October 31, 2008

Dear Friends,

At 11:10 p.m. on March 28, 2005, just three months after being slammed on its north and west coasts by the tsunami, the island of Nias was rocked by an earthquake measuring 8.7 on the Richter scale. In a small village on the eastern coast, Niat Hati Damai (whose name means “A heart that seeks peace”) was awakened by the jolting of her house and instantly did what anyone in a similar situation would do: she jumped up and ran outside. But her older brother was already in the front yard and shouted at her, “What about your younger brother and sister still inside?” Damai obediently returned to the still-shaking house. By the time she reached her siblings, it was too late to escape, so she used her body as a shield when the walls fell on top of the three of them.

Amazingly, the two children survived with barely a scratch. Damai, aged 23 at the time, was unconscious and doesn’t remember anything else except, upon waking up, being on her back in the front yard and seeing people gathered around her, weeping. “Why are you crying?” she asked, unaware that they already knew she had been paralyzed from the waist down by the impact of the falling walls.

Three and a half years later, after extensive surgery, therapy, and training, Damai remains in a wheelchair but has come a long way toward accepting the reality of her situation and finding a way to serve God through her suffering. In the beginning, she had a very difficult time coming to terms with her paralysis. Prior to the earthquake, she had dreamed of becoming a minister and was quite active in her local congregation. When I visited her in early October, I asked her if she was still hoped to go into the ministry. I had even thought of trying to find a way to let her attend the seminary where I teach.

But her answer surprised me. First, she said that it was unrealistic for her to serve in a congregation on her home island of Nias. None of the churches are wheelchair-accessible; many of the pulpits would require her to mount a staircase just to preach. The villages themselves, with narrow lanes that barely leave room for pedestrians, much less offering anything resembling a sidewalk, would make navigating her pastorate a near impossibility.

Second and more importantly, she lamented, the Nias culture is not yet ready to accept people with disabilities. Whether congenital or the result of an accident such as Damai’s, any physical deformity is seen as a sign of God’s displeasure, perhaps because of the sins of the parents. Therefore any disabled family member is hidden within the house and rarely goes outside for any reason, including to attend church services.

Damai is painfully aware of these prejudices and the injustice of them. Instead of pursuing her dream of ordained ministry, she now seeks to help her people begin to accept their “differently-abled” brothers and sisters as the children of God they are.

Becca, Damai, and PDA videographer David Barnhart, in Gunung Sitoli, Nias, Indonesia, October 5, 2008.

Damai undertakes this heroic effort in a number of ways. First, it turns out she is a computer whiz. During her time in therapy, she benefited from a computer training course that enabled her to get a job at a rehabilitation center in the capital city of her island of Nias. The rehabilitation center, run by a Christian public health organization based in Java, has received funds from Presbyterian Disaster Assistance to provide vocational training to people who lost limbs or were paralyzed as a result of the 2005 earthquake. Damai is now the administrative assistant who is in charge of all the bureaucratic details of the training: keeping the records on the people who attend the three-month sessions, overseeing their room and board as long as they are housed in the center, and running the day-to-day operations of the center.

But in reality her role is much more than just administrative. When participants in the vocational training come to the center, they have the chance to witness a person who, like them, experienced a debilitating injury and yet is sitting at the very front of the center to welcome them while handling herself, her wheelchair and her computer as a pro and being the model of an active, engaged member of society. She is breaking down all the stereotypes they themselves had come to believe about the limitations of someone with physical infirmities.

Damai giving a sign of the cross in the middle of the current vocational training group, Gunung Sitoli, Nias, October 5, 2008.

In addition, Damai has taken the initiative to form a vocal group with each of the incoming classes of trainees. After they have finished their training for the day, Damai calls them together to practice Christian songs, either in Indonesian or their local language of Nias. Damai accompanies them on the guitar. Once a month they go to a local congregation and offer a song during the worship service. I had the privilege of attending one such service and witnessed the shocked looks on the faces of the church members, who were seeing physically challenged people in their church for the very first time.

I asked Damai how she handled the stares and the dumbfounded reactions of her fellow Christians. She said she accepts it as part of her role to educate her people and show them that people like her can make a valuable contribution to their society, including in a worship service, by singing a beautiful song in praise of God.

In other words, although she is not ordained, Damai is indeed, fully and completely, a minister who boldly proclaims the love of Christ to a needy world.

Visit this page on the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance Web site if you would like to see videos about Damai’s progress since the earthquake.

Yours,

Rebecca Young

The 2008 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 94