Cha

Cha forced me to sleep in his bed.

The summer I tried to be a missionary in Togo, I stayed in Cha’s village one long weekend. I protested, but he disappeared and left me wrapped in mosquito netting on a wooden board in his cinderblock house with a dying kerosene lamp I didn’t know how to operate, my stomach swollen with bowl after bowl of rice and tomato sauce he had given me to keep eating. In the middle of the night I blundered out to relieve myself, and a pig squealed in my face in the pitch black.

I tried to plough his millet field by hand the way he showed me, but after ten minutes, he took the hoe back, just a wooden handle attached to iron the shape of a bent arm so you had to lean forward with each chop to reach the ground. I sat at the edge of the grass. When he came back, I displayed the blisters on my palm proudly. He pressed his against mine and showed off huge yellow callouses in the same places. As we walked home across the fields at golden hour, those callouses scraped my T-Shirt when he stopped my chest, stock-still. Then he took off running, and I followed. Rain showered from the sunny sky just as we reached his house.

Another day, we found a chameleon crossing our path, a leafshock against clay red. Cha stood back. Its eyes swiveled toward my fingers as I picked it up gingerly, and black spots appeared on its skin that flashed white. I carried the chameleon arm’s length to Cha’s house, where I half-sealed it in a ziplock bag to give to the missionary’s kids. She explained that people there view a chameleon in your home as death. She said Cha assured her he believed in Jesus now though. This is one of my callouses.

Seo

My last months in South Korea, after two and a half years there, I roved the country on weekend bus rides to its far corners trying to savor and understand a place I loved and hated to leave, straining all five senses to grab final memories that might, with time, eventually explain my attraction to it. I walked green tea fields, bathed in green tea, slept on stone floors with wooden pillows. At the Nagan Folk Village food festival that October, wandering among thatch houses, I tickled spindly ginseng roots, bit soft-toasted crackle-skinned yellow chestnut halves, and squeezed pert bursting persimmons to puff their scent while vendors shoved kimchi straight into my mouth, all to thrumming drums from a troop of dancers in silk blue-white flowing robes.

On the bus home, my head spinning, Seo sat down next to me and, noticing my fat Lonely Planet South America open to Peru, pressed her index finger against mine on the map to say she had just called at the port of Lima. I could hardly imagine her as the navigator of a Maersk shipping tanker, but she insisted she was back in Korea on shore leave before a run to Europe. Some nights, in the middle of the sea, when she wasn’t charting their course, among big storms, she felt her room turn sideways. She struck me as fearless.

After trading stories and we neared the station, she pressed her head into the cushioned seat back and sighed that she had a crush on a stevedore in Iceland. He was tall, blond. “Like you,” she said. Everyone on the ship teased her every time they called in Reykjavík, from the captain to the janitor. The last time they met, she had tried every wile she knew, but he was either bashful or uninterested, giving only a grin as he unloaded containers. She was nervous to see him again. I lugged her suitcase a few steps from the bus for her before she disappeared among the busy neon lights of the night.

Esko

The stars blazed as Esko led us over crunching snow to a smoking wooden box in the forest. Lifting its lid, he pulled out a salmon on a hook and led us back into the cabin, set the salmon on paper on the table. He pinched a hunk of its flesh from its side that sizzled, set it down and sucked his thumb with eyes closed. Then he took three forks off the wall and three mugs and the three of us ate the salmon mostly in silence. Once, he had traveled to Montenegro to go shopping, but that was all. Finland more than satisfied him. “I started the fire in the sauna one hour ago,” he said. “It is ready.” He set the key on its hook with a look back and left.

I lifted the hatchet and bucket off the wall, walked onto the frozen pond in the dark, and cut a hole in the ice. There was no one for miles, not even another cabin, only stars and the moon lighting the snow. I brought three buckets of water up to the sauna and poured one steaming over the rocks on top of the stove. Allison and I got naked and laid down on two levels of the cedar bench side by side as sweat soothed us. 

“An old poet found the salmon of wisdom once,” I said in the dim orange light and hissing steam. “Whoever ate it would gain all the knowledge of the world. He gave it to his servant to cook. The servant turned the salmon on a spit over the fire, and when he tested it, he burned his thumb and immediately sucked it, gaining all the wisdom of the world. He became a poet.”

