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Guns, grit, grace:the life of one missioner
By Dolores Madlener
STAFF WRITER
“A villager warned us to ‘Go!’ I didn’t ask questions, but went
in and told our four other sisters. We had 10 minutes to throw
what belongings we thought important into a bag and begin our
exodus from East Timor.
I drove the jeep. There were barricades set up in every town and
no Timorese was allowed to leave.
The next hour we alternated between a sense of peace and fear
as we drove down out of the hills toward the capital city of Dili.
Villagers were crying and being lined up along the road. We saw
hills and houses burning as the army’s ‘scorched earth’ policy
escalated.
Dili was even worse than our village of Aileu. They were torching
the bishop’s house. The Indonesian military was doing Dili in
a big way, drinking and throwing grenades, while people filled
the streets in panic. We were scared, of course, because you just
didn’t know what was next. That day the sisters evacuated East
Timor on one of the last planes to Darwin, Australia.
I’ve never seen anything like it before and hope I never do again.”
--Sister Susan Gubbins, MM
Chicago-born Maryknoll Sister Susan Gubbins told that tale of
horror and survival following the crisis in East Timor, the breakaway
region of Indonesia. Gubbins had returned home for a retirement
celebration for her brother, Father William Gubbins, former pastor
of St. John Berchmans Parish.
The adventures may read like a Hollywood screenplay, but when
spunky, animated five-foot-two Gubbins tells it, she underplays
the danger the sisters faced. She’s a professional; she’s one
of today’s missioners.
Indonesia was a Muslim country and a brand new Maryknoll mission
in 1973. What might have discouraged another, attracted Gubbins.
In 1973 she was working on a master’s degree in social work at
the University of Chicago after five years in Hong Kong, her first
overseas assignment.
Then 35, Gubbins, who says she was the most “unlikely” one in
her family to be a religious because “I was too wild,” felt drawn
to the idea of going to East Asia. She began reading everything
she could get her hands on about Indonesia. She wrote her term
paper on the country.
Gubbins “chose” to go to Indonesia in 1975. That in itself was
a first. “You used to get sent,” she laughed. But Maryknoll had
just changed the rules. “Collegiality” became a byword.
The country needed social workers and Maryknoll sent Gubbins with
a team of four other sisters.
“I spent the next 16 years in Bandung, Indonesia, teaching social
work and doing (hospital) social work,” she said. While President
Suharto built up his military, “we did community health in the
poor areas of the city.” In 1991 he decreed foreigners would have
to seek citizenship to remain, so the missioners had to pull up
stakes.
“We felt this wasn’t the time to leave East Asia,” Gubbins said.
“We saw the islands out there and some were Christian. We applied
to Bishop Carlos Belo, apostolic administrator of Dili in East
Timor, and he put us in a parish and became our friend.”
The nuns found appalling conditions in Timor, once a Portuguese
colony. “If you read in books about absolute poverty--that’s where
the people were,” Gubbins said. “They had barely enough and nothing
extra.”
Homegrown vegetables are their only cash crop and are sold to
Indonesians, since their neighbors can’t afford to buy, she said.
“If they’re in the forests they can grow coffee, but often borrow
on the crop for a child to go to school. So in a sense they never
get caught up.”
The sisters started a credit union in the parish to promote saving
and have tried to give scholarships.
Gubbins set up a rehabilitation program for physical deformities,
burns and disabilities at the clinic. “Doctors would come from
Australia and do the assessments and surgeries. Boys without legs
or with polio, just little stumps dangling, didn’t sit home feeling
sorry for themselves. They did their work and their chores. They
don’t have much of a childhood. Now our clinic is destroyed, but
we’ll rebuild,” she said with a sparkle in her eyes.
Gubbins says from the time the sisters arrived in 1991 conditions
heated up politically.
“The road from Aileu to Dili (about 25 miles) had 14 checkpoints.
The occupational government was trying to capture the East Timor
resistance leader, ‘Xanana’ Gusmao, who had once been imprisoned
in Jakarta and was hiding in the hills.” Today he is the new Timorese
president.
