Strangers in Dangerous Lands: Risks, including death, a worthy reality for many missionaries

10 most-dangerous countries for missionaries1. North Korea2. Somalia3. Syria4. Iraq5. Afghanistan6. Saudi Arabia7. Maldives8. Pakistan9. Iran10. YemenSource: Open Doors USA

Missionary MacGyverBIMI audiovisual director Don Arnold loves being called "the MacGyver of missionaries" as he travels the world, documenting mission work.His most recent making-something-from-nothing miracle occurred after a typhoon devastated the Philippines in 2013. He found himself lost on an island with no cellphone signal. So he climbed a telephone pole and, working with only bits of metal and cord, he patched into the phone line."I had no idea if it would work at the time," he says with a grin.Being handy in a crises is invaluable for Arnold since his missionary assignments can put him in explosive situations that require quick thinking.In 2003, he was in the Ivory Coast just as a fragile ceasefire in the country's civil war ended. Crowds armed with iron bars, clubs and machetes were killing foreigners and civilians. France, Spain and the United Nations commandeered commercial airliners to evacuate foreigners; military pilots flew the passenger jets.The night he was waiting for evacuation inside the airport in the capital city of Yamoussoukro, Arnold noticed a passenger plane's terrifying and bizarre takeoff."There were no airport lights outside, but the pilot turned off the cabin and cockpit lights on an Air France jet, then hit the runway in complete darkness, full throttle, snapped the plane up, then made it sharply bank and turn," Arnold says. "No one sshould do that to a passenger plane, but military pilots do it out of desperation when there's a good chance anti-aircraft guns are targeting them. It's called 'assault mode.'"It sounds like the simulated battle test from in "Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan" in which cadets had to figure out how to rescue civilians from peril under no-win circumstances."The Kobayashi Maru!" Arnold says, nodding happily in agreement.Like many tech wizards, he is a "Trek" fan who knows Capt. James Kirk conquered the test by rigging the game -- reprogrammig the computer simulation. Kirk maintained the Kobayashi Maru was a crucial test because the way one faces death is as important as how one lives life.Arnold says he saw a colleague in Zaire face his own version of Kobayashi Maru in the 1990s. He was traveling with BIMI missionaries and Zairen colleagues to a remote village when a gasket on their Jeep's engine blew. Arnold MacGyvered a patch with pieces of a laminated book cover, but the delay forced the group to travel at night."The road is awful, unmarked, no GPS, and we're headed through six-foot-tall sawgrass with no real landmarks to steer us to a village that isn't on maps," Arnold recalls. "The driver goes by instinct like, 'OK, I've driven this way about an hour now, I should make a left.'"Then, at the top of the hill, we see 200 armed bandits high on something, blocking the road."The bandit leader and mission translator argued for two hours, with the outlaw screaming that he was going to take the women as hostages as well as steal the Jeep. Arnold discreetly slipped enough water and food into his knapsack for three days. If gunfire broke out, he planned to run into the jungle to hide with his colleagues.But as the argument continued, a Zairen pastor held a Bible above his head and began telling the story of Daniel's miraculous night in the lions' den. Then he began singing "Amazing Grace." The bandits drifted away; the missionary group drove on to their village safely."In (Zaire), there's great respect for holy men, whether they're Muslim, village shamen or pastors," Arnold says. "They believe there's a higher power and holy ones communicate with it."The outlaws were pragmatic; no battered vehicle was worth antagonizing Daniel's mysterious God.Witnessing genocideRobert Parham knew he was going to ace the third-grade spelling bee. The son of missionaries, he was living an idyllic childhood in Jos, a city in northern Nigeria. He loved his school and, the day of the bee, had already memorized every word in his vocabulary book."Suddenly, a man burst into class; he was soaked in sweat and he was terrified," remembers Parham, now executive director of Nashville's Baptist Center for Ethics. "Everyone in class knew this man was running for his life."The man was Igbo, a minority ethnicity, mostly Christian and mostly living in southeast Nigeria. It was the man's horrific luck to live in Jos just as a genocide against Igbos was beginning.In the classroom, he begged the teacher to hide him from a Muslim mob. The frightened teacher led him to the principal, and the man hid on campus. But the next morning, a mob dragged the man from his hiding place to a grassy spot between the school dorms and playing fields and beat him to death.In 1967, the southeastern portion of Nigeria seceded to create the nation of Biafra in a desperate attempt to avoid anti-Igbo violence. In retaliation, Nigeria barricaded Biafra's