Their long discussion sitting in the rafts tied up in Havasu Creek meant a lot to Nanci. She had been worried about Sarah and what effect the testimony might have on her – and realistically, with good reason. Right from the first hour that the two had met, Nanci had realized that Sarah had been so sheltered in her life that she might not react very well to knowing that her suitemate had such a sordid past.

From time to time over the past few months Nanci had hinted that not everything in her life before she became a Christian had been sweetness and roses, but she’d never really exposed much of the true story to her friend. In fact, even some of the people she knew in Flagstaff didn’t know all of what she’d told the group there on the ledge above the river that afternoon, for she’d never told the story in the same way except here. People like her mother, Jon, and Tanisha, had only heard it secondhand from people like Preach and Crystal. Nanci didn’t deny any of it to them, but she didn’t go into details, either; she sometimes wondered if she would ever be able to tell the story anywhere else but here.

The day’s run was well behind schedule when the last of the hikers returned down Havasu Canyon; it was even later than Preach had expected when he’d made his statement about plans for the rest of the day following the baptisms. What with everything that had happened, including the opportunity to see some of the spectacular scenery up in the side canyon it seemed like the extra time was well worth spending here.

Finally, everybody was loaded aboard the rafts. Before they got started, Preach told everyone, “This has been a big day, folks, and tomorrow is going to be a big one, too. Since it’s so late we’re just going to run to the first halfway decent campsite we can find, and we’ll take what we can get. We’re going to have to run pretty hard each day to make it to the takeout on schedule, but there’s still a lot of neat stuff to see down here, so let’s saddle up and ride.”

Although Nanci and Sarah had a lot of healing between them before the rafts left, Sarah was still on Kevin’s raft, and he had her rowing a lot of the time. Though this was still only her third trip, Nanci was pleased to see that she’d taken so well to life in the Canyon; it could have been hard for someone who was as sheltered and shy as she had been. Al’s Canyon magic was working on her, all right, and Nanci was happy to see the results.

Preach was as good as his word; he pulled the group into the first spot he could find that seemed even marginally acceptable for camping, a spot that none of the crew remembered having used before, although they’d occasionally eyed it as a possibility in a pinch. It was cramped, the beach was small and rocky, and there wasn’t much level space above the beach for the kitchen or for sleeping spots. After things got set up, that meant that people were actually a little more scattered out than they normally were, and just about every possible flat location was staked out with someone’s night gear.

In previous summers Nanci had usually slept aboard her raft, at least partly because it was a little cooler in the really hot days, although it took some rearranging of gear to be able to make it work and sometimes it wasn’t terribly comfortable. She hadn’t even tried it this summer, mostly because she had Sarah with her; though Sarah was used to camping by now and didn’t need Nanci sleeping next to her, habit and routine had set in. Tonight, though, Nanci was planning on sleeping on her raft, just because there didn’t seem to be enough possible spaces to do it. It might be a little tight, but she thought she could make room for Sarah on the raft if necessary.

Because of the site, things were more scattered than they usually were, and that made them more chaotic, so Nanci never got much of a chance to talk to Sarah about sharing the raft for sleeping that evening. Whenever she started to say something, it always seemed like something else came up, but after a while it seemed to Nanci that Sarah was avoiding her.

When Nanci came to that realization, she also realized that Sarah had been rather withdrawn ever since they’d pulled into the camp site, and that started to worry her. Had Sarah had second thoughts about what she’d said back up on the rafts at Havasu Creek? Had they been brave words used to ease Nanci’s troubled mind?

No matter how much she wanted to think that things were still all right between them, Nanci couldn’t help but have doubts. Her life back then had been very destructive, and it had all but destroyed her, as it had destroyed other people, like Allie. Was the shadow of her former life going to destroy another one? The concern had been hanging on her for days, and although they had seemed to lighten back up at Havasu Creek, they were creeping back onto her again.

There was the usual hustle and bustle with making and serving dinner, and of course Nanci and Sarah both pitched in with it as they always did, but now that Nanci was watching her friend a little more suspiciously, it almost seemed as if she had reason for her concerns.

