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Earlier this week, I blogged about our houses in Nasir being looted. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only sad news to come out of Nasir recently.
Last week, we received word that our compound guard and friend, Yien Chuol, passed away. We didn’t get all of the details, but we know that it was unrelated to the fighting in Nasir. Yien apparently developed an illness that took his life.
Just like that he’s gone.
And the way we’re processing that heartbreaking news is quite similar to the way we are processing our houses being looted: without being there to see it and feel the weight of the loss, it feels surreal. We know it happened, that Yien will never again make us split at the sides laughing or speak at us in Nuer at 100 mph, but it’s also really hard to believe. We want so badly to have been there to mourn with his family, to hear the wails, to cry and pray together with our team, and to really feel the acute pain of the loss.
Since we cannot do those things, I at least wanted to write in memory of Yien.
The first time I met Yien was last March on our vision trip before moving over here. He was already employed as a compound guard, so when we moved to Nasir in October, he stayed on and became a natural fit on our compound. We quickly learned a few things about him.
His laugh was intensely contagious, a deep belly laugh that didn’t quite seem to fit his slender frame. And the best part was that he laughed A LOT. Not every story that he told ended in fits of laughter, but most of them did. He was animated and lively, and even though we could rarely understand a word he said, he told the best stories!
He spoke faster than anyone I think I’ve ever met. A good test of how well we had actually learned the Nuer we’d been taught was to go try to talk to Yien. We would ask him a question, and he would then take off, words FLYING out of his mouth. Most of the time we’d ask him to slow down, and I guess he thought he was speaking slower, but I could detect no difference. I always felt like I’d accomplished something monumental when I could have a conversation with him, because it meant that I’d managed to keep up! And of course, almost every conversation, no matter how brief, ended in laughter and Yien’s approving, “Aiwa.”
He was also deeply concerned about our team. One evening Jared and Keisha went to the market for a dinner date. They left well before dark, but as the sun was setting, they hadn’t returned yet. We were all unconcerned. They knew their way back and they’re always really wise about their decisions. Yien, however, came to our door and asked where they were. We explained that they had gone to town to eat and they would be back soon. He was not pleased. He started speaking in a tone I could only place as fatherly and worried. He stayed at our gate and you could see and hear his relief when they returned.
There are many memories that I will always have of him, but one event stands out in my mind. One night in mid-November we had a bizarre and severe windstorm that started to rip the metal sheets off of our veranda roof. Not long before that, we had set up a big safari tent at the entrance of our compound so our guards could sit and sleep near the gate under the shade of the tent. That night, Yien was sleeping inside the tent when the storm struck. The wind picked the tent up, with Yien and everything else inside, and rolled it across the compound. It tore the tent up, bending the metal frame beyond repair. Poor Yien was inside, being rolled and knocked into everything else inside. The next morning, we asked him if he was okay. He showed us his bruises and told us (mostly through wild animation) how he rolled and rolled, hit his head, had things hit him, again and again all the way across the compound. He was laughing about it when he told the story, but the way he limped around for a couple of days told us that he had been banged up pretty badly. We prayed with him, and he did quickly get better. Even weeks later, his retelling of the story was filled with lots of laughter and wild gestures of what happened. Anyone hearing couldn’t help but to laugh with him.
And it’s that laughter that I will always hear when I think of him.
Here are some photos of Yien Chuol…
