Armed Robbery (and an Invitation to Be My Ally)

Andy and I are walking down a busy stretch of beach on the Ecuadorian coast: vendors sell snacks on the sand as children scamper in and out of the turquoise waves at the edge of the vast expanse of the Pacific. A moment or two after entering an empty section of the beach where the long line of hotels and guesthouses gives way to sheer cliff face, we hear yelling behind us and turn to see what’s happening. It takes a second or two to comprehend.

It doesn’t seem real.

But there they are: two men with faces covered in black balaclavas, machetes held high over their heads, sprinting toward us from a mere twenty feet away.

The vision sinks in. We turn and run as fast as we can, but it won’t be fast enough.

Adrenaline surges through my veins. I am fear with legs, and while the animal of my body instinctively flees the threat, my brain processes everything in an instant: They might rape me. They might kill us. This might be the end.

There is an unclimbable wall of rock to our left, and the ocean to our right–into which we could try to escape, but there would be no advantage in struggling against our attackers in water up to our necks. They could drown us, butcher us with their three-foot-long blades. Stretching ahead of us, there’s nothing but empty beach for about a mile, so we can’t outrun them–if we try, they may tackle us with their machetes, and that will not end well.

“Stop!” I call to Andy. “Let’s just stop and give them what they want.” And let’s hope that all they want is what we’re carrying.

We wait, looking at each other. Looking behind us. In seconds, they’re upon us, yelling and threatening us with their weapons. Mostly, they swarm Andy, who is wearing the backpack and has the cellphone and wallet in his pockets. They move the machete back and forth impatiently near his arm, still yelling, as he reaches into his front pocket to dig out the wallet. I say something to him in English, maybe hurry up or let them get it. I am terrified that they will slice his arm, or his neck.

Then they have the backpack and Andy’s pockets are empty. “Este es todo, es todo,” I tell them. My voice is loud. Reasonable. Calm, in a way–but laced with fear; seeking to appease. (I may have said, “por favor.” I can’t remember. My entire consciousness was screaming, please don’t hurt him! Please leave us alone now! But I don’t know whether those pleas were translated into words.)

Now the men look at us again. Hold up their machetes. “¡Va!” they yell. “Go!”

We turn to move and one of the men makes another threatening movement in the air with his blade. “¡Corriendo!

And we run. We run, and see our attackers running back in the opposite direction, further down the desolation of the empty beach. Andy catches a glimpse of them scrambling up a hidden path along the cliff from which they apparently descended, and suddenly I can no longer run. I walk doubled over through the loose sand; I am going to be sick. But then, instead of vomiting, I erupt into uncontrollable sobs. Andy is calm and consoling.

Afterward, Andy’s hands shake as he dials our bank to report his stolen credit and debit cards, and as he quickly types out new passwords for all of our online accounts from a hotel computer, but he does not cry. He does not re-live the event, over and over, for the next several days, he does not come down with a debilitating gastrointestinal illness by the end of the day, and his body does not lose its ability to regulate temperature for over a week, succumbing to either an erratic, low-grade fever or a fight-or-flight response on repeat. (These were the ways my body responded to what I experienced as an existential threat.)

Andy tells me later that it did not enter his mind that the men on the beach might rape me or kill us.

This fear, I believe, is one of the key differences between moving through the world as a man and moving through the world as a woman. I have been afraid of being raped–and possibly murdered–as far back as I can remember. It was a learned fear, directly taught by my mother and other concerned adults who wanted to make sure I knew which kinds of situations and men to avoid in order to keep myself safe. During my childhood, when a little girl a few years older than me was kidnapped and murdered in my sleepy small town, these fears were further cemented. But as the years went on, my friends and I had our own firsthand experiences with threatening men and boys to reinforce our sense of vulnerability; to remind us that we were rapable.

