A Week of Unrest

From our roof looking toward town center

It didn’t start out that abnormally. It was 7am on Monday morning, the kids were dressed for school and heading out the door when our neighbor called out to say there was no school because of unrest.

We like to think of these as the island-version of snow days. We get a handful of them each school year. Usually the troubles are some kind of protest related to a strike or some other grievance with the government. Islanders are very cautious with their kids and don’t want them traveling between school and home if there might be trouble on the streets, so out of caution they will cancel school. When this happens we stay close to home until things quiet down. Usually by the end of the day, even within a few hours, life has returned back to normal.

This time was different. It wasn’t 15 minutes later that we started to hear gunshots. Islanders are generally very peaceful people. There is nowhere that sells firearms on the islands and I don’t personally know an islander that owns a gun. Gunshots meant something much more serious was going on. First the reports came that major roads across the island had been blocked and barricaded with trees, broken down cars, boulders, old fridges, etc. The pictures showed up on Facebook (islanders love Facebook). Throughout the morning we heard more gunshots and then some bigger booms. It would quiet down and then start up again in spurts. Stories and rumors flitted back and forth on WhatsApp and Facebook, while most islanders stayed inside. We locked up early that night and prayed that was the end of it.

Get some energy out: Family exercise time

The next morning it was quiet. Perhaps that’s it?? Neighbors warned that it wasn’t over, but a local shop owner complained, “When you have war, it should just be 24 hours and then everyone should stop and take a rest? Isn’t that right??” Seemed like an okay plan to me, but everyone was waiting for things to start again. We made the quick decision to move our one teammate to our other teammate’s house. We almost waited too long. When Tom left the house with a neighbor, it was only 8:15 but by 8:20, the gunfire started again. Thankfully Tom was being led by a neighbor who is both cautious and knowledgeable about these things. He guided Tom and our teammate through back trails from her house and back to ours. The normally 10-15 minute journey was twice as long but they still did it in 15 minutes, moving at a fast clip the whole way. Once we had our two teammates together and at a safe distance from the fighting we could take a breath of relief. Now we were the ones closest to the fighting but we had food, we had water, we had a contingency plan in place if we needed to leave our house or even evacuate from the island. We were in contact with islanders, our leadership and in turn with embassies. All we had to do now was stay inside, wait and monitor the situation.

We spent 6 days in our house. The normally busy and noisy streets of our neighborhood were empty and quiet. They were not easy days. We have three energetic kids and most of the time we felt like we were just trying to find ways to occupy them:

Puzzle time with new haircuts

Homeschool time!
Get the big puzzle out!
Let’s do family exercise time!
The boys need a haircut!
How about we make some popcorn!
Let’s read another chapter of Boxcar Children!
Who wants to help me make cookies?
Time for a family movie!

You would think that a week at home would have been productive in some ways, but it wasn’t. Between keeping the kids occupied, there was listening to the gunfire and trying to assess the situation. Tom’s phone rang off the hook with island friends (people living in the middle of the fighting, people checking in on us from further out, people sharing information or looking for information on the situation), not to mention colleagues from other islands and our leaders. We found these days both boring and restless, but trying to wade through all the raw information and make wise decisions was stressful. Still each time we felt a peace with the decisions we came to.

Breadfruit chips

Each day had its blessings too. A shop would open briefly so the neighborhood could quickly get a few things. In a calm, I was able to go up the block and find both flour and eggs! A neighbor gave us a couple breadfruit from the tree by his house. The water came on and we were able to fill our barrels. We were able to speak to neighbors about being freed from fear.  We were surrounded by the prayers and encouragements of people back home and around the globe.

The kids knew there was “fighting” going on but they were mostly oblivious to the sounds going on outside. Used to a noisy neighborhood, the kids just tuned out the background noises and went about their days. At one point on the third day our eldest asked, “Is someone popping a bunch of balloons out there??” “No honey, that’s the fighting.” “It’s guns,” our youngest offered. After that revelation, there was some nervousness and questions. “How long is this going to go on?” “What if it goes on for a month?” We assured our kids that if it lasted that long that we would go away somewhere. Already we had seen some neighbors leave, not being able to handle the stress of the situation any longer.

But by the fourth day, the gunfire was less and there were rumors of talks happening on the big island. On the fifth day, there was almost no gunfire at all and we heard a tentative agreement had been reached to end the current fighting (not to mend the greater underlying conflict). Everyone remained nervous and unsure. Soldiers were stationed in our neighborhood and people still stayed at home.  Unfortunately on that fifth day, our daughter came down with a high fever and we briefly wondered if after all this, we’d have to evacuate for medical (not political) reasons.  By the sixth day, the fighting seemed to have completely stopped.  Though movement was still difficult at this point, our team and island contact helped us to get our daughter to a clinic and tested for malaria. She was negative for malaria and thankfully started getting better, and the outing to the clinic showed that other towns and neighborhoods were coming back to life.  The armed dissidents had dispersed and that whole day and night was quiet.

Waiting for malaria test result

On day seven, we woke up to a new day outside. Many of the normal neighborhood sounds were back. Shops were open. Kids were outside. We all got dressed and walked to our teammate’s house to sing, study and have fellowship together.  It seemed fitting that on the seventh day the unrest was over.

PRAYERS ANSWERED
Thank you for all your prayers this week. (Our last blog accidentally didn’t get posted but many of you are on our email list and got several updates about this situation as it unfolded. If you wish to be added to that list, please send us an email.) God is good and we saw His hand providing for us throughout this week whether it was through island friends, providing for our needs, giving us encouragement, peace, wisdom when we needed it. We are thankful for our teammates and for the unity that we had with them and our leadership as we made decisions. We are thankful that the fighting has stopped and that more people weren’t hurt or killed. We’re thankful that our daughter is feeling better.

PRAYERS REQUESTED
Please pray for the islands. This armed conflict is over, but the greater problems and conflict are not resolved. We don’t know how it will come to a head in the future, but we pray that there could be dialogue, that there could be international mediators and that the islands could find justice and good governance without more violence. Pray for the decision makers in this nation. Pray for the transition back to normal life on our island. It will probably take a few days for schools to open and for business to get back to normal. Pray for us personally that we could have opportunities to relax and recover from the strain of the week. Tom’s birthday is this week, pray that we can celebrate it well.  The language project is supposed to be doing consultant checking next week— pray that the one member of the project will make it back to the islands in time for those checks.