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Have you heard the expression “Boots on the Ground?” Well our Live Dead Missionaries are the boots on the Silk Road. Here we’d like to take a moment and allow one of them to share a snapshot of their life with you. Some names and details have been changed, but this is a true story from this colorful, vibrant, and sometimes surprising region.

“I don’t like indoor bathrooms. I prefer to use an outhouse.”

I paused. Despite the lack of proper acoustics in our tiled-from-floor-to-ceiling bathroom, I was pretty sure I’d heard him right. We had a problem with our toilet and when I had opened up the tank earlier in the day, I realized it looked nothing like the internals of our toilets in the United States, so I called up the plumber.

In small-town Central Eurasia, plumbers cost a couple bucks an hour, and we had already gotten to know a guy who exuded friendly, hospitable warmth. I had hired him a few months earlier to help us fix a leak under our sink and he chattered away the whole time he was in our home. He would ask for some tool, and then look over and point at the correct one when he realized I didn’t know the names of random plumbing implements in his language. So not only did he help us fix things, cost next to nothing, and provide some life and humor in our cold, drafty mud-brick home, but I learned new words and phrases every time he came over.

This day when he showed up I pointed out the problems with our toilet and he set to work tinkering on it. It turns out he didn’t know how to fix a toilet, he was just handy. After we put it together backwards and realized it didn’t work, he just said something funny, shrugged his shoulders, and set to work putting it back together correctly.

“Why don’t you like indoor toilets?” I pressed, my curiosity piqued.

He blinked, reached his grease-smudged hand up to his eye, touched his cheek with his pointer finger, and drew it down his cheek. “It’s shameful,” he said simply. “Someone might hear. Women like the toilet inside where it is warm, so I know you have to fix this for your wife, but I think an outhouse is better.” He smiled, his eyes twinkling in his tanned, wind-worn face.

I smiled, too. The $1.50 I spent to have this “plumber” figure out how to fix my toilet was more than worth spending thirty minutes with this Muslim man from Central Asia. Not only did I learn something new about the culture in which I lived, but I feel like God also gave me a glimpse of His heart for precious men and women in Central Asia who are lost without Jesus.

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