36 Hours to Reality

This past weekend, my school partnered with The Honor Academy (HA)-- the other organization that shares campus with us -- to put on a simulation of the suffering church. The simulation is an annual thing that HA has its interns go through, and they refer to it as the World Awareness LTE (Life Transforming Event).

Thursday night they gathered all of us together to watch "Hotel Rwanda" and then sent us back to our dorms "for the night." Night only lasted about three hours before the facilitators stormed our dorms and herded us out onto the front lawn, bleary eyed and clutching water bottles. Knowing what was going on did nothing to slow the adrenaline that was coursing through our bodies as they marched us to the gym and had us remove "everything" from our pockets -- several people had found creative ways to hide things directly on there persons, so we still went forward with quite a few items they did not know we had...

We were told that the new government in the "glorious Republic of Ceylan" had decided that our "cult" was in opposition to the state and that we were each being rehabilitated either by nature in the "peace camp" or by force in the "prison camp."

I, along with the majority of the group, was led to the "peace camp" out in the back 40, where we were given a few tarps, some rope, a stack of bowls and spoons, a first aid kit, and a map highlighting the places where food and additional water were hidden -- not exactly a UN approved refugee camp, but it was a start.

Anytime we set foot outside of the camp, we were fair game for the facilitators. If you got "shot" you went directly to the prison camp. Our only "job" was to go on missions to collect food, water, sleeping bags, and "bus parts." The "bus" we were building was big enough to hold fifteen people and would see them across the border -- and out of the LTE -- once we completed it. Most watches, cell phones, ect had been confiscated by the government, so time pretty much became a non-issue unless we were on our way to a required movie session. -- We watched movies like "Invisible Children" to try and raise awareness of different world issues.

After the second movie of the day, me and another girl were captured and sent to solitary confinement for a time, before joining the other prisoners in their cells. (There is an empty storage room on campus that is made up of probably a dozen chicken wire and two-by-four "cages," ceiling high and large enough to hold about six college students laying down. They really do look like crude prison cells, so it was perfect.)

I would spend the next 24 hours in this facility, and it was here that the LTE became more than an elaborate game of cops and robbers or capture the flag. Everything we were going through was still a simulation -- push-ups and wall sits are nothing compared to beatings or torture -- but the emotions we were going through, and the moment by moment decisions of whether or not to rebel against our captors, were becoming more and more "real" as the initial adrenaline wore off.

I could tell you story after story of things that happened in that "jail" -- and hopefully will in later posts -- but, for now, let's just suffice to say that there were moments the facilitators could not enter the room where we all were for fear of crying and that, by the end of the event Saturday afternoon, we were all acting far more like Christians than we had been when they drug us out of the dorms early Friday morning.

In some ways, it was one of the longest 36 hours of my life, and, in some ways, I'm amazed that it only took 36 hours to bring us that much closer to reality.