Sometimes this has meant having strangers yell their sexual intentions directly at me on the street; other times it comes in the form of objectifying comments, or being groped and grabbed. A couple of times, I have even been followed–once, in Buenos Aires, I ran and hid in a churchyard, my heart pounding in my chest, as the man who had been trailing me entered the churchyard, too, and looked around for awhile before finally losing interest and leaving. Over the course of my 29 years, I’ve experienced sexual harassment in my high school classroom, at work, while getting a massage… you name it.

These experiences vary in their intensity, and yet all of them–large and small–are linked together because I subconsciously recognize that they exist along a continuum of sexual exploitation and violence. They all signify the same terrifying reality that these men feel entitled to women’s bodies–to my body–and there’s no way for me to predict how far they might take that sense of entitlement in a given situation. Rape and sexualized murder lie at one end of the continuum, and this knowledge means that my various experiences of lesser degrees of harassment, assault, and violation exist within the context of that looming threat.

The armed robbery on the beach in Ecuador and the difference between Andy’s and my experiences in the same high-stress situation is illustrative of the fact that although both men and women (not to mention children of both sexes) are impacted by male violence, gender still largely determines its impact and frequency. As the #metoo campaign has made clear, male violence in its various forms–and the rape culture that condones and upholds it–is not a matter of deviant behavior by a few “bad apples” on the fringe, but rather a reality woven into the fabric of our society as a whole–present in our daily lives, workplaces, and relationships.

The prevalence of all this is no revelation to any of the women I know, but at least in my community here in Vancouver, all the recent publicity around sexual assault and harassment has sparked useful conversations, especially between women and men.

Although ending male violence will require transformation on a political, cultural, and systemic level, that transformation will never come without change in our interpersonal relationships and individual perspectives, so I am convinced that it must begin on a deeply personal level. Addressing rape culture and male violence is, first and foremost, spiritual work.

The change that is needed will involve more than an ideological shift, or legislated progress. Courageous, committed women have been resisting and working to end male violence for generations, but change will also require vulnerability, humility, compassion, and courage on the part of men who commit themselves to joining with us as allies to become part of the solution. For men, joining the struggle will mean men opening themselves up to being challenged, and being changed.

I see this happening around me, and I am heartened. I appreciated a recent blog post by the youth pastor at our church, in which he bravely articulated the fact that even as a victim of male violence himself, he has also been responsible for upholding and benefiting from rape culture in various ways. His vulnerable reflections expressed, eloquently and with nuance, the differences between his experience of sexual assault and those of female survivors for whom the continuing threat of repeated violence continues to shape day-to-day life on an ongoing basis.

I’ve also appreciated the way that my husband and other men in our church community, after taking the time to listen to the stories of the women around them, have begun meeting together for conversation and learning about male violence and the toxic versions of masculinity that our culture teaches. They are seeking to engage in the hard work of uncovering and uprooting these things in themselves; challenging one another to grow into healthy masculinity and to interrupt and resist both the overt and insidious patterns of violence at work in their relationships, workplaces, and wider community.

We are still at the beginning of a long journey, but I so appreciate the willingness of these men to listen, to take responsibility for their own thoughts and actions, and to engage with these issues even when it’s uncomfortable–understanding that the women around them don’t have the luxury of choosing whether or not to pay attention.

My heartfelt request to all the men in my life is to stand alongside me as a woman by doing the same.

No Room

“Rohingya Madonna and Child,” A linocut print I made during Advent this year.

The weather in Vancouver has been cold recently. This morning is was -3 degrees Celsius outside, and frigid enough inside our apartment to see our breath as we looked out at the bare arms of the trees with the snowcapped mountains of the North Shore rising behind them.

We are drawing near to the end of Advent: the season of light; of hope and expectation–but also of longing. We are celebrating Christ’s entry into the world, remembering his humble, vulnerable entry into solidarity with his own creation as an infant. We retell the story of his undignified birth as an outsider in a city where few people were ready to welcome him. Perhaps, with the benefit of 2,000 years’ worth of hindsight, we imagine ourselves in the company of the shepherds, who heard and believed, or of the wise men, who recognized a king in the form of an ordinary village child and came to pay their respects. I’ve heard this story since I was a child myself, and instinctively I’ve always placed myself in the camp of those who were ready to welcome Jesus into the world.

