Stories from the Field

August 2003

Wolves at the door

As the strangers walk through the village, watchdogs snap and snarl—eyes glittering and growls coarse and raspy.

The wolf-like dogs come threateningly close, but save their attack for real enemies—wolves that prowl at the edges of the village at night. During the hungry days of last winter in this remote Kurdish village in western Armenia, wolves killed more than 100 sheep. It’s summer now, but their threat lingers.

“They will take a child, too,” warns “Miras,”* the village leader or mayor, as he walks through the knee-high grass of a nearby field. “Three days ago we lost three sheep to wolves.”

Dusk turns to darkness as Miras returns to his house—a night barely pricked by a few windows glowing from village stone houses. No other light glimmers for miles.

As in most Kurdish villages in Armenia, life is demanding in this hamlet of 120. Three months of the year snow covers the road leading to the village, making travel in and out nearly impossible. There are few vehicles among the families, and last winter two women died in childbirth here.

“I asked a Kurdish man one time how they can live in a place where life is so hard,” says “Craig,”* a worker among the Yezidi Kurds. “He said, ‘If the wolf can live here, then we can too.’”

Village life
This village, like Yezidi villages elsewhere, is dwindling. Originally about 600 lived here amongst the slopes and hills of western Armenia, but a 1988 earthquake that killed more than 20,000 throughout Armenia spurred many inhabitants to give up their traditional lifestyle of herding sheep and move elsewhere. Many migrated to Russia looking for work, for in Armenian cities job opportunities are rare. Rubble from their fallen stone houses still lies scattered.

Miras returned to his village from Russia after the quake. Like many leaders elected to their village positions, he is an educated man. He studied geophysics at Moscow University and fluently speaks at least three languages—Kurmanji Kurdish, Armenian and Russian. At dawn, though, he helps herd sheep to the edge of town, where shepherd boys take them to pasture.

His wife, “Suzanna,”* came from a nearby village. She is attractive, with high cheekbones and smooth skin despite her rugged lifestyle. Her two daughters reflect her beauty.

“Ana,”* the eldest, helps her father butcher a sheep for guests. Kurdish hospitality, perfected by centuries of practice, treats visitors generously. A Kurdish proverb states: “A home without guests, a village without shepherds, both are hopeless indeed.”

As the butchered sheep hangs from a back leg tied to a pole, Ana and her father scrape the skin away with a knife and sharp stone. Ana works carefully, managing to cut away the head, the feet, the skin and remove the organ meats without bloodying anything more than her hands. Her white blouse and long black skirt remain spotless.

Her mother then takes the meat, and along with her daughters, she prepares a meal that covers the table. She boils the mutton with vegetables on a gas burner in a basement room of her house that serves as a kitchen. With it she serves homemade sheep’s milk yogurt, dishes of tender green herbs from the garden, potatoes, tomatoes and cucumbers and lavash—flat bread baked on the side of an earthen oven and piled high on the table.

After laying out the meal, she and her girls quietly leave the room. They eat separately from the men and return only when it is time to remove plates and serve small cups of sweet, thick coffee.

Stealing God’s glory
Like the wolves that snatch the dusty brown sheep from Kurdish shepherds, for centuries Satan has robbed God of His glory among the Yezidi Kurds. Yezidis believe that God gave their nation to Satan, and thus they worship Satan to appease Him.

Constituting a small percentage of the typically Muslim Kurds, Yezidis number about 30,000 in Armenia. During the Arab conquests of the seventh century, they held on to their traditional religion. Yezidis total about 100,000 worldwide and also are found in Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Syria and Iraq. Many Yezidis have immigrated to Germany to escape purges by various governments against Kurds.

But theirs is a religion of fear.

“Milo,”* a Yezidi Kurd who accepted Jesus Christ in 1986, gives an example of stories that circulate among Yezidis: “Satan did many miracles in our nation. One man refused these lessons (from the sheik or demonic priest). He was then filled with a wicked spirit and afterwards couldn’t talk.

“Others, when they refused these lessons about Satan became paralyzed because they are without Jesus,” continues Milo. “When I [became a Christian] and began to preach people said, ‘You will see, you will become an invalid.’ But Jesus is with me,” he smiles as he spreads his hands as if to show his good health.

“From our nation many people want to accept Jesus in their lives, but they are afraid,” Milo says. “They are afraid when they receive Jesus, Satan will catch them.”

“Samuel,”* a Christian worker who has shared about Jesus Christ in many Yezidi villages over the course of eight months, recalls an evening in a small village of just 20 families on the Turkish/Armenian border.

“We showed the JESUS film back in October [2001] and had several people pray to receive Jesus Christ,” Samuel recalls. “We had one young man stand up and then immediately sit back down.”

A week later Samuel returned to the village for a wedding, and the young man approached him. “He said, ‘I wanted to tell you what happened that night. When I stood up, I heard 10,000 voices shouting at me ‘Sit down, sit down!’

“But later that night he prayed to accept Christ,” Samuel says. “He was a real quiet, reserved guy. His friend was the one who would stand up to the sheik and say, ‘We know that your religion is wrong. We know that this Jesus they’ve told us about is right. We’re going to follow Him.’

“When we were there in December, we discovered [the outspoken friend] had left to go to Russia ... and the quiet believer was scared. He wasn’t reading his Bible because he was afraid of people in the village. He didn’t want us to give a New Testament to his new wife or to his mom,” Samuel said. “He was very fearful.”

Destined for God’s grace
But in the midst of this spiritual battle, Christ is gaining ground. Miras, himself, accepted Christ two years ago, which has opened the window for more work in his village. He talks of a new plan to teach about religious life in the village school of 30 students. He also says there are other Yezidi villages in Armenia where inhabitants have turned their backs on Satan.

Samuel relates that another Yezidi village, where Christians in the past had faced much opposition, has recently become “kind of a breakthrough village.

“Sometime last year [an Armenian evangelist] came out here and the sheik confronted him and said, ‘What are you doing here? We don’t want you here.’

“The sheik turned to the [villagers] and said: ‘People, don’t listen to this guy. We don’t want him here.’ It was a big scene. But somehow, [the evangelist] was able to move beyond that and is now doing some Bible studies,” Samuel says. This is the same village where Christian workers heard that earlier a woman had been thrown out of her home and village because she accepted Christ.

Craig, who moved to Armenia a year ago, sees that God is at work here among the Kurds and feels this movement will cross borders into Islamic countries where Yezidis live. “It’s like pieces of a puzzle coming together,” Craig says. “We’re just looking in places where there’s potential for spiritual growth.”

Workers in Armenia say they have seen the effectiveness of the prayers of Southern Baptists in both practical matters and spiritual ministry. When Samuel asked his church to pray for road safety, “we never again drove on solid ice and never missed a day going to villages because of the weather.” He and his wife, “Sarah,”* worked throughout the winter and drove on roads that are difficult even in the summer.

In April, when First Baptist Church of Tallapoosa, Ga., committed to pray for a particular village and for an influential Yezidi man who had experienced a dream about Jesus Christ, the man became a believer three days later.

“I sit here in equality with you,” Craig told a church team from Georgia, “to say, ‘OK … what’s the Great Master up to?’”

The answer is that the Yezidis don’t belong to Satan after all. They’re destined to be God’s children,

*Names have been changed to protect identities.