DANGER IN MEDAN

A Missionary Life:
Rev. J. Wesley Day
China, Malaysia, Indonesia

Sidetrip: Danger in Medan

People ask me if I was in danger.

In Medan, Indonesia, where we lived from 1952 to 1955, we had a cook and a second woman to care for the house. They lived in the back in a separate house and we lived in a duplex in the front. On the other side of the duplex other missionaries lived. The cook had a granddaughter who attended a Catholic grade school. She had a son who came to see her. Her son lived in a soldiers dormitory at the end of our street. I kept our money in a small safe in my office. The safe had a combination lock on it. When we went on furlough I left money in the safe. When we came back from furlough I had the sensation that there was not as much money as when I left. Several times again I had the sensation the money was not all there that I had kept.

One evening my wife and I went visiting; before we left I took out my attache case which could be locked by a combination lock. I thought, I'll set the attache case lock on my birthday which I cannot forget. No one knows how to operate the case. I will see if anyone tampers with it during our absence. We went out and when we came back I looked at the number on the attache case and it was different. Nobody knows the number to open the case. They may try to open it but cannot do so. I opened the attache case and to my surprise some of the money was not in it. Next question - Who was in the house at the time we had gone out? The cook had access to the house and the cleaning woman had access to the house. But we knew that the cleaning woman was not clever enough to open anything. What to do. We were certain it was the cook.

The next day my wife was in the servants' room talking as she often did and the cooks son was there. In the conversation my wife said there was money missing and we thought we knew who took it. The cook's son said, "There will be some killing." I think he was threatening us; as we found out later, he was a compulsive gambler.

We decided to take this threat seriously. We called on our bishop and then on the government person who was a Muslim, in charge of our street, telling them about it. The government person said, "we can put the man in prison but we cannot keep him there. If he is full of revenge, he will come out one day and act out his revenge on you." The government person said "Would you be willing to give up your cook?" The next day the government person came to our home and told our cook that we were letting her go. I paid her in full for the work she had done, plus a farewell gift. She had one request, to be taken to an address. We took her and her things in our station wagon to the address she had mentioned. I noticed as we passed her son's dormitory she was crouching on the floor.

We wrote a letter about her services and her abilities. We heard from neighbors sometime later that she was fired from her next job because things were missing there also.