Andy's Journey

My most recent trip to Panama was spent in business mode. Traveling with a trade delegation from Kansas City, I visited the Panama Canal, ports on both sides of the isthmus, logistics outfits, diplomats and U.S. companies. It was interesting to see what makes Panama tick on a commercial level, but it wasn't my idea of an ideal trip.

Before I joined the workforce in July of last year, my international trips were focused almost exclusively on building God's kingdom through missions. Crazy adventures marked with whimsical itineraries were part of the territory, especially on journeys to China. In 2006, I visited Panama with a different agenda, though the elements of danger and stupidity were still present.

Our mission was much simpler than in China. Instead of bringing souls into saving faith, our goal was to save ourselves from all that can go wrong on a tropical island known for its role as a former penal colony and covered with virgin triple-canopy jungle. Not a mission trip per se, but during the expedition I learned a lot about preparation and how it pertains to my faith. It also deepened my hunger for international travel, a desire I feel is God-birthed.

This year, I thought I'd leave Panama without any kind of spiritual experience. I did visit a cathedral, but it was cold and empty. I did pray a few times, but up until the last night, work had sucked much of the life and energy out of the journey.

But a window of free time opened up, and I spent it with a friend who coincidentally had flown in from the U.S. to speak at a men's retreat. He had recently lived in Panama City for six months and had just moved back home to the States. The day I found out I was going to Panama was the day he moved back. I was sad, but then I found out that the retreat would bring him back at the same time as my trip.

When his plane touched down, he invited me to hang out, but only if I was "up for a little praying." Bone-dry spiritually, I took him up on the offer and hopped a cab to a small church.

We gathered around a table, three white guys and five Hispanics, all men save the one woman who had come with her husband. They started in Spanish. By the fourth prayer, I was understanding about a third of what was going on. I was last, and I thanked God (in English, of course) for the privilege of being around people that wanted so desperately to see his kingdom come. I also asked for him to give my friend strength as he spoke to the more than 100 men registered for the retreat.

Afterward, on the way to a restaurant, my friend and I rode with Andy, one of the men administering the retreat. In what was an affirmation for me that the bond of Christian brotherhood is vastly different and stronger than any other fraternity, he shared his testimony with utter transparency.

Andy's father had lived a double-life for more than 20 years, visiting another each week while his wife and kids thought he was teaching night classes at the college where he was a professor. When Andy's family caught wind of the rumor, they followed their dad and found him coming out of the woman's apartment.

A sick feeling still rips at Andy's gut every time that image comes to mind. His mother's pain was similar. Confronted, begged for her to let him stay, claiming that he didn't love the other woman. Andy's mother consented, but the wounds persisted. Heartbroken, they decided to get him help for what was nothing less than an addiction. They tried everything in the realm of superstition. When nothing worked, they gave a Christian pastor a chance.

That was the turning point. Andy's mother accepted Christ and forgave her husband. He eventually followed suit. He mailed his mistress a Bible. In it, he highlighted the verses that God had used to deliver him from her grasp. That was his last contact with her.

All this time, Andy was still an unbeliever, working his way up the corporate ladder, showing little regard for spiritual things. He found a beautiful wife and earned plenty of money. But there was unease, and his father's legacy began to creep up on him. Around the time the whole family moved to Panama from Colombia, Andy began thinking that an affair of his own wouldn't be too bad of a deal. He traveled often for business, and a lot of the men he knew had engaged in similar flings.

Soon, his wife began, ironically, going to church with his parents. She drew him there, and he stubbornly came along. He became a believer before ever acting on his adulterous thoughts, and now his whole family knows and serves Jesus.

"We must remember," he told me, "when we are ministering to men, we are not ministering just to men. We are ministering to whole families. Tomorrow, we will be ministering to 100 families at our retreat."

Andy knows firsthand the devastating impact a man has when he shirks his fatherly and husbandly responsibilities. I do too, having come from a somewhat broken home.

