Hi. My name is Sammy. I would like to share with you a story. We all have a story. This is God’s story. This is my story. This is how my story fits in God’s story. You could say: this is a Christmas story of a different kind. I want to challenge you with my story this year. I would like for you to think Eritrea whenever you hear the word Christmas this year. You will know why as you hear my story. So let’s begin…
The Beginning
Have you ever heard of Eritrea? If you have not, you are like many people I know, but I would like to change that. The name of my home country Eritrea comes from the ancient Greek word that means “red sea”. Geographically, my country is located in East Africa bordered clockwise by the Red Sea, and the countries of Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Sudan. Historically, Eritrea has a rich Christian heritage. Modern day Eritrea was one of the first countries in the world to adopt Christianity. Due to our proximity and close association with Ethiopia, some trace our Christian roots all the way back to the Ethiopian eunuch in the Book of Acts. Christianity has been recognized officially by Eritreans as far back as the 4th Century. Even after followers of Mohammed arrived to the region in the 600’s, many Eritreans continued to follow Jesus Christ. Today, Eritrea is almost equally divided between Christians and Muslims, and because the Christians live in the highlands and the Muslims live in the lowlands, peace has existed between these two religions.
Eritrea throughout history has been closely associated with Ethiopia. Sometimes we were recognized as one country with our neighbor to the south, and at other times we have been two independent nations. In 1962, however, Ethiopia annexed Eritrea, and the two nations were considered one at the cost of stripping Eritrea of its language, culture and ability to self-govern. A decades-long armed struggle for independence followed, and tens of thousands of men and women, including my uncle, lost their lives as resistance fighters to win back Eritrea’s sovereignty.
In 1982, I was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and grew up with my parents and ten siblings in the smaller town of Dire Dawa, in a very strong Catholic tradition. My father was a manager of a successful textile factory and later managed a large business that exported coffee internationally. My family lived a good life. We were able to afford a housekeeper, a cook, a tutor, a chauffeur, and my parents sent us to a private Catholic school.
However, life soon changed dramatically. In 1991, the Eritrean rebels prevailed in their quest for independence. Eritrea and Ethiopia now were again recognized as two separate countries. In 1998, a border war erupted between Ethiopia, the country where we were living, and Eritrea, the neighboring country. Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian prime minister, announced on national television in July that Eritreans were no longer welcome in Ethiopia. He declared “If the Ethiopian government says, ‘We don’t like the color of their eyes, and get out,’ then they should get out.”
Because my parents were originally from Eritrea, we now were among the 75,000 Eritreans deported back to our country of origin. My dad had just passed away from illness. While we were still mourning his loss, we were ordered to leave the only home my siblings and I had ever known. My mom was detained by authorities. We were uprooted and for several days moved from one deportation camp to another. All the while our homes, properties, and monies were confiscated by the Ethiopian government. We were taken to Asmara, Eritrea’s capital, emptyhanded. The world we knew was no more. What we did not know was that Eritrea too was changing.
Big Changes
Our world had changed dramatically in 1991. The cold war between Eritrea and Ethiopia would go on until 2018. The war gave the Eritrean government reason to limit its own people’s freedoms. The Eritrea government began to force men of all ages, and eventually women as well, into long-term military service to fight in the border war. Before the new Eritrea government declared independence in 1993, Eritreans fought for freedoms of speech, religion, and economic prosperity. Then, beginning in 2002, the Eritrean government declared that Eastern Orthodox, the Roman Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church and Sunni Islam to be the only religions permissible in the country. Gradually the government began to control these religious organizations. Any other freely thinking congregation like Baptists, Evangelicals, Pentecostal Christians, or Jehovah’s Witness were officially closed by the government. These “other and unapproved religions” were considered westernized agents of the CIA. Their members’ loyalty to Eritrean nationalism was questioned. Bible-believing Christians were insulted with the derogatory term “pentay”. The government’s propaganda manipulated Eritreans to be suspicious of Bible believers to the point that Christians were disowned by their families, reported by their friends, and imprisoned indefinitely by the government simply for being Christian. The President of Eritrea declared that Christian evangelism would destabilize and disunite the country, therefore it would be forbidden. A new cultural climate was emerging where it became more acceptable for young people to go a club and drink alcohol than participate in a Bible study or church fellowship. The world in which we lived was changing before our eyes and becoming worse.
In 2001, while I was in high school in Eritrea, I started attending a reformed Catholic Christian prayer group after my two brothers accepted Christ and were baptized in the church. I heard the Scripture in a way that I never understood before and received Jesus Christ as my personal Savior. As a new believer, I found so much joy studying the Bible at an underground home cell group. I invited schoolmates to attend with me. Then in 2002 the Eritrean government banned all unapproved religious gatherings. With the increasing pressures of limited freedoms, religious persecution, imprisonment, and indefinite forced military conscription, I knew I needed to leave Eritrea. In 2004, I remember telling my mother about my plans to escape with a group of young men. We had planned to meet a smuggler the next day to leave on foot and travel through the desert to freedom in Sudan. However, my mother took me on a long walk and begged me to reconsider. She did not want me to go. That same night before my anticipated departure, God spoke to me in a strange dream. The dream depicted a mother cow chasing a moving meat truck with its doors swinging open as it sped down the road. In my dream I looked into the back of the truck and saw slabs of raw meat and a lone calf dangling from meat hooks. Then, the mother cow reached into the meat truck and rescued the lone calf from slaughter. After I woke up, I decided that I would not leave that day with the others. The morning I had been planning my escape, the three young men I had scheduled to leave the country with were captured by police and taken to prison. God had spared me for the time being from being incarcerated by speaking through my God-fearing mother and a dream. I will never forget how He watched over me.
Military Service
This might sound a little strange to you but military service under the Eritrean government is commonly described as modern-day slavery.
It was not an easy decision, but I decided it best to repeat high school in Eritrea starting again in the tenth grade. I knew my former classmates in Ethiopia were already graduating, attending universities in Ethiopia and Europe, and pursuing their dreams. However, I knew it would be better to repeat high school classes, as some of my Eritrean classmates intentionally failed math or science courses, to avoid the mandatory military assignments that began at age 18, at the end of high school. The military not only fought in a seemingly endless border war with neighboring Ethiopia, but the military was also used by the government to enforce and inflict inhumane treatment of our own citizens. Soldiers who refused orders to abuse or unjustly punish neighbors who stood for righteousness or for their faith, understood that they too would be cruelly punished, abused, or imprisoned. In the mandatory military, one never knows when his or her term of service would be over, and dreams of marriage, starting families, and pursuing academic and employment opportunities were eliminated.
One weekend in 2001, while walking with friends down the street, I was picked up by a military truck and taken to a police station. They interrogated, imprisoned, and tortured me because I was seemingly of age but not yet in the military. They abruptly sent me to a military camp in the desert. During my year at the camp that bordered Sudan, I witnessed firsthand hundreds of young people suffer in prison and in the military camp. I was beaten, trekked on rugged mountain trails until my feet bled, and endured intense days of hard labor. My clothing was inadequate for the desert temperatures. My food was barely enough for survival. Many Eritrean’s suffer immensely at the hands of our own communist government. And similar to the biographies written by my Eritrean brethren incarcerated in “Sacred Suffering” and “Song of the Nightingale,” I soon discovered that Christians would suffer more for our unrelenting faith in Jesus Christ.