THROUGH CARING EYES

By Warren Bolon

IT WAS SOMETHING LIKE LANDING IN THE eye of a storm. When Scott Baldauf arrived in Baghdad last August, Iraq was in a state of uneasy calm. United States military forces were pausing between operations. "People were waiting for the next big thing," Baldauf says in a telephone conversation, "not even necessarily sure whether the next thing would be big."

His assignment: a short-term rotation into Iraq for The Christian Science Monitor from his home in India, where Baldauf is based as the Monitor's South Asia correspondent. Preparation is everything when you're heading to a country in turmoil. "You just have to be ready to respond to whatever's coming," Baldauf explains. For this correspondent, that probably meant making sure to pack the body armor and extra satellite phone batteries. But it also meant preparing mentally and spiritually for the knowns and unknowns of life in a war zone.

"One thing that I just always kept in mind," says Baldauf, "was that I am certainly always in God's company, wherever I am, even in Iraq. That the people around me are responding to the same Father, the same God. In Iraq they consider the Supreme Being to be Allah, but the same qualities of this God are expressed in the Christian God, and in the Hebrew Yahweh, and so on. We're all responding to the same Being.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Article

THE KENYAN CAPTIVES IN IRAQ