In spite of the short run from Havasu Creek, dinner was late, and by the time they got the dishes done the light was getting pretty dim. Usually there was time to hang around and be friendly with the guests between dinner and the evening campfire, a period Nanci often used to sneak away from the camp and pray for a while. But this evening, the last of the dishes were barely hung in net bags to dry before Brett was laying the evening fire in the fire pan the team carried along with them. Nanci really felt the need to pray this evening, but right now other things had claim on her time.

The small fire was soon blazing merrily; Brett wasn’t one to fool around, so he carried a couple of small aluminum bottles of kerosene to help out at such times. People soon were gathered around, and Preach got up to speak. But before he could say anything, Sarah stood up and said, “Preach, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to say something before you get started.”

“Sure,” he said. “This has been quite a day, and I’m sure you’re not alone in having some thoughts about it.”

“It’s a little more than that,” she replied, and turned to the crowd. “In fact, it’s quite a bit more than that. Friends, I have known Nanci – Reverend Chladek – for less than a year, but in that time she’s become the closest friend I’ve ever had. In fact, she’s become the closest friend I could have ever dreamed of having, and I’ve never been much of one to make friends of my own age easily.

“I am aware that Nanci has been worried about the effects her testimony this afternoon would have on our friendship. She has been afraid that after I found out the kind of person she had been that I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with her. Yes, in her life she has been a number of bad things she has reason to be ashamed of, and I don’t think I need to repeat them here. I told her this afternoon that in addition to having been and no longer being those things, she is the greatest evidence of the power of God’s Grace that I’ve ever been privileged to meet.

“Nanci, you do not need to worry about our friendship. You are my best friend, the best friend I’ve ever had, and I feel that God has been exceedingly good to me to allow the two of us to become friends in the first place. You have done so much for me in the time we’ve known each other I have difficulty in thanking you for all of it. You have helped me grow as a person, and you have helped me grow as a Christian more than I could ever have believed.

“In the time we’ve known each other, I have been aware that you hadn’t told me much about your past until this afternoon, and now I understand why you hadn’t. That has been your decision to make and you had good reasons to do it. But Nanci, you aren’t the only one of the two of us to keep things about our past to ourselves. I’ve been doing it too, and since you had the courage to come out and tell the truth even though you were worried about our friendship, I feel I have no choice but to do the same.”

Sarah stopped for a moment, took a deep breath, and scanned around the people standing and seated around the campfire. “None of you know me as well as Nanci does, of course, but I haven’t even told Nanci much of this story. I think I’ve told her less of it than she told me of hers before today.

“My parents are missionaries in Rwanda, in Africa,” she began. “I was actually born there, living at a mission station in a place where there were three small villages not far away. I have since come to understand that we lived there pretty primitively, although as a child I didn’t know any better. We had a small house, not very well furnished, and in some ways this camp on the riverside is more civilized and comfortable than the house I lived in until I was eleven years old.

“Just as a bit of background, my parents tried to bring me up as much an American girl as they could, difficult though it had to have been for them. The predominant language is native, called Kinyarwanda, but many people speak French, as well. My parents mostly used English around me, but as I was growing up I learned a little Kinyarwanda and a few words of French. I haven’t used very much of either in the last few years, and I remember little of it since I haven’t had the need or the desire to use it in years. There are two predominant ethnic groups in Rwanda, the Tutsi and the Hutu. To put it simply, they are in competition with each other and don’t like each other very much, although there are about as many variations to that statement as there are Rwandans.

“I would think it safe to say that most people in this country never heard of Rwanda before 1994, when a major ethnic war broke out between the Tutsi and the Hutu. I’m not going to get into the background, but the war soon turned to genocide in which huge numbers of Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed. I can’t tell you how many, and the numbers depend on who you’re talking to, but it may have been the worst outbreak of genocide since Hitler, and certainly since Cambodia in the seventies.

“But I was not aware of much of that in 1994. I was eleven then, and living with my parents, who did what they could to keep the news of what was happening from me. Looking back on it I’d have to say they were probably pretty unsure of it themselves, either from not being able to know more or sheer denial, but that doesn’t matter. All I really knew was that my parents were talking quietly when I couldn’t hear them, and one day they said we were going to have to leave the only home I’d ever known, and leave very quickly.

“I did not find out until later that the American ambassador, a former missionary himself, had become quite concerned for the missionaries in the country, and had been working to get us evacuated. My memory of the next few days is mostly a jumble of riding in several vehicles, usually open trucks. We had to go from place to place as my parents and a small group of other missionaries searched for safe places, and one where we could get out of the country.

