**This blog series was written about the events that happened on Tuesday, November 16th.
It just took a while for the words to come. Told you that might happen… ;p**
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Andrew.
He was pacing back and forth a few feet in front of me, talking sternly and cursing occasionally. He’d walk to the coffee bar and then back to the end of the display cabinet, almost the entire length of the front lobby of the hotel. I was sitting at a small table with my back against the wall; a front row seat to the events unfolding before me.
And the gun?
It was in his hand, muzzle buried just under his right jaw, pointed upward.
I’d heard him fighting with the front doors. It sounded as if someone was trying to shake them off the hinges that bound them to the building. It took me about as long as it took him to succeed in forcing the doors open to realize that Andrew was at, no, in the hotel. We’d met him briefly a couple of days prior at the Center and had encountered him again just the night before. He was talking incessantly; about the explosives in his satchel, his work as an assassin, the death of the Nicaraguan President the night before, useful Spanish phrases, the uselessness of American missionaries in Nica and other ramblings that didn’t make much sense. It was obvious he was not in his right mind.
Officially, Andrew is bi-polar.
Unofficially, I wonder if there is more than that going on in his head. My mom was bi-polar and, while the talking incessantly – sometimes about things that had happened years before or were going to happen in days or months to come – was very much a part of her manic phases, she at least made sense. It may not have followed a sensible timeline, but they were things that had (or would have) actually happened. Andrew’s, I suspected, were not. Daniel Ortega is still alive and I’m relatively certain Andrew did not have explosives in the satchel he kept tossing on the kitchen counter.
Our contacts here had been employing Andrew as an English teacher, among other things, for some of the youth that were frequenting the Center. From what we understand, he had a great rapport with the youth, is a solid brother in Christ and, all in all, was a blessing to the ministry.
But, he’d been refusing to take his medication – for how long, I’m not sure – and his mind had become a minefield. We’d awoken that morning to sounds of gunshots, the banging of metal objects on the walls and him shouting and cursing – to no one. He eventually made his way into town where he was flashing a knife and a machete threateningly. Later that evening, we were asked not to return to the Center because Andrew was on the property, holding a knife to his throat and threatening suicide. He’d busted out some windows on the property and there were holes in the concrete walls of his room. Our ministry contacts wanted us to spend the night at the hotel, where we would be kept away from Andrew’s unstable disposition.
Unfortunately, Satan and his demons had other plans. (
continue…)
