PASSOVER/PASSION WEEK 1977 LIVES ON

Jonathan Beachy

L ong before the rooster first crowed, sometime after midnight, and before his last crow timed to the sun’s appearance, I awakened for the umpteenth time. It was Friday of Passover/Passion Week, April 7, 1977. Sixty miles from the nearest all-weather road and two hundred miles by air from the nearest reliable medical service, it might as well have been half the distance to the moon and the sun. With neither vehicle nor neighbors with more than an oxcart, and no planned radio communication, hope seemed about to be overpowered by despair.

After seven months of a totally uneventful pregnancy, some twelve hours before, my wife Ruth had started losing blood. Our very competent nurse-midwife colleague advised us to keep calm but to be aware of the life-threatening possibility of uncontrollable hemorrhage if indeed, as it appeared, the placenta had become detached. That the night was long and incredibly dark, no lights other than the glow of distant dying cooking fires of our indigenous neighbors, made it no less frightening.

About an hour before daylight, I lit a kerosene lantern, turned the antenna of my ham radio to the south, and turned on the battery-powered radio. Two hundred miles was too close to expect communication on the only active bandwidth, but I had no options.

"Mayday, Mayday, Mayday . . ." I called and waited. Soon I received an answer to my universal distress call. An operator in Hong Kong, halfway around the world wanted to help, but could not. A few more calls, and another operator, this one nearly 1000 miles away in Uruguay, volunteered to make a long-distance call if no one else responded.

And then, the impossible: a "ham" in Asuncion, our hoped-for destination, also heard me. He called friends. Within a short while, soon after daybreak, on the most revered holiday in Paraguay—when no one works or is in town—a single engine plane was on its way.

It arrived and we were off. During years of traveling in such craft, I had never seen one with retractable landing gear, but somehow this had it. Not only that, a north wind pushed us to the south, so lacking drag from the landing gear, and pushed by the wind, we landed in record time.

From the airport we traveled quickly to the hospital, where we went directly to an emergency C-Section. Ruth’s life was spared as we passed through a series of "impossible" barriers. Rebecca, for unexplained reasons, had become detached prematurely from her mother, and was gone.

The grief of that Friday did not leave us immediately overwhelmed. We grasped little more than what Lisa, our two-year-old firstborn, did of what had happened. We were just glad to have each other. Months later we were thoroughly warned to avoid any further pregnancies and started pondering the possibility of adopting a child. When Heidi became part of our family eight months later, the gap started filling, and the likelihood of our leaving Paraguay soon receded. Now, years later, we stand in awe of the consequences, at times still too awed to comprehend.

Out of the pain we lived that day, three beautiful children, Heidi, Joel, and Peter eventually joined our family. They linked us more firmly to their country of origin. Out of the distance and aloofness that is so possible and easy in a strange culture came close and enduring ties to our adopted country. Out of having no family members close to us came many families, and incredible love, and the awareness of how precious and needed all our loved ones are.

Out of the grief for our loss, and through our adoption processes, we became sensitized to others who grieve the loss of abandonment. We became aware of the anger and pain of not belonging or connecting. Through prison chaplaincy, we learned that severely dysfunctional families, which often produce adoptable children, could also create potential criminals who never knew healthy love. We learned that arms which once longed to hold a child could now offer hugs, a safe place to cry, and the beginning of wholeness for prisoners and their families.

As we left Paraguay, nearly 30 years after that painful Friday, we were overwhelmed with demonstrations of appreciation, hugs, and tears of hundreds of people we would never have met if that pivotal event had not occurred. We believe that even now there is much more still to unfold out of that painful Friday. For truly, after the darkest most difficult night, the dawn of hope and God’s light has and will come again and again. So be it, and may it ever be.

—Starting in 2005, Jonathan Beachy has lived in San Antonio, Texas. For most of his professional life as a registered nurse, he has been privileged to accompany persons misunderstood and rejected by the society that envelopes them, including indigenous communities in Paraguay and prisoners in both Paraguay and USA. Currently a correctional health nurse, he delights in seizing the moment to share hope, defy despair, and assault the darkness, in the firm belief that transformation by God’s love is possible for all.