“However, I remember all too well having our truck caught in the middle of a riot, and massacre is a much better term to use. There was shooting, and there was a lot of killing. My parents tried to keep me from seeing, but I watched a mob of Hutu killing Tutsi men, women, and children with guns and machetes. I remember seeing Hutu men raping Tutsi women before they killed them, and I remember seeing the women being raped even after they were killed.”

She stopped for a moment, tears in her eyes, but went on bravely, “I remember it all too well. I don’t know how long the massacre must have gone on, probably no more than an hour or so, but then and now it seems like it went on forever. I have only to close my eyes and I’m back in the middle of it, watching with horror and expecting to be the next one to die.

“In fact, I was later told that the only reason we survived was that a squad of Belgian paratroopers happened by and were able to rescue us, although they were not able to stop the massacre. Somehow, we managed to get out of there with the tires of our truck shot out, driving over the bodies of the dead. Some of the people on the truck with us were killed as well, one of them right next to me.”

She stopped again to pull herself together, her eyes rolling tears now, but in a small voice she went on, “I will remember it to my dying day. In the years since, I’ve often woken up screaming, my dreams taking me back to the middle of that outbreak of human insanity. It wasn’t until fairly recently that I’ve been able to wake up from that dream and remind myself that it was just the same horrible dream, that I managed to live through it somehow.

“I have no clear memories of how we escaped the country. I only know that we did, being flown out in a cargo plane without any seats, our only luggage the clothes on our backs.”

Nanci was barely able to believe Sarah’s words. She knew, of course, that Sarah had no desire to go back to the country, and as far as Nanci was concerned she had all the reason in the world to feel that way, especially after hearing this story. Sarah had never given her a hint of it.

“I will say that after we got out of the country the mission society took good care of us, but again, I wasn’t aware of it at the time. The society was able to help us get reestablished, making an arrangement for my father to become the pastor of a small church in Huntington, West Virginia, where we started to put our lives back together.”

She was starting to pull herself back together as she went on. “Even though we were safe, the terror of that riot left a deep impression on me, one that I was very slow to get rid of.” She actually grinned as she said, “We joke about Brett being a man of few words, and he is. But he is very talkative compared to me for the next year or more. In fact, it was over a year before I said a word. I might have nodded or shaken my head if my parents asked me a question, and I might not have, too.

“I only slowly pulled out of that funk, not that I ever have totally done so. You can understand that school was impossible for me at that time, but after a while I was home schooled. Later I went part-time to a small church school, but I was still so different from the few other kids there that I wasn’t one to make friends. That carried on over to when I went to college, still living at home and not feeling as though I could be like other people. And I wasn’t.

“For lack of any better ideas, my parents and I decided that if I were on my own a little more I still might be able to recover, so they were able to arrange for me to attend Hickory Run. And there, ten months ago, I met my best friend, the only real friend I’ve ever had, Reverend Nanci Chladek.

“The thing that impressed me most about Nanci was that she was a woman who could do all these extraordinary things like row a raft down through all the rapids on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, and seem so normal about it. She was and is a brave, skilled person, with a passion for what she is doing and a passion for the Lord. She was the best example I ever had of the kind of person I could be, of the kind of person I ought to be, and she’s had to take me by the hand and lead me to places I could never have dreamed of going a year ago. Those places include this camp by the Colorado River deep in the Grand Canyon.”

Sarah stopped for a moment, obviously pondering what she wanted to say. “My parents never gave up the dream of carrying the Word of God to the people of Rwanda. To them, the genocide and the civil war and regional wars that followed were only an interruption to their mission. Last winter they returned to the country. I thought they were lunatics for wanting to do it. They wanted me to go with them, and you’ll understand why I could never dream of doing that. So I have to thank Nanci for working it out for me to be here rather than have to face the horror that lurks in my mind again.

“I have already spoken much longer than I wanted to, or that I think Preach expected me to. To wrap up I’m just going to say that giving me Nanci to be a friend to lead me out of the darkness of my life was the best thing God has done for me since He sent a squad of Belgian paratroopers to rescue us from that massacre. Ladies and gentlemen, if you ever have a friend half as good and loyal and true, you can count yourselves lucky.”

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