Somali Peacemaker and Herald Press Author Dies

Jewel Showalter

Twice before, Ahmed Ali Haile had approached death's door. A bout of cerebral malaria almost felled him as a young teen. Then years later a rocket mortar shattered his leg, but he lived to father a third child and continue peacemaking work.

But on April 26, 2011, there was no reprieve. The beloved 58-year-old Somali church planter and peace teacher died in his Milwaukee home, after a six-year battle with cancer.

He is survived by his wife of 24 years, Martha Wilson, and three young adult children, Afrah, Sofia, and Gedi.

In an April 30 funeral service at Eastbrook Church of Milwaukee, senior pastor Marc Erickson welcomed former Mennonite missionaries to Somalia, Christian and Muslim Somalis, and other family and friends who had gathered to pay tribute and reflect on Ahmed's unusual life that straddled worlds, cultures, and religions like few others.

Marc and Nancy Erickson had served as missionaries in Somalia from 1969-71 before returning to found Eastbrook, a 2,500-member, suburban/urban, multi-ethnic, multi-racial congregation.

"Ahmed got a lot more out of that body than most people do," Erickson said, with a loving glance at the casket in the front of the auditorium. The coffin, handmade by Old Order Mennonites, per Ahmed's request, was transported to Milwaukee from Goshen, Ind., by his longtime mentor and friend J.R. Burkholder and his wife Susan. Also at his request, Ahmed's body was shrouded in a traditional white Somali burial cloth.

Erickson, who had led Ahmed to Christ in Somalia in the early 1970s, moderated the moving service that included tributes from the Haile children, Martha's sister, Ahmed's brother, and longtime friends. Worship included special Somali praise music and a sermon by Erickson.

In the 1970s when Ahmed and another Somali came to Erickson with the simple request, "We want to be Christians," he had countered, "But do you know you will be rejected by your people, persecuted, and maybe killed?" When they persisted, Erickson said he realized that God had prepared this young man to come to Jesus in radical surrender.

Erickson described Ahmed's intellectual brilliance, his voracious reading of thousands of books, his careful integration of all he learned into simple Christian discipleship. He came to the West and encountered all its diversity, which made him realize how his own 3,000-year-old Semitic heritage had prepared him: the sacrificial lamb's blood, smeared on the doorposts of his father's Somali house, had readied him to meet Jesus, the Lamb of God.

Ahmed's spiritual journey was built squarely on this ancient Somali heritage, and what he had learned from Islam when, as a child, he memorized the whole Quran accurately and with much meaning. Without fear of death Ahmed went back into the heart of his Somali community to bear witness to these truths in 1982.

Then from 1994 to 2009 Ahmed and Martha Haile and their family served as Eastern Mennonite Missions workers in Nairobi, Kenya. While their primary assignment was teaching at Daystar University and helping to launch a peace studies program, their home quickly became a hub for Somali friendships and the nucleus of a Somali believers' fellowship.

Martha said it was not unusual to go through 50 kilos of sugar in a month as a steady stream of Somalis – many refugees from their deteriorating homeland – stopped for an ever-present cup of sweet, cardamom-infused Somali tea.

Many of the memorial tributes to Ahmed, both in the service and during the open microphone lunchtime, focused on Hailes' hospitality and the way Ahmed would talk with anyone about anything without pressure. "My father always had five guests," Gedi joked.

His daughter Sofia shared a moving poem, "…Watching my Dad fight was like: Watching the before and after of a land going through drought, Body wasting away, but spirit devout…"

Glenn Kauffman, EMM's director of Global Ministries, remembered that on a number of occasions after Ahmed learned that his cancer was terminal, he had told EMM leaders, "When Orie O. Miller [early Mennonite mission leader] was dying he said, 'Don't forget the Somalis.' I want to say the same thing. Do not forget the Somalis."

Kauffman and Richard Showalter, who represented EMM at the funeral, said that the experience wove together the EMM and Eastbrook strands of the Hailes' life and ministry. "We discovered a common heart impacted by Ahmed's profound life among us and linking us together," they said. "May the Lord be gracious in showing the next steps he is asking of us, including workers to send."

Ahmed's memoirs, Teatime in Mogadishu: My Journey as a Peace Ambassador in the World of Islam, were penned with longtime friend and associate David W. Shenk; the published book arrived at his home the day after his death.

The book is selling for $14.99 (in Canada $17.25) and can be ordered online at www.mpn.net/teatimeinmogadishu or by calling 1-800-245-7894. Also, find a final interview of Ahmed Ali Haile by David W. Shenk, shot in January 2011 during the editing process for the book, here on YouTube.