The Fairfax resident and theology professor was co-facilitating a healing and reconciliation workshop last month in Mutare, Zimbabwe, hoping to foster forgiveness in the wake of widespread political violence and intimidation around the country's 2008 election.
Workshop attendees were split into pairs to share a painful experience of suffering. Little did Dreitcer know that the person he'd been paired with was actually a member of President Robert Mugabe's "secret police": a spy, pretending to be a chaplain, sent to monitor the event for anti-government sentiment.
Dreitcer, 52, went first, sharing in part his anguish over the April 2004 death of his wife, Sleepy Hollow Presbyterian Church Pastor Wendy Dreitcer, from cancer at the age of 47. The man was so taken aback by Dreitcer's story that he began to let go of his guise.
"Andy's ability to be passionate and tender and open about his own experiences is extraordinary, and he shared that in a deep, deep way with this person," said Frank Rogers, Dreitcer's colleague at Claremont School of Theology in Southern California.
"He was really taken with how Andy shared his story," said Mazvita Machinga, a Claremont student from Zimbabwe who directs from afar the Pastoral Care and Counseling Center in Mutare and who organized the National Healing and Reconciliation workshop. "He told the group that he shared with Andy some things that he never told anyone in his
Dreitcer listened as the man told him he was with Mugabe's Central Intelligence Organization and had perpetrated violence in Zimbabwe, and that he felt great shame at his inability to leave his position. The man didn't get the stunned reaction he expected. Dreitcer nodded, and the men kept talking. After a while, conference organizers who weren't fooled by the man's disguise went to Dreitcer to clue him into the ruse. But Dreitcer said he already knew and didn't care.
"He was a clear example of perpetrators being, at least to some degree, victims of forces of the wider societal context," Dreitcer said.
Afterwards, the man told Dreitcer, "You will never know how you have changed my life."
"This was coming from the one person nobody wanted to talk to," Rogers said. "Andy just has this amazing empathy. He has such a soft heart and is such a tender-hearted person. The man told the entire group that he had never experienced such healing by someone willing to listen to his story. 'This man has become my brother,' he said."
The Zimbabwe workshop, held on the country's eastern edge, was the first baby step in the impoverished country's road to reconciliation. It gathered Christian ministers, tribal leaders and local leaders who sought to learn reconciliation techniques. The event stemmed from the Ministry for Healing and Reconciliation, a division of the newly formed tenuous partnership between Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, who Mugabe narrowly defeated despite widespread claims of voter fraud and abuse.
"This was pretty extraordinary," Dreitcer said. "This kind of event hadn't happened before in Zimbabwe."
What made reconciliation so complicated in Zimbabwe is that the perpetrators and the victims of violence mostly still lived in the same communities. In one instance, a Methodist pastor in western Zimbabwe told of nearly being beaten to death in the summer of 2008 by a group of men after he refused to chant the political slogans of Mugabe's Zanu-PF party. He said he still sees those men every day.
"I am a Christian pastor," he told the workshop attendees. "I am supposed to forgive. But I am also filled with anger and bitterness. They have taken my humanity."
Another woman was told to say that she couldn't vote because she had broken her hand. When she refused, they cut off her fingers, Dreitcer said.
"If you were a local leader and you didn't publicly support Mugabe and the ruling party, they would target you," he said.
While the event was unprecedented in Zimbabwe, it also marked a culmination of sorts for Dreitcer.
Nearly five years removed from the death of his wife, he's taking steps well outside of the academic and theological world where he's spent his career. He, Rogers and their Oregon-based colleague Mark Yaconelli recently formed an organization called Triptykos to spread what they call "engaged compassion" in places that need it most.
"This kind of brings it all together, and it's very gratifying, especially Zimbabwe," Dreitcer said. "Professionally, it's the most important thing I've done."
Rogers said he's noticed a deepening of Dreitcer's work in recent years.
"This is an extension of the kind of work he's always done, taking it into places where pain and suffering is more transparent as opposed to just working in an academic context," Rogers said. "It probably did come out of Wendy's death and raising two teenage daughters by himself to an extent."
The trio plan to continue taking their teachings of compassion to the places that need it most. They've received requests to work in Northern Ireland and with prisoners related to gang activity in Guatemala. A follow-up workshop in Zimbabwe is already in the works for summer 2010.
But their next mission might make all of those seem easy by comparison. As part of the Faith & Politics Institute's regular series, Triptykos will head to Washington, D.C., in April 2010 for an event designed to heal the tremendous rancor in Congress. It's tentatively titled "Working with Difficult People Without Losing Your Soul."
"The parties in these situations can find some basic sense of human compassion and can still hold their ground and work together constructively," Dreitcer said. "It's about connecting with some fundamental human goodness in the other person."
Dreitcer is realistic about his chances to make a dent in a political culture rife with cynicism and opportunism.
"In some ways it'll be more difficult than sending people back to a village where there was a torture camp," he said. "When it's life and death, there seems to be a more pressing desire to make things work. But we're just talking about planting seeds."
Read more Fairfax stories at the IJ's Fairfax section.
Contact Jim Welte via e-mail at jwelte@marinij.com
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