c. 1996 Religion News Service

BUJUMBURA, Burundi _ During nearly a half-century as missionaries in Africa, Carl and Eleanor Johnson have dealt with many crises, but never one as dreadful as what they face now.

More than 7,000 refugees are crammed inside the 20-acre mission compound _ called Camp Johnson _ on the outskirts of this capital city. Primarily members of the Hutu ethnic group, most fled their homes in the nearby suburb of Kiminge in 1993, after an onslaught by the Tutsi-dominated Burundian army pursuing Hutu rebels. Since then, more refugees have made their way to Camp Johnson as the three-year civil war grinds on.

The enormity of looking after so many people is a daunting enough task for the young and the fit. But Carl and Eleanor Johnson are both 81 years old. Still, they make their rounds, overseeing the mission staff, organizing food deliveries, hustling for sorely needed medicine and doing whatever they can to secure the safety of the residents.

The hard life is just what the two bargained for when they joined the Christian Brethren in 1937 while students at Wheaton College near Chicago. And they were well prepared for difficulties when they arrived in Burundi as missionaries in 1950 for this evangelical Christian denomination that claims about 80,000 members in the United States. But here at Camp Johnson, life has never been so hard.

Every morning the couple look out from their small cottage onto a patchwork of over-crowded, tarp-covered shacks that stretches down the slope of the mountain toward the deep blue of Lake Tanganyika. Schoolrooms, dispensaries, storerooms and the mission clinic are all packed with the sick and dying.

Eleanor Johnson, a Baltimore native, strides down the trash-strewn path past the stinking, open-pit latrines to the mission’s former school building, its veranda covered with patients stretched upon grass mats.”Here we have just about every ailment you can think of,”she said, with a sweep of her arm, slowed down only slightly from a bout of malaria she cannot seem to shake.”Right now we have 115 patients undergoing T.B. treatment, plenty of cases of malaria, AIDS and meningitis _ and we have some gunshot wounds.” Inside, a cluster of blanket-wrapped people sprawl on the floor of a classroom, some shivering with malarial fevers, others with the hacking cough of tuberculosis. Next door is a child, barely two years old, wounded by random gunfire in the camp. The bullet that passed through the baby’s arm pierced his mother’s heart. A neighbor found him crying, still clinging to his dead mother.

With all the suffering looming over Burundi, it is easy to fall into the habit of blame. But politics and blame are two things the Johnsons will not talk about or assign. To them, to suggest who a perpetrator might be, or to venture opinions about the current government or its policies, is to invite trouble.

The vast majority of the refugees at Camp Johnson are Hutus caught between the Burundian army, which suspects them of collaborating with insurgents, and rebels, who periodically sweep through the outskirts of the city. But ethnicity is avoided. When they talk about the camp residents, the Johnsons are both given to euphemisms, describing them by physical stature rather than by ethnicity.”We mostly have shorts (Hutus) here but we also have a lot of talls (Tutsis),”says Carl Johnson. When politicians are mentioned within earshot of the refugees, many of whom have limited literacy skills, they spell rather than say the name. And the ongoing civil war is referred to simply as”the troubles.” Danger lurks everywhere around Bujumbura, and everyone at Camp Johnson knows that staying here does not mean they are absolutely safe. On May 9 at 3:30 a.m. someone (Eleanor Johnson doesn’t venture to guess their identity) set up a machine gun on a nearby building and raked the camp with automatic gunfire. When the shooting was over, eight people lay dead.

On a recent weekday, just after this reporter’s visit, three men entered the camp and shot a resident dead through the throat. A few months back, a funeral procession was machine-gunned as they sought to bury a woman who had been killed by a sniper inside the camp.

After that incident funerals were kept very small affairs and burials conducted late in the evening. Then city authorities created more problems for the camp residents when they told the Johnsons that a permit was needed anytime a body was buried. With an average of three camp residents dying each week, Eleanor Johnson dutifully sent the letters off to the mayor’s office and patiently awaited a reply while the bodies continued to pile up.

Finally word came from the city that a truck would come to fetch the bodies. Days passed.”Oh good Lord, you can imagine what it was like, with so many dead in this tropical heat,”said Eleanor Johnson. A truck did finally come once, but never appeared again.”We just got to the point where we couldn’t deal with it anymore,”Carl Johnson said.”A couple of the older men organized some of the strongest boys into burial details. Now when someone dies they take the body up into the mountains and bury them, no cross or gravestone, nothing. They just put them in the ground and get out of there. It is extremely dangerous for them to go up there, and we worry about them every time they go out but what can we do.” From the outside, Camp Johnsons looks like a massacre waiting to happen. When reminded that thousands of Tutsis were slaughtered in churches across Rwanda when they sought sanctuary during the genocide there two years ago, Eleanor Johnson acknowledges the danger but relies on her faith.”We trust in the Lord and we’ve been lucky so far,”she said.

But the Johnsons also have some very powerful friends. The United States Embassy in Bujumbura is constantly checking up on conditions in the camp. Camp Johnson has been graced by visits from the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright and Howard Wolpe, the U.S. State Department’s special envoy to Burundi.

The French and Belgian ambassadors also call from time to time. If a rampage were to happen here, as happened at Kiminge in 1993, the outcry of the international community would likely be loud and the military understands that.

But the Burundian military is not all-powerful. There are extremist elements both within and outside the government who care little for international opinion.

Trouble in this part of Bujumbura often occurs in the dark. Carl Johnson’s standard advice to visitors is”not to let the shadows get too long on you out here. Better get on back to town.” At a military checkpoint on the deserted road that borders Kiminge, a soldier waits to scrutinize the passports and credential of a carload of visitors who have come from the refugee camp.”And why have you come to this section of Bujumbura?”asks a soldier with dark glasses in the failing light.”We have been to the Johnson compound,”comes the reply.”So you are collaborating with the Johnsons,”he says, tossing the documents into the car and waving it on.

MJP END FLEMING