I jumped up and ran outside down to the pond as fast as I could, sensing steam leap off every part of my body, rolled in the snow three times under the moon and ran back up into the sauna as all my skin contracted and my blood surged with euphoria in contact with the warmth. That night we set an alarm every forty-five minutes but never saw the Northern Lights past the glow of the moon.

Ravi

Monks built a hermitage on a green-black island off Ireland’s west coast called Skellig Michael. For a thousand years they lived in beehive stone huts. Someone at some point even climbed to the barely accessible peak that sticks out like a knife and sat there alone, gardening and praying. A basin carved into the lone shelf just large enough for one person to lie down probably caught rainwater for drinking, archeologists think.

I sat on the ferry to Skellig Michael next to a handsome Indian man who cracked a few jokes before the engine’s roar kept us from talking. Away from land, the waves stopped cresting white and just lolled smooth and steel grey with gannets skimming their valleys coming in and out of sight as the boat lifted and dropped. Gannets look like larger statelier sea gulls with beige-black-marked heads. They almost never die of natural causes. Age ruins their eyes till they lose depth perception, misjudge the surface, and crack their necks diving. I didn’t know what Ravi was thinking until we came back to shore, but we both watched the gannets intently.

Over scones on the pier I asked what brought him to Ireland. He said love and laughed painfully. He had grown up in poverty in southern India, gotten a good education, taken a well-paying job in Singapore, found competitive ballroom dancing, and fallen for his Irish partner. They were together until she realized she wanted to return home. He had come on a last-ditch effort to win her back, to see if maybe he too could live in Ireland. He had just seen her.

“How did it go?”

His face went somber. “We’ll see.” And he looked back out toward Skellig Michael.

Binta

“It all stems from naivety,” Binta began. She said this was the scariest story of her life. 

She was statuesque, “90 percent limbs.” Her accent marked her as a Londoner, a young doctor traveling with an old buddy from medical school, Kaveesh. They had come to snorkel with the sharks nearby. They and Allison and I sat in the dark outside our bungalow on the island of Caye Caulker off the coast of Belize, toes in the sand. 

Moments earlier she had tried to start the story while we ate dinner on a dock, but a voice from the night whispered, “There’s a crocodile behind you,” and we scattered. Sure enough, under the light of our waiter’s cellphone, we saw two caiman’s eyes sticking up from the water. The island was fringed with mangroves and a jade sea and so small that you could walk its white sand breadth in two minutes and its length in twenty. You never would though, because signs everywhere said, “Go slow.”

When we sat down at our place, she said that her very first time traveling outside the UK was at age 22, alone. A friend canceled at the last minute and she decided to go forward anyway. Her plan was to take as much of the Orient Express as still existed, all the way to Cairo. She was so new to travel that on the trip she realized she had never even eaten in a restaurant alone and had no idea what to do with herself sitting there.

In Syria, a Japanese couple suggested visiting a monastery near Damascus, and she arranged with a bus driver to drop her off there, through the help of a bystander who translated the Arabic. Along the way, the driver asked for more money, they argued in hand gestures, and she got off. “I couldn’t understand, of course, but he must have been saying, ‘You’re crazy!’ It was just desert.” She walked for fifteen minutes. Then a motorcycle turned up.

“Again, no English, no Arabic. It was an old man, and I figured he was saying he could take me to the monastery. I thought, ‘He’s an old man. He must have a wife and kids. It must be fine.’” So she hopped on the back of his bike. 

He took her directly to his house, which was a one room shack. “We got off the bike, went in, and he turns and locks the door.” Allison gasped. “And I’m like, ‘Oh great, this is where I’m gonna die.’” Binta paused, tapping the cap of her beer bottle on the picnic table.

She started telling the old man that she needed to go. In response, he kept showing her his watch and she didn’t know if he was saying he would take her in ten minutes or at 10:00 am. “Finally, he was like, ‘Come see my garden.’” We burst into nervous laughter.

“He had fresh tomatoes and cucumbers and started feeding me, telling me I was too skinny, literally trying to force feed me. And I’m thinking no one knows where I am. So when he took me to the garden, I said, ‘Ok, so nice to meet you, but I’m gonna go now.’” 

She set down the bottle cap. “So that’s how I escaped from the old Syrian man who I don’t know whether he wanted to kill me or marry me.

“So you just left?” Allison asked.

“I ran.”