I shared my testimony with Andy as he drove me back to the hotel. He told me that he is planning to quit his high-paying job to become a missionary to a West African country. His co-workers will think he's crazy, but he prays that it will be an opportunity for him to share the Gospel.

I realized that he had touched on the theme of both of our stories. As in our lives, God's plan often looks ridiculous. But with him, broken families and illogical career choices are chances for unworldly forgiveness, power and sacrifice to be made known. With a God who writes the rules, impossible circumstances become prime opportunities.

My Cousin Eddie

If you're in transit enough, talking to cab drivers is often a good way to gauge public opinion. They're generally very friendly, they meet a lot of people, and let's face it; it takes a certain amount of gumption to do that job, especially in Panama City, where the chaotic traffic means there's no guarantee that you'll arrive alive from any given ride.

Although today's 1 1/2-hour transport to the Colon Free Zone involved a smooth, scenic ride on the luxurious rail cars of the Panama Canal Railway and an air-conditioned bus, yesterday we were adventurous enough to take four different cabs.

Luciano, a van driver that makes his money on tourists exiting the Country Inn & Suites, told us that he used to live in Boston. His son now attends high school in Rhode Island, and he misses the snow, although he really likes the warm, humid weather of his native Panama. He's got a 10-week visa to visit the U.S. to see his kid and he hopes to go soon.

The next cabby took us from the posh Marriott Panama back to our hotel, which is known more for its canal views and location than aesthetic amenities. I didn't catch his name, but this guy helped me figure out what they were selling at the Panamanian/Japanese Marisco Market we saw en route to the hotel. "Fish," he said flatly in English. As one of our trade mission handlers said, they speak Spanish in Panama almost as much as they do in Miami.

As if it was hard to get deeper into conversation than a debate over fish, our next chat was a bit more serious. Eduardo, a dark-skinned Panamanian whose father and grandparents are Jamaican, gave us the full gamut of public opinion about the U.S. Despite the invasion of Panama in 1989, the U.S. is still considered a great friend of Panama, he said. Most people feel very happy that the Americans liberated the country from Manuel Noriega's dictatorship, but many have resented the Americans in the past for having what he called "a country in a country" in the Canal Zone.

The Zone was controlled by the U.S. from the Canal's completion in 1914 until 1999, when it was returned to Panamanian control as per a treaty signed by then-President Jimmy Carter. Since that time, the Panamanians have been leveraging the Canal as an economic development engine, and the U.S. has pulled out most of its military personnel. Former U.S. army barracks and Air Force bases are being retrofitted to house companies and government offices. The cloistered American life in the Canal Zone is over.

As a cab driver, Eduardo had the added bonus of actually knowing where he was going. He found us a great strip of restaurants. Somewhere in the course of conversation, he clarified that "Mariscos" are not necessarily just fish. "Pescado" is the term for fish, while mariscos refers to all kinds of seafood, including shrimp and lobster. When we disembarked, we found out that his last name was Williams, the same as mine.

"Cousins!" I said.

"It's a small world," he replied, laughing.

On the way home we pried the day's last driver for his opinion on which is the best of Panama's predominant beers: Atlas, Panama Cerveza and Balboa.

"I don't drink," he said. "Food, food, food. As long as I have food and friends, I'm okay," he said. As an afterthought, he said he thought the Country Inn & Suites Amador is the best in Panama because of its quiet location, fresh air, and view of the ships traversing the Canal.

Farzana

If her name tag had more room, it wouldn't have said Farzana. It would have said, "I'm not just a random photo girl behind a Walgreens counter."

After snapping a digital passport photo of me, she took the camera back and started to print out the 2x2 square of paper that would identify me on my visa application for China. The last time I had this done, it was a significantly less technical process that took only long enough for the chemicals in the Polaroids to perform the magically blurry fusion that ends up capturing a memory.

But it took longer than expected, and as Farzana centered my cheesy face in the photo software, we somehow struck up a conversation.

