"...the helper of the fatherless." Ps. 10:14

"...Thou beholdest mischief and spite, to requite it with Thy hand: the poor committeth himself unto Thee; Thou are the helper of the fatherless."

     In 1970 our family was moved by the U.S. Air Force to Zaragoza Spain to a base we affectionately called ZAB. (See Call to ZAB, Feb. 1).  Jennifer was three weeks old when we arrived at the deserted base which the Air Force was busy reopening.  They had moved G.I.'s from all over Europe to accomplish this task and had also moved in the children of diplomats and other Americans who had previously been housed at our base in Sevilla.  We were thrilled to still be with these kids to whom we had ministered  previously.  They had become a precious part of our youth group in Sevilla and we were loathed to leave them.

Michelle and Mary Ann are the two blonds on the right.

     Shortly after getting settled into base housing a fellow showed up in the Chaplin's office with two motherless girls.  He told our Chaplin that he was working in the oil fields of the Middle East. Their mother had died and he didn't have the heart to leave them in a barracks with all the other children.  He wanted a Christian family to take them in.  So Chaplin Mosher called Ted.  We took one, Mary Ann (the oldest at 15) and he and his wife, Nan took the youngest, Michelle. I think she was 13.  Well it didn't take long and they were part of our families.  Their dad, Bill Myers, would try to come see them on the holidays.  He was usually late (one time we had Christmas with him in February), but it didn't matter to them as long as they got to see him two or three times a year. 
     Michelle and Kelly became close friends and Mary Ann had a wide circle of teenage friends who came in and out of our home every week.  We have so many memories of our time with them.  They were funny, happy girls who brightened and challenged our lives.
     When our family went on our tour of Europe just before we left, Michelle went with us.  She was given to car sickness and had to have Dramamine to endure the trip.  As a result she slept through most of it.  She slept in the tent with Kelly, Jennifer, Ted and I while the boys slept in the car.  One night we camped by a river in Austria and during the night there came a frog strangling thunder storm.  We awoke with Michelle and Kelly screaming, "We're floating!"  I can still here her squeaky little voice pleading, "Get up, Mr. Gehrke, we're floating to the river!"  Ted got up and went outside in the rain, grabbed some tool from the trunk of the car and dug a trench around our tent to drain away the water.  Needless to say he came in soaking wet and I don't think he ever got completely dry that night.  The boys slept soundly inside the car and didn't even know how close we came to "floating away on the river".
     They were little mothers to Jennifer.  I don't think I changed a diaper or dressed her for months.  She was their baby.  As a result she was very late in learning to dress herself or brush her own hair.
     Mary Ann was very funny and always in trouble.  She came home one day from school and said, "Mr. Gehrke, my science teacher hates God.  He's always mocking Him and anyone in class who is a Christian.  Also if we try to answer him, he puts us out into the hall for a "time out".  Of course we love the time outs and stand out there laughing and joking."  So Ted said, "I tell you what to do, Mary Ann, the next time he mocks God or Christians you stand up to him, politely, and when he says, "Go to the hall for a time out!" You start pleading with him not to banish you to the hallway.  That way you'll be able to stand firm for the faith and he'll believe his "punishment" is effective and keep banishing you to the hall.  Just make sure you do the work and get good grades."   Well a couple days later she came home and reported that he had made some asinine statement about Christianity and she put up her hand and answered him.  He immediately raised his arm and pointed at the door and said, "To the hall, Mary Ann!"  She began pleading, "No please, Mr. So n So, not the hallway!  Please don't make me go to the hallway!"  She wouldn't leave her desk so he went over and took her by the arm to guide her out to the hallway.  She immediately dropped to the floor and grabbed him around the ankle and held on for dear life screaming, "Please not the hallway!  Don't make me go out there by myself!"  The hapless teacher began to drag her, one step at a time until he had pulled her out the door where he extricated his foot, went back into the classroom and slammed the door.  As far as I know he continued this practice to the end of the year and the Christian students continued to stand up for their faith and accept their "punishment".
     Eventually the Moshers rotated back to the states and we inherited, to Kelly's delight, Michelle.  They really did become "our girls".   They are in a couple of our family Christmas pictures.
      Finally the day came when we had to go back to the states and Mary Ann and Michelle went to be with their dad, somewhere in the Middle East.  We left Spain in May and were sent to Altus, Oklahoma.  There we rented a house and prepared to enter our kids in school in the fall.  We missed the girls terribly.  Added to that, we were hearing reports of a conflict between Lebanon and Israel and we thought they were in Lebanon in an American boarding school.  One night as we sat down to eat dinner one of the kids asked, "Are Michelle and Mary Ann in a war?"  "What do you mean?" I asked.  "Well, I heard that there's a war between Lebanon and Israel.  What if they are in danger?  Can't they just come here and live with us?"

Mary Ann and Michelle, the two blonds on the left.