The next night Allison went snorkeling while I worked. She came back wide-eyed. She watched an octopus crawl over rocks and into the inky black at the edge of her flashlight’s reach. Then the guide said to turn the light off, and in the dark, she saw seafire. Bioluminescence.

Sunila

At the bottom of the world at the southernmost tip of Chile, I spent a week with a 92-year-old woman named Sunila. Every night at 3:30 am I would wake up and sneak down to her parlor in my coat to teach English to kids in China online in a whisper. Their parents complained and rated me only two apples out of five, but I had no choice; the house was so small. In the half dark between lessons I heated water to pour over cup after cup of the instant coffee she left out for me. Throughout Patagonia, Nescafe was all I could find and in Tierra del Fuego, I finally fell in love. Sometimes I could hear the wind shake the walls as I took warmth from the coffee. During the days I read Darwin, Bruce Chatwin, and Gabriela Mistral or walked to the ocean to look for penguins or just stand and think. Darwin said: “Indeed it is impossible to bear too strong testimony to the kindness with which travelers are received in almost every part of South America.” Chatwin said: to travel through Patagonia “is the most jaw-dropping experience because everywhere you’d turn up, there, sure enough, was this somewhat eccentric personality who had this fantastic story. At every place I came to it wasn’t a question of hunting for the story, it was a question of the story coming at you.” Mistral said: “The wind wandering in the night sways the wheat” and in Patagonia “the mist is so thick and eternal it makes me forget where the sea’s briny wave tossed me—the land I came to has a long night which hides me like a mother.” And Sunila said very little, but when I said goodbye and we took a photo together, she squeezed my knee.

Ruvin

I usually end up confessing my most personal story to taxi drivers all over the world; sometimes they tell me theirs. In Jerusalem, an older man named Ruvin picked me up on Emek Refaim. “You live back there, eh? Emek Refaim?” he asked, squinting in the rearview mirror. “Very nice,” he rasped. He was bald, powerfully built. He chopped his speech with pregnant pauses and startling bellows that had him rubbing his triceps afterwards to cool down. “You know, I make good money before. Long time ago. Long time ago.” At a light, he thrust the car forward beside another taxi and rolled down his window and mine, jerking his thumb at me saying, “This one lives on Emek Refaim.” The other driver squinted back at me and said slowly, “I have my gun. Maybe I should kidnap you?” They guffawed, the light changed, and Ruvin continued with a long sigh, “Yes, I live in Paris. Good money. I went to Normandy for vacation. It was nice out of Jerusalem, for short time. I met woman. Old. Very strong.” He tensed his biceps and made fists, tossing his head like a bull. “Very strong! You understand, eh? Not beautiful.” He wagged a finger. “Very … strong!” He pumped his fists harder, then stroked his arm. “I made love to her. She ask me work for her. Come to Paris. She was madam. I go to hotel. Collect money. Every day. I muscle, yeah. Someone don’t want pay, I come, they pay. For my birthday, she say me, ‘Choose a girl.’ Ah, Alphonse!” He closed his eyes and shook his head, scraping his stubble with his palm so his lips hung loose. He was almost crying as we passed the Israel Museum with its white Shrine of the Book shaped like a breast. “And now I here again,” he said as he let me out, squeezing his arm and barely listening as I told him to keep the change.

Franz

It took a little before I realized what I had seen, but I leapt from the table the moment I did and chased after the two men, nearly toppling our espressos. Allison was stunned. We were sitting outside a cafe in Thun, Switzerland staring into the distant ring of monstrous white Alps trying to pick out Eiger and Jungfrau. The two men had walking sticks and matching blue backpacks from which dangled the distinctive white shells I had spotted: the first pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela I had ever seen. I caught them just before they entered a wooded trail, and they confirmed they were in fact headed to Spain, beaming as they showed me their Camino passports, stamped all the way from Germany to Switzerland. I asked why. Franz explained that when his father died five years ago, he called his friend and said, “Walk with me.” Every year since, they have hiked for five days, picking up where they leave off each time. From their hometown of Ulm it will take more than a decade to get the final stamp at Santiago de Compostela. When I said I hoped to follow them one day, Franz smiled warmly and said, “Only go.”