Before my job at GlobalAtlanta as an international business reporter and our move to Decatur, asking someone's nationality would have been an anomaly for me. Now, it's the norm. It's not that I'm a workaholic always looking for story ideas. I'm just interested in the mixture of cultures into the U.S. and how that trickles down to my little street.

Bangladesh was her answer, and it more intrigued than surprised me. Bangladesh, which is enclosed on three sides by a long tentacle of land owned by India, is the seventh most populous nation on Earth. But it doesn't have the space that should come with such a huge chunk of humanity. Imagine cramming half the U.S. population into an area slightly smaller than Iowa, and that's the crowded life Farzana endured before emigrating to the U.S. She estimates that about 20,000 of her countrymen live in Georgia, although the density is probably a bit lighter than back home.

Back home, Farzana was educated. She speaks Hindi and Bengali, and she has only been learning English for the two months since she came here. She'd traveled to Pakistan, Nepal, India and Thailand. She was a lawyer. What need did she have for English? Did I mention she was educated back in Bangladesh?

Apparently, the state of Georgia didn't think she was educated enough. Her law degrees aren't equally valid here, so she's currently saving up her wages from Walgreen's so that she can eventually go back to school at Georgia State University and get a law degree that will enable her to practice here. She's thinking immigration law, something she can relate too that isn't too broad.

Until she reaches that goal, it might seem that she's just a photo girl behind a Walgreen's counter. The more people I meet, the more I realize there's a story behind every name tag.

Colson

We humans are rebellious by nature. We run from God, and in those times, he often has to cripple us to bring us back to him.

For Colson, a homeless man limping his way through life in downtown Atlanta, that spiritual phenomenon recently took on a physical dimension. Caught on the street in the middle of a gunfight between people he didn't even know, Colson ended up with a bullet through his lower thigh that sent him for treatment at a local hospital.

"When you runnin' from God," he told me as he sat in the crisp January night, munching on a muffin at a local park, "He sometimes gotta show you who's boss."

In other words, sometimes God takes you out of the game to make you realize who's really pulling the strings.

Without the few bucks he needed for meds, the smell on Colson's clothes and breath told me that he had turned to alcohol to take the edge off his pain. But even through a semi-drunken glaze, the 41-year-old spoke with the kind of desperate and damaged faith forged by slogging through life at the very bottom of the social totem pole. He sat on a bench wearing a orange skull cap to fend off the cold, and I noticed a long, thin scar running along the bottom of his cheekbone, giving him a rugged look as he stared vacantly toward Atlanta's glistening city lights.

Colson wanted two blankets, and he took a whole loaf of bread, but he wasn't too happy about the fact that the more swift of foot downed the last of the steaming broccoli casserole provided by the ministry that had set up shop in the parking lot. His limp had made him late, and although muffins were good fuel, he would've liked a hot meal on a night where temperatures threatened to soon reach freezing. A steaming cup of cider seemed to placate him, and we began talking.

I offered to pray for his leg, and he obliged, mumbling something about needing all the help he could get. We bowed our heads, and I placed hands on his knee. I felt the bandages through his worn, brittle jeans, and asked God for restoration. When I ended, nothing extraordinary happened. Colson just pointed his droopy, brown eyes back up at the city lights, and he began counting his blessings.

Colson's proof of God was not theological. It was experiential. With all that he had gone through, he felt that just being alive shows God is real, active and powerful. The gunfight could've cost him his life or his ability to move his leg, a near death sentence for a vagabond that relies on his mobility for subsistence. But the bullet hit no ligaments or arteries, and the emergency room wasn't far away.

"He's kept me alive for 41 years. I know he's an awesome God," Colson said. He spoke with a wistful tone both suffused with wonder and certainty but strangely subdued at the same time. As he quoted scriptures and proclaimed the glory of God, it was interesting how little hope he had to translate these abstract qualities into the real-life experience of love, joy and discipline.

"So what's your next move?" I asked, trying to get him thinking about the future. Folding tables squealed and slammed shut behind us and boxes rumbled into their seats as the church packed up to leave. I knew my time was short.

