Humanitarian leaves legacy 
in the hills of Afghanistan

By Jonathan Larson

The staggering news of the death of Dan Terry and his colleagues in the back country of Afghanistan found me in a coffee shop in small-town Indiana where my wife, Mary Kay, and I had been married, and where Dan had turned up breathless at the last moment to be my best man.

Terry was one of 10 humanitarian health workers who were ambushed Aug. 6 in remote Badakhshan, north of Kabul. Terry was buried last week in Kabul.

Over the years, Terry had been a regular visitor at the old Turner Mission Center on Clifton Road, and his work in Afghanistan received support from congregations throughout the Southeast.

Excruciating as the news of his death was, I think those who knew Dan had anticipated it might well come to this, an ending that he also had reckoned with and accepted as worth the reckless joy of his peacemaking calling. He had taken a bullet once before: By his telling, the result of a bit of deadly fumbling at a roadblock as he passed by on a motorbike. It left him bloodied but unrattled.

Terry’s love affair with mountains and their people took shape in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas, where as a young person, he tramped with great, hungry strides the ridges and valleys, swam the icy tributaries of the Ganges and sipped rivers of chai in the mountain tea shops with the charcoal porters, farmers and caravaneers. Years later, I wandered the bazaars of fabled cities like Kandahar, Herat and Jalalabad in his company, unaware how his imagination was being taken captive by a place that would suffer a pathos that he would come to share.

Fully formed, this furnace-like passion and his fierce commitment to building personal bridges rarely squared with prevailing practice. A sample of his discoveries from one of his letters:

“In Afghanistan I feel less intimidated, dispossessed the less I intimidate or hold [others] in contempt. More enfranchised the more I enfranchise. Opposite numbers or catagorical (sic) enemies have rescued me, and more than my marbles, again and again.”

As we weigh up those marbles now in search of a larger meaning, I sense he would be slapping us upside the head, and with his trademark chortle, shoulder his rucksack with an eye toward some rugged piece of country. It is, after all, a trait of spiritual greatness, that it is unaware of itself.

Rather than saint though, I prefer to think of him as a kind of pilgrim, a notion that is thoroughly native to such ancient and devout lands. Dan was restlessly on the move, borne along by a hunger and vision, looking not so much for healing or even redemption, but for reconciliation.

He counted among his friends the Taliban commanders of his neighborhood, and insisted after 30 years they were not the nemeses caricatured to us. It was the humanity of each one that he kept reaching for, flint-like in his belief that there was something noble in each neighbor, which made him a willing and joyful debtor to the forgotten poor of Badakhshan, Nuristan (“country of light”), and beyond. He was often heard to say, “in the end we’re all knotted into the same carpet.”

For me, the wistfulness of such news spurs personal inventory. That there is something recognizably lofty about seeking the good of others, like the unbearably majestic mountains that appear in the photographs coming from the scene. And their effect is to redouble my own determination not to squander what is left to me of strength and health in pursuit of personal comfort, consumer mirages or notoriety.

The spiritual equation runs something like this: To whom much is given, much is required. Dan understood that he had been lavishly endowed in faith, in friendship, in family, in opportunity, learning and hope. And it’s as though he’d be damned if that great wealth failed to count for something in the larger scheme of, yes, humble things.

On that summer weekend (actually, the weekend of the Woodstock rock festival) when Dan surrendered the chance at a frolic in the mud to the rhythms of Janis Joplin, choosing rather to play his part at our sedate Mennonite wedding, he brought with him gifts to convey his affection: matching rucksacks.

The message was inescapable. We shouldered them, and set out ourselves, but on a diverging course that took us to the lake country of central Africa, and later the Kalahari, scene of a withering HIV/AIDS epidemic. But the deeper kinship of purpose and vision with Dan spanned the decades and the divides.

And now it is time, grateful for the nobility and faith of this companion, to return to the workbench with a sharpened fix on what really matters. There are mountain ridges yet to be tramped, even if they are not the Hindu Kush. There are high passes to be threaded even if not the Khyber. There are torrents, creamy with cold and tumbling, to be forded even if not the Pamir. There are valleys to be sought, befriended and served, even if not Nuristan.

Jonathan Larson, a Mennonite minister, lives in Atlanta.