Eltaj

I walked out of Rome’s Tiburtina Station utterly lost, following a vague set of directions past a confusing array of other entrances and exits to the metro and bus corrals and taxi stands, way out past everything to a fenced field with a rip I climbed through. A banner on the fence proclaimed in Italian, merrily, “We’re all in the same boat!” At the center of the field stood the abandoned building I sought, the former station, surrounded by tents. In the largest one hastily erected by volunteers I taught an English class to a dozen migrants from various parts of north and central Africa. They took notes, repeated after me, and practiced in pairs, and I think I taught them how to discuss the weather. As I wrapped up and gathered my things, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“Excuse me, can I ask you a question?”

“Of course,” I replied.

The young man before me in an overlarge beige coat leaning on an umbrella asked, “Um, how can I publish my novel?”

Eltaj explained that his uncle had come to Europe decades ago and become a famous novelist, and that he himself had always dreamed of following in his footsteps. When the war in Sudan finally made life unbearable, he began his journey north with a clandestine ride through the desert of Eritrea in the trunk of a car in the hopes of finding a publisher for his already written novel of Darfur. He also had a poetry collection called “Waves and the Sea.” Both were in Arabic. I wish I knew how to publish his work, let alone my own.

Instead I took Eltaj to John Keats’ house on the Spanish Steps a few days later. On the way over he said that he had been delayed in Libya, enslaved for half a year until he could escape in the night, run, and find his way to the shore, get on one of the human smuggler’s boats and cross the Mediterranean with fifty others to Italy where he has been hiding in Rome waiting for his asylum application to process. “I hope to go to Germany where my uncle is.”

I had already met the curator of the museum at Keats’ house, sat and listened to the story of how at the end of his short life, the great English poet had come to Rome as a last ditch effort to stave off the tuberculosis he knew was killing him. He took this house and slowly passed away writing final letters which are splayed on the walls among very tall dark wood bookcases. You can stare out the window as he did from the bed where he died and look into his face at the moment of death, because they have preserved his death mask. It has a troubling calm.

Eltaj traced the letters on the wall with a long finger, sounding out what he could silently in gathering awe that culminated as we stood on the threshold to leave. “Excuse me. What is his most famous poem?”

The best I could, I paraphrased “When I have fears that I may cease to be:” “When I am afraid that I might die before I finish writing everything that I hope to or before I get to express how beautiful the world is or before I fall in love … ‘then on the shore of the wide world I stand alone, and think till love and fame to nothingness do sink.’”

Tears gathered in Eltaj’s eyes as he listened. He said very quietly, “Yeah, nature heals us. Nature is a gift from God that heals us.” We became friends on Facebook, but his account disappeared a few weeks after I left Rome.

Betty

The last time I read my bible was at the Sea of Galilee. My mom had given it to me when I turned fourteen, and I brought it with me to Israel. I sat on the hill where archaeologists think Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount and flipped to a well-worn page covered in underlining and highlights, “You have heard it said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who hate you. If you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even nonbelievers do that?”

Noticing an older woman sitting nearby and thinking she was a German tourist, I asked what brought her. She was actually Palestinian. Again and again in Israel, I was surprised by my inability to determine who was who based on appearance. Palestinians in particular caught me off guard with their fair features.

In reality, Betty’s identity was far more complicated than Palestinian. She moved from neighboring Lebanon to marry a Palestinian doctor in Jerusalem and spent four decades running a hospital on the Mount of Olives across from the Lion’s Gate in the forboding stone wall that encircles the Old City, a life she wrote in her book—A War without Chocolate. We laughed at meeting so far north since we both lived in Jerusalem, and she invited me to visit her home.

A few weeks later I crossed to East Jerusalem with a bottle of arak under my arm. Her memoir describes her family drinking this clear anise liquor under their olive trees after harvests. She took the bottle I brought with a smirk and produced her own unlabeled bottle. “Try this one.” When she put a droplet of water in my glass, the arak clouded milky white. It tasted like licorice.

When she told about huddling on her living room floor protecting her children as Israeli soldiers pounded on the door during the war of ‘67, I realized she meant the living room we were sitting in, the door I had come through. I haven’t lived in one place the way she has, nor have I lived for more than ninety years.

As she spoke, the power went out, and she simply continued. I listened in the dark, rapt. In response to the outage, she said she has no ill will towards Israelis. She believes those words Jesus preached where we met. She prays for Israelis.