Colson couldn't answer, except to say that he believes in a God of second chances, even when it comes to his use of drugs and alcohol, some of the church's biggest taboos. Listening to his words, I began to feel convicted. Though bruised undoubtedly by some mistakes that he chose to make, Colson showed that he knows the true Source of what little power he had left. I hope it doesn't take homelessness for me to display a similar dependence.

The Kurds

This is the second in a series of profiles of international residents in Decatur. The first installment tracked the story of a Colombian now working at an apartment complex here.

Mustafa can’t read Arabic. A Kurdish Turk from Ankara, the capital of Turkey, where more than 90 percent of citizens call themselves Muslim, it’s almost a given that he considers himself the same. But the nine-year resident of the U.S. and co-owner of Café Istanbul in Decatur is far from fanatical about his religion. He abstains from pork, mostly because disdain for it is so ingrained in his culture, not because he really thinks it unclean. He says all the food at his restaurant is halal. In Arabic, the word means “permissible,” but it has come to describe an Islamic food classification similar to Jewish kosher laws. He serves it not because he believes it imbues his restaurant with holiness. It’s enough for him that it brings in profits from the consumers who want their food that way.

We had come to research the halal phenomenon as a business story for my job. Any city’s ability to attract international business will be directly correlated to its ability to make foreign businesspeople feel at home, and we wanted to investigate the accessibility of halal food in Atlanta. Café Istanbul is close to the office, and it was rated by a halal Web site as adhering to the dietary restrictions on at least some level. The food is amazing, and the atmosphere is top-notch Mediterranean. Customers can choose normal, Western-style tables or opt for a more exotic experience: reclining on posh cushions at low tables throughout two other exotically decorated rooms. Not ones for the status quo, my co-worker, Katy and I plopped down on cushions in the corner in a room with tufted, plum-colored silk covering the ceilings and half-walls and columns separating this middle section from the other two rooms.

After feasting on kebabs and other Turkish dishes, I approached Mustafa and dropped the name of a guy I met at a Turkish event a few months back. He runs a Turkish cultural association in town and told me he knew the owners of Café Istanbul, two brothers who were Turks but Kurdish in ethnicity. Introducing myself, I asked Mustafa to confirm what I’ve heard and told him that we wanted an interview once he finished cleaning a mess left by a party of 10 next to us. He was probably glad they were gone. At first hesitant to puff the hookah, one of the girls persuaded herself to partake by muttering, It's an authentic cultural experience, over and over again.

A few questions in, it was obvious from the rapid-fire intensity of his speech that Mustafa was a passionate guy. He was fiery, and not because he had just demonstrated to the big party how to really suck in and exhale the hookah's flavored tobacco smoke. He had an uncanny way of exuding intensity while maintaining a cheerful disposition, even as he volunteered information about the grave situation underway in his home country. The PKK, a Kurdish rebel group classified by the U.S. as a terrorist group, is fighting against the Turkish government from outposts in southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq. Mustafa seemed to think that such extremism gives peaceful, loyal Kurds like him a bad name in their native country. “They might not like me very much right now, but I love Turkey,” he says.

Mustafa also loves the United States. He came three months after his brother Kamal, who while we spoke picked up Mustafa’s slack, scurrying around the restaurant wearing a shirt that said “Got Hookah?” Kamal had won the green card lottery, but Mustafa had to wait for his permanent resident status. When he first got here, he and Kamal worked in an Italian restaurant, but in a strange turn of fate, the brothers decided to visit a local Turkish restaurant they had heard about one Sunday night. The restaurant was closed, but when the Turkish owner came to the door and saw fellow Turks, he ushered them for some drinks and conversation. By the end of the night, Mustafa and Kamal somehow became the proud owners of part of the building that now houses Café Istanbul.

