In contemplation of the murder of one of my mentors, community development coordinator Dan Terry, in Badakhshan Province, Afghanistan, after a medical expedition to Nuristan. He and his wife, with their three daughters, served across political, ethnic and religious boundary lines through a monarchy, a dictatorship, two Communist coups, a Soviet invasion, mujahedeen civil war, the Taliban, and the current fragile Western-backed government. Dan worked alongside Afghan communities to develop self-sustaining creative projects for thirty-nine years, serving in regions that included the Hazarajat (of which the city of Bamiyan, mentioned below, is the capital; the ruins of the “City of the Screams,” destroyed by Genghis Khan, lie outside it), as well as Balkh, Kabul, Kunar, Laghman, Nuristan, and Badakhshan, where he was killed along with another mentor Tom Little and eight others on 5 August 2010.

 

Your true name is Abraham

Though Dan Terry you were born

For you walked about a land,

Seeing more than earth war-torn.

 

Land of Sorrows I have called it –

Bamiyan’s “City of the Screams” –

But quite differently you saw it.

Through you, God dreamed His dreams.

 

Dreams developed by your fingers,

Dreams developed by your hands.

And the work you did, it lingers.

Who will grasp unfinished strands?

 

Who will finish what you started?

Who will pick up where you led?

Dan Terry, you’ve departed.

Who will walk the path you’ve tread?

 

“Love your neighbor, love your neighbor,”

Following the Golden Rule,

This you did, Dan, without waver,

Be the neighbor good or cruel.

 

Since “Muslim” means “submitted”

You were truly one of them:

Model Afghan, guilt-acquitted

By surrendered trust in Him.

 

And like the first true pilgrim –

Abraham, God’s chosen friend –

You submitted, wand’ring, winsome,

And believed Him to the end,

 

Believed that even barest

Afghanistan would yield

A holy, ample harvest:

Heaven’s life on earth revealed.

 

You were called a “logistician”

By the earnest journalist
,

But in truth were a physician

Making balms, a calm artist

 

Healing hearts of disposition

That sees promises as vain

And fulfilling heaven’s vision

Through your perseverance, pain.

 

You are hiking in the mountains

Further up and further in

While I endure the constraints

Of shadowland and sin.

 

While you are breathing pure air

(What a view it all must be!)

I shall find your path and start there

Sowing seeds that set men free.

~ km