But then again, all through this Advent season I have walked up and down the streets of my neighborhood past trees and houses strung with twinkling lights, and past homeless men and runaway youth who huddle under sleeping bags or sit collecting change in paper cups, the damp cold of the sidewalk seeping into their bones. This, while tens of thousands of homes sit empty across our city, offering passive income to investors rather than shelter to people who need it.

I follow the news about Rohingya refugees who are being raped, burned alive inside their own homes, and hacked apart with machetes. Some live through horrible violence, and–after fleeing with their elderly grandparents and newborn babies in tow–cross the border to the relative safety of Bangladesh to be turned back to the hell they have just fled by border guards who are “just doing their job.”

I read about the fear and suspicion running so rampant in the country of my birth that the nation as a whole is turning its back on refugees, slashing the number of people who will be resettled annually by more than half and passing laws to keep people from many parts of the world out of the country all together.

I look around and I realize that we still live in a world where there is often no room  for the vulnerable members of our society who represent Christ in our midst. We still live in a world where Jesus is often met with the cold dismissal: No room.

So as I prepare to celebrate Christ’s coming on Christmas day, I think long and hard about how I can make room for Christ in the middle of the cold winter we find ourselves in right now, and how we as a society can extend welcome to Him in all of His distressing disguises.

Prayers for the deported

Today, The Mudroom has published an essay I wrote about the grief of journeying alongside refugee claimants who are denied asylum, and the ways that my coworkers and I have learned to care for our souls so that we can continue to reach out to new arrivals despite the recurring pain of having friends deported. Here’s how it starts:

Silently, we sit around in a circle as my co-worker picks up the first candle, speaking a name and a prayer as she lights the wick and sets the tiny flame down in the middle of the table.  We each follow suit, one prayer and tongue of fire after another.

God, we don’t know where they are or if they’re alive…

Please keep her safe…

Please provide whatever he needs…

Just don’t let them be alone….

May she know that she is loved.

Each candle on the table represents a friend who has been deported. Each prayer is for a family or an individual we have accompanied through the process of making a refugee claim in Canada. These people have all failed to secure the protection they have asked for, often because their story was not believed…

You can read the rest of the piece over at the The Mudroom.  If you are someone who works with/lives alongside marginalized communities facing frequent violence or loss, what are the ways that you have learned to tend your soul in such a way that you are able to continue loving and reaching out without succumbing to burnout, hopelessness, or compassion fatigue? How can we strengthen ourselves to live as friends and allies with the oppressed over the long haul? I’d love to hear from you.

Two Canadas

two canadas

Every week, our community gathers for a shared meal. We are made up of staff, volunteers, newly-arrived refugee claimant families living in community with one another in the share space of the welcome houses, and families who have already moved out and are in various stages of establishing themselves in Canada.  Someone volunteers to cook, and we indulge in Kurdish or Afghan or Congolese food, getting to know each other a bit better by experiencing the smells and flavors that the cooks for that week have grown up with.

It’s getting late on a Tuesday night, and the crowd is thinning out. My friend has come to community dinner after an early morning and a long day at work, but he stays to wash dishes anyway. As we stand together at the sink, scrubbing and rinsing the plates and glasses, I ask him how work is going. He works in the most impoverished part of Vancouver, known locally as the Downtown East Side. This diverse neighborhood is home to some vibrant and inspiring communities, full of people whose stories of creativity and resilience would take your breath away.  Paradoxically, it is also a place where issues of drug addiction, homelessness, and street prostitution are concentrated and contained in the middle of what is otherwise known as one of the “most livable” cities in the world. It’s the same neighborhood where Andy and I lived with the Servants community for six months when we first arrived in Canada, and it’s currently the epicenter of BC’s fentanyl crisis.