Her son came in with a candle and said it’s always been this way, that the news does not reflect the traditional harmony. He said he’d heard that, a hundred years ago, to knit their neighborhoods closer together, Muslim and Jewish families in Jerusalem would exchange their newborns to nurse with the neighbor mother for a few weeks.

I turned to Betty for confirmation, her face lit by candlelight. She was pouring me another glass of arak, and with a droplet of water, turned it from clear to milky white.

Takuya

Halfway to the desert, I met a Japanese man who volunteered in Honduras. We passed further and further into the inner chambers of a hotel in a windcut chasm in Morocco’s highlands, seeking a silence apart from our chattering tour group, past the bustling clink of hotel staff, and sheltered finally from the wind’s rattling the wooden window frames against the outer stone walls. I needed the silence to concentrate because he didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Japanese. Our only communion was Spanish—and streams of mint tea poured by a waitress who found us anyway smiling.

I have no memory of his face because the room was lit dimly, in the same way that whenever I listen in a language I have only studied not my own, I feel as though I only hear dimly. He was at two removes, so take this story with a grain of salt. There was a carpeted floor and heavily carpeted seats. My memory carpets even the table.

As steam rose into our faces from the teacups we held close for warmth, he said that Japan’s equivalent of the Peace Corps sent him to Honduras to teach math. Intrigued, I asked how travel had changed him. Once, he said, he made a pilgrimage to the tree in India where Buddha found enlightenment, to the source of the faith he had grown up with, to Bodha Gaya. As he sat six days practicing zazen, he thought about the fact that fewer and fewer young people in Japan believe, and that maybe one day, belief would disappear altogether. So he asked his teacher, sitting with him under the tree, “Do you think Buddhism will eventually just disappear?”

“Yes, maybe,” the teacher answered. “It could be like a temple that people no longer visit. Without money, it falls into ruin. But Buddhism will always be in the heart of the Japanese. Whenever someone has need, they will never stop asking God for it. The building may not last forever, but the religion will.”

Takuya added, looking around the dimly lit inner chamber of the hotel as the waitress poured steaming mint tea, “The same must be true for Christianity and Islam.”

That night in my room, buried under three heavy blankets with all my clothes on and a fleece and a headlamp, I read desperately about sand. The following day would be my first time in a real desert. It is extremity that makes deserts, I learned. The cold of night and the heat of day cause rocks to expand and constrict too fast for their comfort, and crack off little chips that over time move in the wind against each other and freeze and heat again and break down more and more until they are finally left as just grains, the point at which they can no longer break, impervious to wind, heat, cold, or each other.

Yet, the smaller they get, the more easily they move. Wind collects the grains together according to its whims in tall dunes that also themselves then very slowly, continually, too slowly for us to see, move.

Soinbhe

“I always keep an open mind about the gentlefolk, you see.”

At her desk overlooking Ireland’s cliff shore set with a pale inlay of the North Atlantic, Soinbhe whispered as if the books surrounding us might hear. In Donegal, you still avoid saying “fairy” whenever you can.

Shelves of the Troubles and classic literature, fairytales and other Irish history covered three walls of her study, the fourth a window onto the dark-green seascape below. As she handed me a mug of coffee and the wind tapped outside, she pulled one volume from a corner of the library that had her name on the spine: A Hive for the Honeybee. “This one’s quite feminist.” She winked and told me she had been an author before age stole her focus. A week later, I would read it cover-to-cover on the floor of the Cancun airport.

Her voice was so low that I could barely hear what she said, so I leaned in to ask about the collection of fairytales that also had her name on the spine. What was it like to live in Ireland? Do people still believe them? Her eyes twinkled as she smoothed wisps of white hair and deployed a bit more brogue, very very softly.

“D’you see the ringfort over there,” she said, glancing at the shock of green hill closest the sea. “There’s a fairy path from it to the other one there,” she continued, pointing inland. Ringforts were ancient grey ruins all over the landscape, I had just read the night before. Many attribute their construction to the “gentry.” The so-called ley lines between them are set apart for the otherworldly creatures in a kind of fragile truce, and rarely do people in Ireland build a house on a known ley line, even today. 

Soinbhe explained that it was particularly dangerous to be caught unawares when you cross one. “You have to tuck your thumbs into your fists like this.” She held up both hands to teach me the technique—with some urgency, I thought. “Otherwise, they lead you away by your thumbs. I always do it just to be safe.” She sipped her coffee.

