Students Can Surprise You, Part 2

Students Can Surprise You, Part 2

Judges 5:10 “You who ride on white donkeys,
You who sit on rich carpets,
And you who travel on the road—sing!

Mr. Nemy was a very impressive gentleman from Zaire. I had the fortunate responsibility to instruct personally Mr. Nemy and his wife in mastering the English language, both in grammar and in conversation.  While completing my doctorate at Florida International University, I worked with a special contingent of professionals from all over the world: lawyers, government officials, ambassadors, doctors, corporate executives.  They all came to our special university program to learn English.  Knowing the English language on a professional level was a requirement for each of their professions.  Mr. Nemy was the CEO of the national diamond mine of Zaire, Africa.   He was just about the richest man I ever met.   I wonder how that happened for him?  Mr. Nemy and his wife were Catholic, very down to earth people and easy to talk with.  He even played guitar and sang, but confided to me that President Mobutu of Zaire   was opposed to this talent, for he did not consider it a serious thing to do.  The president was opposed also because Mr. Nemy knew him personally, being a high-ranking Senator and being groomed to succeed the President.   This never transpired as Zaire entered into a period of political turmoil and revolution, subsequently removing Mr. Nemy from his country to find protected haven in Belgium.  I hope he escaped with all his money.  Though he was very sympathetic to the poor of Zaire, it wasn’t good enough for the Marxist rebels who took over.  

During one of our sessions, Mr. Nemy also confided to me his experiences in America.   For one, he relayed to me that so many people thought that Africans walked around with bones in their noses and were so uneducated in the ways of western civilization.   In fact, he was paying for six of his nephews in attending the University of Texas.  On weekends he would visit them.  He also told me the CIA was spying on him.  His appointed guide would search his suitcases for information when he left his hotel room, and was writing down all sorts of personal habits of his:  how he brushes his teeth, how and what he eats for meals, what he wears daily, his topics of conversation, his relationship with his wife, etc.  He discovered this when he turned the tables by uncovering his written notes from the guide’s own suitcase.   “Well,” he said, “I could very well become the next president of Zaire, and the U. S. government was paying for my entire trip and training.”

Upon their departure, he gifted my wife with a bottle of Dom Perignon and me with a dozen Davidoff cigars priced at $70 each, straight from Cuba.  Google it.

Isaiah 43:19 “Behold, I will do something new,
Now it will spring forth;
Will you not be aware of it?
I will even make a roadway in the wilderness,
Rivers in the desert.

Akara was a tall, attractive Cambodian woman.  I emphasize tall because there is special meaning to this physical characteristic for her. Very quiet and not participating in discussion, yet studious, her work was of high quality.  One day she had a cathartic experience and it all came out.   We found out who she really was.  

Akara was in America because of the Cambodian civil war and communist revolution.  A refugee, she was sponsored by an American citizen who became her husband, but it wasn’t as easy as that.  She shared with us in this cathartic expression that she was the wife of a Cambodian general and had five sons, and wealthy according to Cambodian standards.  One afternoon, the notorious Khmer Rouge knocked at her door during a family dinner.  The Khmer Rouge were the communist rebels led by the also infamous Pol Pot.   They murdered her husband and three of her sons right in front of her eyes.  They took the other two sons away never to be seen by her again.  She was spared.  Why you may ask?  Because she was a tall strong woman and could be useful in the slave labor camps.  And so off she went.

For over a year she lived without a roof over her head, nor shoes on her feet.  Akara labored away on rice patty fields and farm land alongside Cambodian jungles, their place of rest.  A well-behaved prisoner, the controlling soldiers began to become a little lax in their supervision.  This was her chance to take off and so she did, by traversing through the jungle toward Thailand.  There at the Thai border was a Red Cross Camp and from there made her way to Miami, Florida and her sponsor.  Shades of the ‘Killing Fields’ if you saw that powerful movie.  Ways were provided for something completely new along with life’s new calling.  Powerful stuff in itself.  I hear that ‘all good things come from Jesus’, so whether Catholic or not, all good things come from Jesus.  

Jeremiah 6:25 "Do not go out into the field, and do not walk on the road, for the enemy has a sword. Terror is on every side."

 Here are two more stories of God making a road for my students. One from Zaire and his new country, another from Cambodia and a new life calling     All these roads, all these connections.  All good things come from Jesus.