Now a proud green card carrier, Mustafa can’t believe it’s already been nine years since he first came to America. He already thinks a little bit like an American, and that’s gotten him into trouble on occasion. Some stricter Muslims have taken issue with his decision to serve beer—which is forbidden in Islam—in a supposedly halal restaurant. “It’s not their business,” he says, becoming defensive when I ask how he weighs his customers’ varying standards of piety. “If they want to be like that they shouldn’t come to this country. It’s a free country, you know?”

The back wall in Café Istanbul’s largest room is covered by a painted mural. A portrayal of a large, keyhole-shaped doorway topped with a pointed arch draws eyes to a central point in the wall. I ask if this represents the niche in the wall of a mosque that shows devotees the qibla, the direction of prayer toward Mecca. Impressed that I even knew about the qibla (which was originally pointed toward Jerusalem), Mustafa says it’s just a door, but it does have an interesting story. The mural’s painter, a friend, originally included an Arabic phrase above the painted doorway, Mustafa says, scribbling his best impression of Arabic on a pad. One day, a patron complained that Mustafa could not defame the Qur’an by having such words scribbled on the wall. Although Mustafa thought it was just a generic Arabic name, he asked his friend to come back and paint over it to avoid any more disputes.

The few fits of ire the restaurant has drawn pales next to the fanfare it regularly attracts, especially on the weekends. A lively night spot that features belly dancers, imported Turkish beer, knock-you-down Turkish coffee in a somewhat out-of-the-way Decatur location, Café Istanbul threatens to break fire codes every weekend. Mustafa shuffles back over to a table where he had been calculating figures earlier. Grabbing the guest list for the coming Friday, his index finger trails down the page, passing parties of 10 and 15. It stops on a party of 80. “And that’s just from 7 to 9 p.m.,” Mustafa says with pride. Halal or not, Turkish or American, these Kurds must be doing something right.

The Colombian

He didn’t want to talk about the specifics. All the Colombian would say--and that through implication-- is that his experience with rebel soldiers in his home country was traumatic enough to make him want to leave and never look back. A civil engineer by trade who sometimes worked with the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, the Colombian stopped in one day to ask America for political asylum. Just nine days later, he was dropped in Georgia.

Without any English skills, he wasn’t able to find an engineering job, so he settled for the next best thing for a refugee—using a local connection to land a job as a menial laborer, scrubbing dumpsters at an apartment complex near Atlanta. The work was hard but nothing to get upset about. This was just an obstacle, and he could endure a few setbacks if by them he could escape his past.

He began studying English, and after a few years the owner of the apartment complex recognized his work ethic and asked if he’d like to become a painter. It wallowing in trash all day, so he jumped at the chance, even though he had little-to-no experience with a brush and roller. A few more years gone and his English much improved, the same boss asked if the Colombian would like to sell apartments to Spanish-speaking families.

Two years removed from that promotion, the Colombian now sells apartments to everyday clientele. His Hispanic accent is evident but winsome, and he’s extremely courteous without coming off as fake. He vigorously holds onto this job, which he says has its pros and cons. Just the other day, he had to tell a rowdy tenant to turn his movie down so a pregnant woman could get some sleep, and he’s been refereeing a group of unruly students who treat the complex like it’s the dorm for the college they cross the street to attend.

The Colombian represents an odd twist on the American dream, having come here by an odd confluence of desire and necessity. After eight years in America, he loves his new life, and he says he never even thinks about returning to civil engineering. He could care less that “sales manager” doesn’t have particularly prestigious connotations. To be honest, he’s just too busy reading about Colombian politics or helping customers retrieve their packages that were too big to fit in their tiny mailboxes.

When I ask him what he thinks about Americans who were born here but continually complain about the government even as they rely on it for sustenance, he replies with a pointed but non-judgmental response: “I think that we have so much here and we are accustomed to so much, that if one thing gets taken away, we complain about it.” The flipside is implied in his polite and grateful tone: If you’ve gone from nothing to something, you’ll appreciate all opportunities and the turns of fate and time that afforded them to you.

Photo: The jungle of Panama, the closest I've ever been to Colombia. Copyright 2006, Trevor Williams