
They don’t always allow me to come and see you, but I’ve been told that I can send you this note. I’m still being the persistent widow, and there are lots of new friends who care about you. I drive here and try to visit every day. Don’t give up hope, my love. N
It was like holding a priceless work of art. I read it over and over. Be the persistent widow for me—this is what I had said to Norine the night she was released. Jesus told the story of an unjust judge who kept denying a widow’s request. She was so relentless that he finally gave in. I knew that Norine was being relentless for me.
And so I became a watchman. I spent hours each day standing and staring, and there was something comforting about the task. She always came, and the anticipation of seeing the van approach always made my heart yearn the way our German shepherd would strain against the leash and pull with all his might to get to Norine.
Then one day she did not show up.
Immediately I thought the worst. What has happened to Norine? Has she been rearrested? Has she been deported? Has she been in an accident?
I felt myself unravel. All the gains I’d made from watching for Norine—all the comfort I’d found in the routine—vanished. Panic swept over me. My breathing shallowed, my heart surged, and my mind spiraled further and further down. How could I keep going if I was now completely on my own?
I stayed that way for two days. Isolated from almost all human contact by the regime above me, deprived of almost all sleep by my own body and mind, I had never felt so weak and powerless. I prayed day and night for her. It was only when I saw our van crest the hill on the third day that the fear subsided.
I was so grateful to know that she was outside that I didn’t even think that she might be allowed to pass a note or visit me. But within a few minutes of her arrival a guard was at my door announcing that I had a visitor. I quickly grabbed the styrofoam plate on which I had “written” notes for my next visit.
Because I had no pen and paper, I had begun to keep styrofoam plates that were not too greasy and use my long fingernails to scratch out words—prayer lists, fragments of verses, questions to ask Norine, encouraging things I heard from her, so that I would not forget them and could read over them again and again.
As for my fingernails, they were long because the guards would not let me cut them.
I TRIED TO HOLD MY EMOTIONS in most of the time—focus, press in, don’t lose it. But when I saw Norine, the person who loved me and comforted me, my guard would collapse and my emotions poured out. I couldn’t help it. And after the scare of the past two days, I felt it even more.
Norine and I both knew that time was short, so we talked fast. She told me that the lawyer had warned her to stay low for a couple of days, which was why she hadn’t visited.
“What about your visa? Is that okay?”
Norine avoided answering my question fully, telling me instead about the two groups that were now advocating for me, Middle East Concern and ACLJ—the American Center for Law and Justice, based in Washington, DC. “MEC wants to keep things quiet,” said Norine. “They want to keep going with the letter writing, to lobby the Turkish leaders that way. Maybe that’s the best thing to do while we wait for the presidential election in the States.”
Our time was running out.
I had come up with a plan to communicate on the days Norine could not get in for a visit. If she or our friends parked on the first road in the valley it meant everything was okay, if on the second road then there was a problem. I told her how to work out which window was mine and that I’d hang a certain T-shirt up to let her know I was still here and had not been transferred.
That was a big relief to her. “Andrew, last week while I was waiting for permission to see you, a man yelled out one of the windows—in English. His voice was desperate. A few minutes later a police vehicle drove through the gate and left. I tried to see if you were the one in the back, but I couldn’t tell. I was frantic because I did not get permission to visit and see if you were still here or not.” She had been shaken by the event. Every day afterwards she would come, dreading that I might have disappeared into the system, and would not relax until she saw the T-shirt in the window.
The visit ended too soon. I went back to my cell and tracked the van as it rattled along the road and then paused just where she said she would. Our practice run worked. We had it down.
THE FIRST WEEK BLED into the second, and still I was locked in my cell all day. I forced myself to eat—doing it as a discipline for God. I had turned down the offer of being taken out to the courtyard for air. What was the point? I was high security, so I was alone out there just like I was alone in my cell.
Although Harmandali was a modern building, the water was often cut off. I was given a half liter plastic bottle of water at lunch and supper each day. I learned to keep these bottles and fill them whenever the water came on. Soon I had a collection, enough to take a bird bath. And when the little radiator was turned on, I would place the bottles next to it overnight to make the water a little less cold.
AT THE END OF THE SECOND WEEK I received the biggest encouragement of my time so far at Harmandali.