“One day I walked my dog over there, and I must have forgotten, because hours later I stumbled home from the forest with no recollection where I’d been. My husband rushed to me, panic-stricken. They took me to the hospital to check my wits.” She leaned back. “And there was nothing wrong with me a’tall.” Far below, the waves crested along the entire length of the bay in aching, slow, seemingly endless rows.

That night when I crossed the beach in the dark, hearing the rush of surf unseen to my right and sensing the mass of rock face ahead that I would ascend by a narrow path, I kept one thumb tucked into my fist, the other out.

Julio

Normally, a kilo of cocaine travels through the U.S. under layers of disguise. It is wrapped in a layer of plastic, smeared with a layer of mayonnaise and coffee grounds, then sealed in another airtight layer of plastic. On the side of the highway near Waco, Texas, Julio sat calmly in his car as the dogs searched the trunk, certain they would never pick up the scent. Then the officer reappeared at his window, package in hand.

“It’s been a long road.” Julio shakes his head, sitting in the conference room of Mission Lazarus. “But God has helped me a lot.”

He has short, salt-and-pepper hair and a pained smile. Now as he drives into the mountains around San Marcos to preach every day, he reflects on everything that happened since he first left Honduras and was forced to come back.

At 20, he and a friend crossed Mexico under a train. They climbed onto the brake cylinders—just wide enough to straddle—with no food or water and no idea how long the journey would last. The train didn’t stop for 48 hours. When Julio finally slid down again, his legs gave out, and it was several moments before he could limp to a nearby convenience store. The woman behind the counter stared in horror.

“What?” he asked.

“Mugre,” she pointed. He borrowed a bar of soap and washed the thick, brown layer of grime off his skin at a nearby river.

During the next leg to Mexico City, migrants openly rode on every available surface of the train, and he and his friend found a platform between two cars where they could sit. He grabbed rope to lash himself to the train for security, but his friend didn’t. Having fallen asleep, Julio woke up to find his friend gone. “I looked all over the train for him. I asked everyone. But I never heard anything about him again. I’m sure he fell and died.”

After reaching the U.S., he found work in roofing. Six months into his first job, he took a wrong step and fell two stories, breaking his spine. His coworkers, who were also undocumented, gathered their gear, abandoned the site, and left him in a coma. He woke up in a hospital, thinking he had hit rock bottom.

Miraculously, he healed and decided to go back to work roofing, but he made sure to find a company that required harnesses. He also found a wife and started a family. Thrilled to be making $800 per week, he thought his dream had come true. Ever since his father left when he was 7 and he watched his mother struggle to feed their family, his desire had been steady work.

One day, a coworker approached asking for a favor. He sensed the coworker was involved with drugs but thought nothing of it. One thing led to another, and before he knew it, he was transporting drugs for a cartel. Twice a month he would make $10,000 delivering a package. “Eventually I wasn’t doing it for the money. I was doing it for the drugs,” he says. When his wife and children left him, he plunged further into addiction.

He agreed to make the run through Texas, not knowing that his boss had tipped off the police. Waco is a notorious bottleneck that drug traffickers have to circumvent increasingly creatively. The cartel had decided to sacrifice Julio. “As they stopped me with four kilos, another hundred went by on the highway.”

The night he got to prison, Julio fell on his knees and begged for forgiveness. “I needed that time. God gave me that time to set me free from drugs. Before that I always went to church, but  I even used drugs at church.” Facing 15-45 years for five felonies including drug and arms trafficking, Julio dreamed that God told him he would spend only 22 months incarcerated. “I said, ‘Really?’ But I felt this indescribable peace.”

At the sentencing, the judge, one of the strictest in Waco, surprised everyone by setting his punishment at 8 years. His lawyer urged Julio to accept. When Julio explained the dream, the lawyer, an American who spoke perfect Spanish, said, “Look I’m a Christian too, but you’re facing decades in jail. You have to take this.”

When Julio stood up, the judge asked if he agreed to the sentencing. Julio said, “No. God says what will happen. You don’t say what will happen.”

Stunned, the judge listened to the prosecutors who rushed forward to whisper with him, his face slowly turning red. When they returned to their seats, he turned to Julio again. “In twelve years dealing with narcotraffickers, this is the first time that prosecutors have asked me to give such a steep reduction. Julio Cesar Palma is hereby sentenced to 22 months, followed by deportation.”

