What sitting, sipping with Syrian refugees taught two Lowcountry missionaries

Ann Tullie was hot and tired.

She sought shade under a tarp.

Tarps, blue and white ones, dotted the dusty land. Many of them were people’s homes — residences, more accurately. The people had fled their homes in Syria.

Now refugees, they lived in Turkey’s Hatay Province, in a camp.

A Syrian woman looked at Tullie, a Sun City resident who was visiting the camp on June 9 as a missionary with Anglican Frontier Missions. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees website estimates there are almost 5 million Syrian refugees in the Middle East and North Africa. About 2.7 million of those now reside in Turkey.

The Syrian woman wore a floral-patterned, full-length dress and head scarf. She ducked inside her tarp-house. Moments later she emerged with a rug.

She placed it and a cushion on the ground, and motioned for Tullie to sit.

Tullie, whose white blouse matched her curly hair, sat.

The refugee offered her tea.

“I guess she could tell I was tired and thirsty,” Tullie said Monday as she and her husband, Dick, sat on the sofa in their living room. Dick Tullie made the short-term mission trip with her, like he has about a dozen times before. The couple, members of The Parish Church of St. Helena, have performed mission work since 2004 in the United States, Central America and Africa.

“And I’m sitting there and I’m saying to myself, ‘What do I do now?’” Ann Tullie said. “This woman speaks Arabic, and I have not one word of the language.”

Language barriers were nothing new for the couple.

The Tullies had traveled to Madagascar for a two-month mission in 2014. They didn’t speak the local language, and a bishop — the point person who was supposed to help coordinate their activities — was traveling throughout the country, touring the diocese. They found themselves with a lot of downtime at first, restricted to a compound between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. every day.

“Lord, why are we here?” Dick Tullie said, remembering a question he posed to God. “We’re not doing anything tonight.”

Later, when he returned to the United States, he reflected on the experience. The lesson he took from it: Sometimes it’s less about performing acts and good deeds and more about having faith.

“It’s about being with the Lord,” his wife said, “not doing things. You begin to see people through God’s eyes, how he loves them.”

Ann Tullie taught some of the women to use a sewing machine. Her husband showed the men how to use new tools to perform handiwork. They visited villages where “spontaneous” Christian churches might spring up under a shade tree.

On one occasion they hiked two hours to a village to attend a service. The villagers brought a half-dozen plastic chairs and insisted their guests sit. The locals sat on the ground as the service began. Goats and chickens milled about near the congregation.

“They always made us sit in a plastic chair,” Ann Tullie said. “At first I was embarrassed — who am I to sit in a chair while they sit on the ground?”

But she came to realize it was an honor to be asked to sit, a gracious honor she could not refuse.

“The average person in Madagascar eats a half cup of rice a day,” she said. “So we were giants, because of our nutrition. We were giants among the refugees, too.”

While in Turkey, Tullie and her husband visited five refugee camps. To the refugees they delivered food, in white bags.

Each heavy-duty plastic bag might weigh 20 pounds, Dick Tullie said. Each bag contained a kilogram of flour, another of rice, two kilograms of wheat grains, a liter of oil and some salt and sugar. Enough food to sustain two adults for a week, the Tullies said.

Also in the bag was a large container of loose leaf tea.

As Ann Tullie sat on the rug and shared tea with the Syrian refugee, she noticed she was twice the woman’s size. The woman held her grandchild, garbed in a white, yellow and orange flower-patterned dress.

No interpreter was nearby, so it was hard to communicate with the refugee. Tullie was at a loss.

“So the thought that came to me was when Job had lost everything — his family, all of his property, everything — his friends came to visit him,” she said, recounting the story of Job — whose faith was tested when God allowed Satan to take his wealth and health — from the Bible.

“And for the first week they were with him, they did nothing but sit next to him,” she said. “So I said to myself, ‘I guess that’s what I’m supposed to do — I’m supposed to sit here, and just be with her.”

And so Ann Tullie drank tea.

And sat.

This story was originally published July 18, 2016 at 4:54 PM with the headline "What sitting, sipping with Syrian refugees taught two Lowcountry missionaries."