food supplies and soon the international media was reporting that thousands of Biafrans were starving.U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk declared that the U.S. could do nothing to quell the violence in Nigeria because, though it had gained independence from Britain in 1960, it was still part of the "British sphere of influence."Parham's father, Bob, a highly respected missionary in Jos, could not prevent street mobs from dragging Igbos from their homes and killing them. But he could hide, feed and shelter Igbos and get many of the wounded onto small cargo planes, regularly loading severely injured Igbos into the family station wagon and driving to the airport, dodging homicidal crowds along the way. As each overloaded plane took off, Bob prayed with airport workers that the plane would clear the trees at the end of the runway.One day, he found the little boy who sold him a daily newspaper curled up in a doorway; a crowd had beaten him to death. Parham remembers his dad being heartbroken over lives he couldn't save."The embassies were no help at all ... the U.S. embassy just wished the missionaries would leave," Parham says.Catholic and Protestant missionaries united to arrange for airlifts of food and water to Biafra. Doctors Without Borders and other aid groups formed in reaction to the U.S. and Great Britain's unwillingness to help. In 1970, Biafra collapsed and was reabsorbed into Nigeria."One of the biggest changes in how missionaries view the world is that they no longer believe American interests overseas are always consistent with their faith," Parham says.Between two dictatorsWilliam Ackerle was a boy when he flew with his missionary parents to Bolivia in 1935. A rickety German junker carried the family between the 12,000-foot peaks of the Andes."The cabin wasn't pressurized well, so my pet cat threw up," Ackerle recalls. "Each passenger got chewing gum and cotton balls we could use in case our ears were bleeding."Ackerle learned fluent Spanish and, as an adult in the late 1950s, became a BIMI missionary to Cuba, then ruled by dictator Fulgencio Batista. Ackerle graduated from famously conservative Bob Jones University, but he seems judicious and temperate toward the communist dictator who would overthrow Batista -- Fidel Castro."I can remember how cruel Batista was to his people, including my congregation, which is why they put so much hope in Castro," Ackerle says, anger steeling his voice as he recounts the tragedies his congregants confided to him."Batista's men pulled one man out of his home, tied each of his feet to two separate Jeeps and ripped him apart. They locked another innocent man in a stall with a wild horse, who stomped the man to death."After Castro's 1959 coup, Ackerle continued teaching classes and supervised a church in his coastal Cuban town, located an hour outside Havana. He stayed until suspicion toward Americans triggered by the U.S. embargo and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 "reduced my influence to nil."He is now retired but continues to translate news and Bible lessons into Spanish for a South American broadcast mission. And he still remembers Cuba with love.Spooks and spiesJ.B. Godfrey, executive director of Baptist International Missions Inc., says BIMI missionaries have never been debriefed by the U.S. Departments of State and Homeland Security. Yet when serving overseas, missionaries, including him, are routinely asked by locals if they are Central Intelligence Agency spies.The suspicions seem to arise from the fact that the CIA once used missionary work as a cover for unauthorized operations, a revelation that came to light in 1975 before the Church Committee, a Senate investigation chaired by Sens. Frank Church, D-Idaho, and John Tower, R-Texas. The news angered churches, including the Southern Baptist Convention, who complained that the CIA was risking missionary lives and alienating the people they wanted to help.Southern Adventist University professor Kris Erskine has been researching American missionaries in China during the 1930s and 1940s, people who routinely shared information with the CIA forerunner, the OSS, and the U.S. Foreign Service."The Church Committee found 21 instances of CIA working with missionaries or mission organizations in the '50s and '60s," Erskine says. "Based on my own research from the '40s, I located probably at least that number of missionaries who worked with CIA. And that is only in China."Missionaries were far better educated than most Americans in those decades, he explains, and, along with diplomats, they were among the few Westerners in China."Once the Nazis were defeated, fear of Russian and Chinese communists taking over the world seemed urgent, so sharing observations and intel seemed like common sense," he adds.Attitudes changed in the 1960s as various scandals rocked the CIA and missionaries wanted no part of its plots. The Cold War ended with China and Russia as our problematic allies. Erskine believes most missionaries "no longer automatically equate communism and Marxism with a threat to Christianity."