The second he pounded the gavel, Julio felt a rush of cleansing water run over him. He turned to his lawyer and smiled, “God always has the last word.”

During the remainder of his sentence, his cellmates noticed that he kept himself apart and seemed to look beyond the walls. Eventually they said, “You’re always studying that Bible. You might as well teach us what you’re learning.” So they made him their preacher.

“The one who has been forgiven much, loves much,” he says. “The Lord saved me from drugs. The Lord saved me from prison. The Lord healed my spine. The Lord gave me my family. A new family here in Honduras. My wife and my son. God has been too good to me.”

Nelsy

A tumor the size of an orange made Nelsy curious.

She first noticed the lump growing in her neck at age 12 and went to see specialists in Tegucigalpa, Honduras’ capital. The doctors concluded it was a tubercular ganglion and prescribed medicine accordingly. She went home thinking she was on track towards healing within months and even saw a reduction in the tumor.

Meanwhile, a doctor visiting from Turkey sent her biopsy to the Mayo Clinic on a hunch. The results came back as Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. She immediately started a course of chemotherapy and entered a painful period of slow healing when in her darkest moments she questioned, “Why me?” “Why not me?” her mother encouraged her to ask instead. Though she lost her hair and suffered terribly, she survived, grateful to God and invigorated in her vocation.

She has thanked Dr. Nasrala, also a Christian, every time she’s gone back to Teguz since. “Without his help, I wouldn’t be alive today.”

Ironically, she had always wanted to be a doctor. As a child, she made the neighborhood kids visit her mock clinic. However, Nelsy’s family could not afford to send her to the universities in Honduras, so she applied to programs abroad. A program in Cuba offered a full scholarship shortly after her cancer, and she jumped at this miraculous chance.

In Havana, the diversity of the people she met from all over Latin America astounded her. “Chileans are so open-minded and frank.” Once, when the cafeteria announced that they had run out of chicken, all the Central American students lowered their heads and resigned themselves to eating rice and beans, but the Chileans stood up and protested. “Chileans, Uruguayans, Argentines, they demand their rights.”

She, on the other hand, struggled to find courage in Cuba. She was only 16 and ill-prepared to adjust to being away for the first time. “I cried every night for three months and wanted to go home.” She asked her mom to send money to buy a ticket three times, and the last time, she got all her bags packed and then hesitated on the doorstep.

A Cuban friend, Elena, who normally had a gentle way, rushed in and grabbed her by the shoulders, practically shaking her. Elena stared into her eyes. “Honduran women are strong. You can do this. If you go home now, you will only be another mouth for your mother to feed, but if you finish your studies, you will go back a doctor who can help not only your own family but countless others.”

Nelsy wiped away her tears and never looked back. She finished the seven year course and met her husband in the process. Though he now has to complete further surgical training in Guatemala City, where she visits him frequently, she ended up taking a job near his hometown in the south of Honduras. Her days now are spent digging into the lives of her patients at Mission Lazarus and making sure no one misses out on the chance God gave her, asking as many questions as she can.

Her work takes her deep into remote Honduran communities where such sensitivity can mean the difference between life and death. Patients in the mountains often do not know how to communicate their symptoms, and she has to use all the resources at her disposal to investigate.

“Many doctors treat the patient like only a body. I want to always treat others like a person.”

Majda

Just before the war, Majda gave birth.

Violence flared across the border in Croatia as Yugoslavia disintegrated, but war in Bosnia still seemed unthinkable in 1993. The various ethnicities in her city Mostar had co-existed peacefully for five hundred years, a celebrated Ottoman bridge linking their predominantly Muslim east side with a Catholic west over the teal water of the Neretva. Calls to prayer from the stone minarets dotting the skyline competed with each other, not the bells of the churches.

We sat at Majda’s table over small cups of coffee she prepared in a copper kettle, the Bosnian way, waiting for the grounds to settle and rich crema to form. “This house was totally destroyed,” she said, attributing her husky voice to tobacco between long breaths. “I started to smoke then.”

She and her husband, Dragan, faced a choice: leave like the droves of others who scattered to safety around the Balkans or stay and wait out what they hoped would not last long. Her Muslim heritage and his Orthodox made them one of the many mixed marriages in Mostar that encouraged this hope. Then a Croatian general bombed the bridge …

Listen to the whole story in Episode 91.