KDurant7 blog adventures

Santiago, Chile 1982

My wife and I moved to Santiago, Chile seeking a better school for our deaf son, Paul, as Bolivia at that time had no school to offer. One of my students in Bolivia had a grandmother who was the Consulate of Chile in Bolivia, and she helped us obtain resident visas so we could get more advanced training for him there. Starting a new life there with 2 toddlers and one on the way was tough. I taught English in the local institutes, and we did what we always had done, start in home Bible studies with our students. Under Pinochet, it was illegal to have any sort of in-home gatherings as the intention was to control the spread of communism. Many thousands had gone ‘missing” (there is a movie on that) and the somber climate of the threat of being arrested and disappeared was real. My students told me frightening stories about this. Amongst the dozens of students that came to our house, unbeknownst to me, were university students who were communist sympathizers. We got red flagged, and suddenly one day we got a knock on the door at 5:30 am in the morning. 5 military police with machine guns and 1 woman stormed into our house! “Sit here on the sofa” they commanded, and we sat there embracing our kids as they went through all the things in our house. Not finding communist materials they said we would have to register downtown as being out of regulation in our activities. Our fingerprints were taken, and we were released. Our phone was tapped after that. One of my students had been a foreign exchange student in Russia and for hours during classes I learned a lot of what the country of Russia was like. It dawned on me later that she probably had been monitored, and our friendship probably appeared suspicious, however, she was not communist by any means. It was hard to say goodbye to all of our new friends but we prayed and took the decision to return to Bolivia. We enjoyed getting to know Chile for that year, travelling through the Atacama desert by train, and living in crowded Santiago. The lesson we learned was that God will protect you and me even when under military rule, and He often allows situations to get us to be desperate and closer to Him, trusting that He guides where He wants us to be. God wants us ‘ready to go’, ‘ready to stay’, and ready to move whenever it’s in His time.