Mennonite Weekly Review

ACCRA, Ghana — Human suffering overwhelmed Kate Brubacher on her first visit to Buduburam, a Liberian refugee camp 30 miles from Ghana’s capital.

She smelled poverty and glimpsed gruesome scars that foreshadowed the stories of violence, torture and abuse she would later hear from the women of the camp.

“How many times had I sat in church and prayed for ‘God’s people’ without knowing this sight, this stench, this pain?” said Brubacher, a member of Bethel College Mennonite Church in North Newton, Kan.

“How many times had I watched the news or seen images of refugees without really looking at faces or having any idea what reality these people lived? My visits to the camp brought a face and substance to the phrase, ‘God’s people.’ ”

A Mennonite Mission Network intern for five months, Brubacher initially went to Ghana to work with the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding, where she prepared a presentation

about women’s peace initiatives for a United Nations conference in Rwanda. But her relationships with widows in the refugee camp became the most memorable part of her experience.

“The unique opportunity to connect with and learn from these women tore me open,” Brubacher said. “I can’t say I ever really understood the significance of a God who suffered because I had never faced such intense and encompassing suffering.

“Only when I was plunged into a bit of their world could I even begin to grasp what the person of Christ meant for these women. Their faith, the belief that Christ was suffering with them and that because Christ forgave they could as well, was all they had. It was literally all they had.”

Lucy Gaye Waylee, a Liberian widow, told Brubacher that she once had a prized possession, a beautiful basin in which she prepared food and washed clothes and children. She etched her name in the enamel on the underside of the basin. However, when rebels raided her house, they took the basin and everything else of value.

Waylee fled, but the rebels caught her. After killing her husband and five children, the rebels used the same bloodstained machetes to hack a large portion of flesh from her inner thigh and forced her to eat her own body.