Four missionaries from Devils Lake have returned home after spending four days being held by authorities in Venezuela.
The group had set up a clinic in a church in Ocumare De la Costa, Venezuela - about 60 miles west of Caracas. Bethel Evangelical Free Church has sent over a hundred volunteer missionaries to Ocumare since 2001 - who in addition to sharing the word of God have provided routine medical services, offered hearing aids and even given haircuts. Team leader Arlynn Hefta says the trip had been going well until last Wednesday afternoon when Venezuelan soldiers entered the church, brandishing rifles - and demanding that the team leave with them. Hefta says it wasn't long before the locals discovered what was happening.
"Within a half hour, about two to three hundred people in the little village of Ocumare, which has about five thousand people, it happened so fast - they came in and surrounded us and they challenged the Venezuelan military, with the guns, and they said, 'We're protecting you, and we're not going to let these soldiers take you.' Imagine the courage."
Hefta says the team discussed the situation with the pastor of the church they'd been working with, and then asked the locals to allow them to leave with the soldiers in order to prevent anyone from being hurt. The team was then taken into military custody and questioned for three days. Dr. Russ Petty, who has traveled to Venezuela twelve times, says the team was treated adequately - but the situation was very confusing.
"They said, 'we don't know what to do with you, whether we'll send you back to Ocumare or send you back to the US,' then they would come back a couple hours later and say 'oh, we've almost reached a decision, this is what we're going to do with you,' then we'd wait eight hours, and wouldn't hear anything. They'd come in and say 'well what you've done is very serious, you need to be punished for this,' and then a few hours later come back and say 'oh, well, this is going to have a good outcome.'"
The team was ultimately released from custody on Saturday. They then traveled to Aruba to await their originally scheduled flights home. Desiree Bouvette says this was her third trip to Venezuela and despite this experience, she would go back. She says she remembers one family who came to get haircuts on her first trip in 2007.
"They'd never had a professional haircut, so the husband wanted to make sure his family got one. They walked seven miles through the jungle just to come for a haircut - how insignificant in America is a haircut? I mean, really? So that's why I go back. It's not much - it's not like giving medicine or shots, like the doctors, or hearing aids so they can hear - but it still means a lot to them."
Kermit Paulson says he would return as well. He says missionaries don't always go to places that are considered to be safe - he says they go where they are needed.
"Their love of God is going to carry them on and keep them going. And that's going to be the same way with us - we're going to trust in the Lord, that's what we did through this whole thing."
"That's what got us through." Hefta agrees. "That's what got us through."
Hefta says the four of them were deported so they are not legally allowed back to Venezuela for two years. He says the team did not know that the Venezuelan authorities thought they might have been spies until after they'd left the country.