Bishop Belo has been courageous from the start, she said. “He
was the figure that kept the spirit of referendum and independence
alive. He made himself the ‘voice of the voiceless’” she said.
Receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 brought him even more
prominence, but that wouldn’t have saved his life last June, Gubbins
said.
“One of the militia planned to throw a grenade in our midst during
a parish festival and kill the bishop and as many priests and
sisters as he could get. The reward was to be 1 million rupiah.
When you broke that down, we weren’t worth very much,” she joked.
The assassination was foiled when another militiaman who was to
cause a distraction, refused to be part of killing the beloved
bishop. “When Bishop Belo used to drive out to the villages,”
Gubbins said, “the people lined the streets and some would kneel
down, and he would say, ‘Don’t do that, don’t do that.’”
Last January the government began moving the families of the Indonesian
soldiers, police, teachers and others back to Indonesia. Gubbins
said, “You thought, ‘What’s coming?’”
By summer, when the United Nations mandated a referendum, freedom
was in the air, she said. Despite all the governmental delays,
“98.6 per cent of the eligible voters cast ballots. Those brave
and faithful people knew the risk. She said most of the leaders,
those who had been on “wanted” lists, voted early and went straight
into the mountains. “Our people went home to wait,’ Gubbins said.
When the election results were announced, said Gubbins, “there
was a minute of joy and then panic. People needed to be with their
families when pandemonium broke out. Everyone was making choices
on how and where to hide. Nobody was safe--not the Red Cross,
the United Nations personnel, the church--everyone was in danger.”
She described how government forces began burning in Aileu first
and then in Dili. “People were just frantic. Someone had thrown
a grenade into one village church and people were killed, so Bishop
Belo said, ‘Don’t let them congregate like that any more, they’ll
be ripe for another massacre. The church is no longer a sanctuary.’”
There was systematic shooting and burning of villages for three
days, she said. Soldiers would break all the windows and torch
the place with gasoline and the thatched roofed, grass houses
of the Timorese burned to nothing.
Reliving the memory, Gubbins said, “Missioners are normal people,
not supermen. I think what got us through it was the faith of
the people and our faith in God. I felt God was with us and I
always felt God was with the East Timorese. Their faith grew and
grew all through the years of persecution.”
When the sisters came back to East Timor at the end of October,
she said, the destruction was complete. “Our house and clinic--years
of work--were destroyed. All our equipment, instruments, leather
for special shoes for crippled children, just burned or taken.”
Bishop Belo had set up a little office on the veranda of a government
building and the sisters stayed for a time in the post office.
“I was apprehensive,” sister said, “wondering what the effects
would be on the people. The anger is probably there, but I didn’t
experience it. They were free! They had won the final battle and
were looking ahead. They were busily reclaiming their only material
‘treasures’ they had placed in the empty church for safe-keeping--their
house statues of saints and holy pictures. God was with them.
They were free! It was lovely.”
We have to rebuild of course, Gubbins said. “We need resources.
And there is the pathos over those who have died and those 270,000
who were “stolen” to West Timor and other islands.
During her family visit to Chicago, Gubbins told her story on
Catholic Family Radio before flying back to East Timor in time
for Christmas.
She said “I hope Americans, especially younger Americans, will
develop a ‘world view.’ She didn’t have one when she entered Maryknoll
in 1957, she said, “but I’ve learned a lot more geography than
I ever knew before.” She warned of the School of the Americas
which has trained Indonesian military.
“Just remember,” Gubbins said she told a U.S. senator during a
Washington stopover on her way back to Timor, “there’s only one
thing the Timorese people are afraid of.”
“What’s that?” he asked her. “That the world will forget them.”
Right now, she said, there is joy and hope in their hearts and
life goes on. “I want to be a part of it too.”
Donations to the Maryknoll Sisters can be sent to P.O. Box 317,
Maryknoll, NY, 10545-0317 and can be earmarked for East Timor.
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