Mar/Apr 2003

Life on the Frontlines

As American bombs fell on Afghanistan, missionary John Weaver stayed to mend spiritual wounds.

It's like one of those increasingly unbelievable stories that would be funny if it weren't so awful.

John Weaver tells of a moonless night when he was bounding over rugged desert terrain on a dirt bike. The weak, vibrating headlamp barely illuminated each jarring rut before the bike hit it, one after another. Still, he pressed on.

He was looking for men with guns--killers--who wouldn't be at all happy to see him. They were soldiers, looting air-dropped crates of food, clothing and medical supplies, intended for the region's impoverished homeless. And this was Afghanistan, October 2001--just days after American warplanes had begun bombing the area.

When all the other foreign aid workers fled the country after 9/11, Weaver stayed--the only one who did. "I couldn't see leaving right when the people here needed me the most," says the 33-year-old North Carolinian. In his book about the experience, Inside Afghanistan (W Publishing), he writes, "Potential danger may cause some to worry, but for others it creates a wonderful work atmosphere in which to practice faith."

As field team leader for Shelter Now International (USA)/Shelter for Life, Weaver had been in northeastern Afghanistan nearly a year prior to the World Trade Center attacks. His group gives local Afghans food in exchange for working on construction projects, such as grading dirt roads and building latrines.

"We provided work for 8,000 men," he says of the country's pre-liberation days. Weaver's base of operations was a mud shack in Dasht-e Qaleh, a remote village near the border with Tajikistan. Dominating the local landscape was a tent city.

Weaver says, "Americans simply can't imagine a life that hard"--a life made worse by the constant threat of violence: The Taliban kept an artillery division on a nearby mountain range, from which it would periodically shell the village and border crossings.

Despite the hardships, says Weaver, "the regular Afghan people [not the Taliban] are the most courteous, generous people I know. I honestly believe they would have shielded me from harm if I'd been personally threatened."

And that was an overwhelming possibility in a country where the Taliban often seized Christian aid workers, subjecting them to imprisonment, torture and sometimes death. Even after the American offensive sent Taliban forces scurrying for the hills, the danger to Weaver subsided slowly.

"We were afraid regular Afghans would retaliate against the United States by attacking any available American," he says. It turns out that his very presence among the locals reassured them that Americans weren't after Afghanistan, only the Taliban and their Al Qaida cronies.

The thankfulness of Afghanistan's people and knowing he was doing God's work were not Weaver's only rewards for staying--he also got to watch the Taliban's cannons get blown off their mountainside perch.

"The Taliban and Al Qaida were possessed by evil itself," he says grimly. "Nothing would have stopped them from taking over the entire country, killing everyone who resisted them and turning it into an entrenched terrorist state. As terrible as 9/11 was, it warms the heart to witness God's hand turn something evil into something good."

An indefatigable desire to help God do that is why Weaver stayed when everyone else left--even when helping means suffering a few knocks himself. Take that night when he'd set out to find the looters of the air-dropped supplies. Instead of an Indiana Jones-type confrontation, Weaver became lost in the dark, careened into a ditch and flipped over the handlebars of his dirt bike, knocking himself unconscious.

A friend heard his crash and rescued him. A few days later he found the looters at a local bazaar, selling the goods they couldn't use. Diplomatically, he convinced them to stop stealing from their poorer countrymen.

"There's a great sense of fulfillment," he says. "I go to bed at night and sleep peacefully, knowing that I've helped people, knowing that I'm doing what I believe God has called me to do."
Bob Liparulo

For More Information: Shelter for Life International, P.O. Box 1306, Oshkosh, WI 54903. Call (920) 426-1207, or visit shelter.org.