It started when I walked into the visitors’ area. Norine was standing there ready to hug me. But she was not alone. Next to her were two dear friends from church, Korean nationals who were living in Turkey. I was surprised to see them, but Norine gave me a look that told me just to go along with it all.
We talked and prayed, and when at one point Norine gave me another hug, she whispered that the guards had let our friends in because they thought they’d come all the way from Korea to see me, not an hour or two down the coast in Izmir.
They had brought me some kimbap—a Korean take on a sushi roll that I absolutely love.
“They put your favorite in it,” said Norine, pointing inside the bag to the layer of paper at the bottom. Beneath it I could see the faint markings of something printed. Again Norine gave me the just go with it eyes, and after we said goodbye I hurried back to my cell, desperately hoping that I’d be allowed to keep the bag.
I was, and as soon as the door was locked I carefully lifted out the kimbap. Hidden at the bottom was a thin book, barely forty pages long, called Prayers to Strengthen Your Inner Man by Mike Bickle.
Instantly I realized this book was more precious than gold to me. It was life. Finally I had some verses from the Bible that I could read, some prayers that I could say when my own words and thoughts were too fogged up with fear. I now had something that I could build my day around, and I started spending hours and hours each afternoon and evening pacing from the door to the window and back, reciting the verses and letting the book inspire my prayers. And when I wasn’t holding it with my back to the door, I hid the book in my pile of clothes, hoping that whenever one of the regular and random room inspections took place, the guard would not be interested enough in me to look through my underwear.
I NEEDED ALL THE HELP I could get. As the days passed by and the effects of too little sleep and too little human contact accumulated, I found it harder and harder to keep myself steady. No matter how much I paced and prayed and meditated on the pages of my little book, I could feel myself slipping.
Scenes from my years in Mexico kept coming to mind.
Those days at the kindergarten were not the only bad memories from that time. We were the only American family in the city, and to make it worse I was a missionary kid as well, making me a double target. When I was in junior high, I’d often get chased by gangs of older teenagers, even young men in their early twenties, laughing and shouting and throwing whatever they could find at me as I sprinted home.
I lived in fear, but my mother always said that the troubles I faced on the street were making me stronger. She was right too. They did make me stronger, but in a hard-hearted kind of way. And worse than that was what those troubles did to my view of God. I began to believe that I could expect God to put me in difficult circumstances precisely so that he could toughen me up.
It was only a matter of time before I started to see the parallels between Mexico and Harmandali. I was a foreigner in both. I was isolated. I was locked up. I was kept from my family. And my authority figure who could save me—in this case not my parents, but God—was using the pain and the fear of the experience to toughen me up.
LYING IN MY BED in the darkness, I was trying to ignore all these thoughts when one night I heard footsteps in the corridor outside. My light flickered on. Nothing good ever happens at night in these places. I held my breath.
The door opened.
“Gather all your things,” said one of the two guards who walked in. “We’re moving you.”
“No!” I begged. “Please! Don’t move me.”
My words were weak. I had no control. All I could do was what they told me.
I scooped up my clothes, desperate to make sure that the book stayed hidden in my underwear. I followed them to another room on a higher floor. It was almost identical to mine, an outer cell with a window that faced the parking lot, the hills, and the road that Norine drove down. But this one was better. There was a light switch on the wall and the view out front allowed me to see the guardhouse where Norine would enter. Had I just been upgraded? I started to clean the room and make the bed.
An hour later the same thing happened. Footsteps outside in the corridor. Door opens and guards tell me to get up and leave.
This time they took me back to my old room. I was even more confused, but there was no time for questions. There was barely time for me to sit down and get used to the darkness.
Once more the door opened.
Once more I was taken out into the corridor and up a flight of stairs.
Once more I stood before a door while the guard fished out the correct key and unlocked it. Only this time, the room was not on the side of the building that faced the front. It was an inner room, facing the courtyard.
My heart sank. I would no longer be able to watch for Norine. I would no longer know if she was still in the country. I would no longer get encouragement from seeing her parked in the valley, knowing she was there praying for me. Now I was even more cut off.
The head guard was in the corridor. I pleaded with him to let me have my old room, but he ignored me. There was nothing I could do but walk into the room and listen as the lock closed behind me.
I lay on the bed, shivering, whispering the question that came from the deepest ache within me.
I thought I knew the answer—that God just wanted to toughen me up some more. It was a terrifying thought. How much tougher did I need to become? How much worse did things have to get before God rescued me?