CSI: Jos

Some days just don't turn out like you think they will, know what I mean?

This past weekend we hosted a sports ministry retreat at our campsite just outside of Jos proper. We were not in charge of the programming, just the facilities, food (recall my shopping trip with Mamma Hanatu), and a little canteen. Things had been going fairly well during the first two days, except that due to the number of participants fluctuating on a nearly hourly basis, we had to keep making runs into town for food. Saturday morning Claudia and I were doing just that but we kept getting these texts on the cell phones asking us to hurray up because people were not happy and there was a bad atmosphere at camp. No more details were given except some mention of running out of bread for breakfast, so we grab a few extra loaves and get out there as soon as we made our purchases. Upon arriving, however, we discover that there was a much bigger issue at hand than just some hungry bellies (though, that can be a pretty serious problem here, too).

Apparently, when one of our guards did not show up for work the night before, a search party was sent out and discovered him dead in the river bordering our property. So when we arrived, the body had been pulled out of the water and now needed transporting to the hospital. The chief of the village was there to oversea the procedure and several other men helped to pout the corpse in Claudia's truck. It was fairly bloody due to to some gash wounds to the head. Now, I did not have a chance to go near the corpse, much less take pictures, so you'll have to use your best Hollywood imagination. When Claudia returned from the hospital, we began to try and put some pieces of the puzzle together. Babba Afan, the guard, normally walked the couple of kilometers from his village to work. but unfortunately, often spent a good deal of time with the local brew before coming. He was an older gentleman and we had had an intense rainstorm the previous evening so not only was the river swollen, but the footbridge across it was mighty slick. We heard that a shoe was found on the bridge but the body was pulled out a couple hundred meters down a winding, narrow, -river, which seemed odd. Also giving us some pause were the seriousness of the gashes in Babba Afans's head, he messed up jaw, and the amount of blood he seemed to lose. So, the only thing to do was to go check out the crime scene. Four of us went down to the footbridge to have a look around and I'm telling you, it was straight off of CSI. I watched, somewhat bemused, as the tree trunks were inspected (with the naked eye) for skin or hair remnants and attempts were made to identify footprints on the boards of the bridge. I had to stop myself from asking out loud, "But what would the motive have been?" At the end of the day, we concluded that he might have fallen a couple times en route and then slipped and knocked his head really hard on the bridge as he fell into the river. No autopsy was done (they rarely are here), nor was a police report officially filed, so we'll never know for sure. I do know that Claudia's truck has never been so clean, though. She was just going to take a hose to it and was told that it had to be completely cleaned out and sanitized so that there would not be any suspicion of any of the blood being used for any kind of idol sacrifice. I was thinking more along the lines of disease transmission prevention, but was informed that animistic worship is still pretty rampant here and that's the reason for the thorough cleansing.

Babba Afan's death certainly caught me by surprise, but it has opened up a neat door to the village where he was from. The participants of the sports camp took the initiative to gather a collection of money to give to the bereaved family and Babba's family hardly knew what to do. Then some of us camp staff attended the funeral and burial on Monday (a whole other story) and the family and village elders were profoundly touched that we could make the effort to attend. This is not a Christian area and yet when we were leaving the village, the chief said, "We could really use a missionary like you, Aunty Claudia, here." Maybe, just maybe, Christ's love and compassion was communicated. You won't hear a CSI episode with that as the closing line.