They TORTURED a CHRISTIAN FATHER for 5 DAYS in Front of His Children in the DESERT
There are silences that weigh more than any scream.
The silence of that early morning on July 23rd, 2022, while I watched my four children sleep for the last time in our home in Asara was the heaviest I have ever carried.
I knew that we would probably never return. I knew that what was coming could cost us everything.
However, staying meant certain death, just slower and more cruel.
My name is Daniel Tes.
I am 42 years old, although my body looks 60 after what we have lived through.
I am the father of four children. Emanuel 12 years old, Anna 10, David 6, and Ruth our little one just 3 years old.
For 8 years, I served as the leader of an underground church in Eratria, one of the most dangerous places in the world, to be a Christian.
But that morning, as Dawn painted the mountains surrounding our city orange, I stopped being just a pastor and became a fugitive.
My wife Sarah was awake, too. Although she pretended to sleep, I could see the tears sliding down her cheeks as she silently packed the few belongings we could carry, some clothes, a little money hidden for months, identification documents, and the small Bible that Emanuel kept as his most treasured possession.
That Bible, if we had known the price we would pay for it, for years we had lived in the shadows.
Church meetings were always in different places, never more than 10 people at a time, always with lookouts outside.
We taught our children to pray quietly, not to mention Jesus outside the home to live with a secret that defined our entire existence.
However, the net had been tightening. Three church leaders had been arrested in the last month.
One of them, my close friend Johannes, had been seen 2 weeks later in the market with torture marks so evident that children cried upon seeing him pass by.
Then the visit came. 4 in the morning on July 22nd. Knocks on the door that sounded like a sentence.
My neighbor, a man I believed to be neutral, was shouting outside, “Daniel Tes, we know you are hiding illegal meetings.
Open up or we will break down the door.” That night, we didn’t open. We escaped through the back window while they kicked the entrance.
We ran to the house of another brother in faith who hid us in his basement, but we knew the truth.
In Eratraa, once you are marked, there is nowhere to hide. The whole country is a prison.
The borders, the only escape doors. We have to leave,” I whispered to Sarah that night in the basement while our children slept huddled on the cold floor.
“If we stay, they will separate us. I will be taken to prison. You will be forced to deny everything and the children.”
I couldn’t finish the sentence. We both knew what happened to the children of imprisoned Christians, government orphanages, re-education, years of indoctrination to erase any trace of faith.
Sarah took my face in her hands. Then we leave together as a family. If we are going to fall, let it be in the attempt for freedom, not in resignation.
24 hours later, we were in the back of a battered truck sharing space with 17 other people who were also fleeing.
The plan was to cross into Sudan first, then traverse the Libyan desert to reach Tunisia, where international organizations could help us.
8 days of travel, they told us. 8 days that would become the longest journey of our lives.
I remember how Emmanuel looked at me that first night in the truck, his eyes full of questions he didn’t voice aloud.
He was a wise child, mature for his age. He had grown up watching his father disappear at night to preach in basements and abandoned warehouses.
He had learned to lie when asked about our family to say that we were Muslims like everyone else.
He carried his little Bible hidden in the lining of his jacket, a gift I had given him when he turned 10.
Someday I had told him then you will be able to read it aloud without fear.
If I had known that this Bible would be the reason why it almost lost us all, I would have no I wouldn’t have changed anything because what happened next taught us that sometimes God allows us to reach the very edge of the abyss to show us that he is the one who holds even the void.
Anna, my 10-year-old daughter, was writing in a small notebook. She had always been the poet of the family, the one who found beauty even in darkness.
Dad,” she whispered to me as the truck shook over dirt roads. “Will God be in the place we are going?”
I squeezed her hand. “God is everywhere, princess. Even in the places that are the most frightening.”
David, my six-year-old son, clung to his favorite toy, a small wooden truck that I had carved for him.
He didn’t speak much, but his eyes observed everything with an intensity that broke my heart.
And Ruth, my three-year-old baby, slept in Sarah’s arms, oblivious to the danger surrounding us, completely trusting that mom and dad would keep her safe.
That trust, my God, that absolute trust. I didn’t know then how much it would torment me later when I couldn’t protect them when I was tied up under the sun while my children screamed my name and I could do nothing but bleed and pray.
The truck left us at the border with Sudan on the third day. From there, we would walk.
We had a guide, a man named Ahmed, who knew the desert routes. Six days to Al Kufra in Libya, he told us.
After that, another contact would take them north, but they have to stay together and follow my instructions exactly.
We walked during the day under a sun that melted the soles of our shoes.
We rested at night under stars so bright they seemed like punctures in the veil between heaven and earth.
I taught Emanuel the constellations my father had shown me. I told Anna stories of how God guided his people through the desert for 40 years.
I carried David on my shoulders when his little legs could go no further. Sarah sang lullabibies to Ruth even when her own voice broke from exhaustion.
If this story is touching your heart, I need you to stay until the end.
What comes next is not easy to tell. But it is true and you need to know that God does not abandon even when everything in you screams that he has.
On the sixth day in the desert, something changed. Ahmed, our guide, became nervous. He kept looking back, hastening our pace without explanation.
We have to move faster was all he said. That night we didn’t camp. We kept walking under the moon, stumbling over invisible rocks with the children crying from exhaustion.
Dawn broke on the seventh day of our journey, July 29, a date I will never forget because it was the day the desert stopped being our passage to freedom and became our personal hell.
It was around 9:00 in the morning when we saw them. Three Toyota vehicles kicking up sandstorms on the horizon.
Ahmed cursed in Arabic, something I had never heard him do. Traffickers, he said. Run, run with four exhausted children after almost a week of walking without enough water in the middle of a desert that stretched infinitely in all directions.
It was an impossible order, but we tried. My God, how we tried. I carried Ruth, Sarah took David by the hand.
Emmanuel and Anna ran ahead of us. However, the vehicles were faster, much faster. They surrounded us in less than 5 minutes.
Men with scarves covering their faces, armed, shouting in Arabic and in a language I didn’t recognize.
They forced us to kneel in the sand. Akmed tried to negotiate, offering them money.
One of the men shot him in the foot. My son David screamed. Ruth began to cry.
Anna clung to me, trembling. Documents, demanded the one who seemed to be the leader.
He was a tall man with dark eyes that showed nothing resembling compassion. I handed over our papers with trembling hands.
He briefly reviewed them, then threw them to the ground. Eratrians, Christians fleeing, I suppose.
We are just looking for a safe place for our family, I said, trying to keep my voice steady.
We can pay, he laughed. It was a laugh that chilled the blood even under the scorching heat of the desert.
You will pay, but not with money. They separated us from the group. The other refugees were loaded into the vehicles.
Us, our family of six, were left there. Search your belongings, ordered the leader. Everything, empty your backpacks.
Sarah looked at me with terror in her eyes. We knew what they would find.
I tried to distract them, offered all the money we had hidden. It didn’t matter.
One of the younger men grabbed Emanuel’s backpack. He opened it. He emptied its contents onto the sand.
Clothes. An empty canteen, a notebook, and the Bible, small with worn pages from so much use with the name Emanuel written on the first page in my own handwriting.
The Bible I had given him with so much love and hope. The leader picked it up.
He opened it. He read aloud. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
He slammed the book shut. So they are those Christians. They believe their God will save them.
Please, Sarah stepped forward on her knees with her hands clasped in supplication. They are just children.
Whatever you want to do with us with my husband is fine, but please let the children go.
The leader crouched in front of her. He lifted her chin with the barrel of his gun.
Do you want me to let your children go so they can walk alone in the desert and perish from thirst?