Fentanyl is an opioid 100 times stronger than morphine, and it has become so common in the street drugs sold and consumed in the Downtown East Side that 80% of the street drugs tested in a recent study were laced with it. This means that on a daily basis, the desperate people turning to drugs to cope with their pain and trauma—such as sexually exploited women, abused foster children who have aged out of care, and people with chronic, untreated mental illness—are now at higher risk of losing their lives, because the same dosage of heroin, cocaine, or crystal meth that would have merely provided a short period of euphoric escape in the past is now likely to deal a death blow. Overdose deaths are nothing new in Vancouver, but the result of fentanyl’s proliferation has been such a sharp increase in overdose deaths across BC (922 in 2016 alone) that our provincial health officer has declared a public health emergency, and the province has urged the federal government to do the same.

My friend’s job has made the crisis personal. He’s been trained to use Narcan, an opiate antidote that works as an emergency treatment for overdoses by blocking the effects of opiates on the brain. During one of his shifts, he found a man in the street who had overdosed on an opiate laced with fentanyl, and he saved the man’s life by injecting him with naloxone and waiting with him until an ambulance arrived.

My friend tells me about the sense of fulfillment he gets from being part of a community at work that is building people up, and the happiness he feels in seeing people make progress in their lives as a result of the care and respect they’ve been shown. He reflects on the anger he feels about the government’s complacency in responding to the fentanyl crisis, and the way that the down-and-out people he sees in the neighborhood are robbed of their dignity in a million different ways on a daily basis. He even reflects on the similarity between the indifference of the wealthier people he sees interacting with homeless people in the Downtown East Side, and the privileged obliviousness with which he once lived his life in his home country—before he lost everything, before his family sought asylum on the other side of the world, before they entered into temporary poverty and into the stressful process of waiting for The Powers That Be to decide their fate in a hearing room.

I am moved by my friend’s compassion; by the fact that instead of losing himself in anger or despair over the injustice that he himself is experiencing, he is instead choosing to throw himself into the hard work of confronting suffering, building relationships, and doing what he can to make the world a better place. My friend hails from a country that has been torn apart by war. He and his family were forced to flee their home under threat of death, and so far, they have experienced the refugee protection system here in Canada as an unresponsive bureaucracy that is yet to grant them protection or provide any promise of permanence or safety. (So much depends on the subjective assessment of the particular human being assigned to decide your case, the potential ignorance or inflexibility of the system, or how well or poorly your lawyer does their job…)

Yet instead of feeling self-pity, what my friend feels is a sense of righteous anger on behalf of all those who are unjustly suffering in our society. “You get very tired, but at the same time there is something pushing you,” he explains, speaking of his sense that God strengthens and inspires him to continue being present with people around him who are in difficult circumstances.

We discuss the idea that there are actually two Canadas: one inhabited by wealthy people who can choose to go about their lives without ever facing the brutal realities of poverty, addiction, and injustice in their country, and another inhabited by marginalized people like the ones my friend meets at work. He views the world of the Downtown East Side as the more honest one because the people he’s gotten to know there are so real. “There’s no fakeness,” he explains. “If I had to choose between the two,” my friend states with conviction, “I would choose to stay with those guys [in the Downtown East Side].”

Tears spring to my eyes as I realize that in the solidarity my Muslim friend describes, I am encountering the heart of Christ. I realize that, in the relatively brief time that he has lived in this country—with precarious status, no less—my friend has engaged more fully with Canadian society than the majority of people who have lived here their entire lives without ever having to justify their presence within these borders. I realize that this man’s life challenges me to embody the ideals that I myself profess but so easily fall short of living out. My friend is a refugee, but that label doesn’t even come close to capturing who he really is.

I pray for the day when my friend’s family will be allowed to officially call this place home, the day the beauty of their lives and contributions will be recognized and welcomed, and the day that my friend’s longings for justice will be fulfilled.