     "Of course they can if their dad wants them to.  We just need to pray for them and ask God to send them to us if He wants them here."  So we did.  I think Joel prayed and asked God to send Michell and Mary Ann "home" so they'd be safe.  We began to eat and a few minutes into the dinner the phone rang.   Ted answered the phone and heard Bill Myers' voice on the other end. He asked if we'd be willing to accept his girls back into our home for a while longer.  "You're not going to believe this,"  he told Bill, "but we just prayed for that and we can't wait to get them back."  Two days later we picked them up in Oklahoma City at the airport.  They lived
 with us for at least another school year then their dad moved them back to California to live with relatives.
     Life separated us after that.  Ted retired from the Air Force in Altus and we came to Michigan to finish our education.  We lost touch with them for several years but we have finally re-established contact with them and are corresponding via Facebook and mail and phone once again.  I talk to them, hear their familiar voices and the years fade away.  Once again, "our girls" are a part of the family.  It makes me long for that day when "the helper of the Fatherless" will welcome us all home.

The Call to ZAB

     In an effort not to confuse my readers about where we were and at what time of our lives we were in a particular place, I have decided to try to clarify it for you.  We were stationed in Spain twice.

The Cathedral in Sevilla

  The first time was from 1960 to 1963 when we lived in Constantina.  That's where Joel was the baby, (fourteen months old when we arrived there) and Kelly was born while we were there.  The second tour of duty was in Sevilla at San Pablo and Moron Air Force bases. The time period of this second tour was 1968 to 1973.  That's where Jennifer was born in 1970.

       By the time we returned to Spain for our second tour we had grown as a family and in our marriage.  We were no longer newly weds.  We now had three children and our interests were different .  We were active in church,  Ted was a Baptist Preacher, so we came back to Spain 

 Entrance to Base Housing for San Pablo AFB

looking for a place to serve the Lord and our church.  We weren't there long when Ted began his first pastorate.  He was an Air Traffic Controller in the Air Force and the pastor of a small Baptist Fellowship in his spare time.  I won't go into detail about the Fellowship because I've mentioned it in previous stories but I must say this, it was a very active group of young Christians, enthusiastic about their faith and eager to grow and learn and they had a great impact on our lives and future ministry.    It was also in Seville, at this time, that Ted started his first youth ministry.  While we were there the base became the home of over a hundred American teenagers from all over Europe and the Middle East.  These were the children of diplomats, oil field workers, and other State Department employees.  Their parents wanted them to attend an English speaking school, so San Pablo Air Force Base became the "boarding school" for all of these young people.
     Now, this was the time of  "flower, power, and Haight/Asbury in Los Angeles where drugs flowed like water and runaway teens laid around high in the parks and in unoccupied buildings. It was the time of "sex, drugs and rock and roll".  The group of teens who arrived on the tarmac at Moron Air Force base were poster children for that time in our national history. 


Moron AFB

      The night they arrived the Air Force buses met them at the plane.  They deplaned in various stages of disarray.  Many of them were high on hash, which was easy to obtain in the Middle East, several were drunk, a couple were wrapped in army blankets and when the blankets were removed, found to be completely naked.  The ones who were sober were homesick and frightened and some were crying.  Of course this description was quickly relayed to our fellowship by the G.I.'s who picked them up and we realized the challenge that our little military community had been presented.  As parents, they broke our hearts.  We looked at them and saw kids...  someone's son or daughter.   As a Christian group on base, we viewed them as a ministry.  We began by visiting each one of their rooms and inviting them to church.  We never expected any of them to show up, but to our surprise a few did start attending chapel on Sunday mornings.  Of course the chapel didn't know what to do with them, so our fellowship decided to start a Sunday night youth meeting.  We announced it in the morning chapel services then waited with bated breath for them to show up on Sunday evenings during our worship service.   The first Sunday evening we went ahead with our usual services,   We had all brought cup cakes and punch just in case the flood of teenagers, that we were praying for, showed up.


Park at San Pablo AFB

      During the service I sometimes allowed six year old Kelly to take her restless little brother out to the playground, which was located between the chapel and the dorm.  They were swinging together there, when a young man from the dorm, joined them.  He was sixteen or seventeen.  He had long straggly hair and a scruffy beard.  He was dressed in "hippy" garb and looked generally disheveled and unkempt.  Kelly, who was an out spoken and friendly little girl, struck up a conversation with him.  She asked him if he was a Christian. He said he didn't know and what was a  Christian anyway?  So she proceeded to explain it to him, then she asked him if he was coming to the youth group meeting at the chapel after church, "We're having cup cakes and punch and we'll probably sing for a couple hours.  Why don't you come? It will be fun!"
     That must have been the hook that reeled him in because just before the  service ended, Kelly came walking in holding the hand of her "catch" while he and a group of other teenagers (she must have hooked the leader of the pack) walked around the congregation, handing out flowers to everyone.  We accepted their flowers (which they had probably stolen out of the chapel flower beds) with smiles.
     When church was over Ted immediately went back and introduced himself to them, shook their hands and invited them to the fellowship hall for cake and punch.  There we milled around them asking questions about their families, their countries of origin and where they were from in the states.  They were eager to talk to us.  We began to get acquainted with these lonely kids and they with us.  It was fun for us all.  Before they left we invited them back for the youth fellowship the next week.  Thus began our adventure with the boarding school kids.
     Soon we were taking birthday cakes once a month to celebrate the birthdays of the month, at the dorm.  We were inviting them in groups into our homes for dinner and board games or just times of conversation.  Ted started teaching them and counseling with them during the youth meetings on Sunday night.  We discovered that he had a special rapport with teenagers.  They thought he was funny and he related to them like a friend. Soon we had a large group that attended church to hear him preach.
     About a year after their arrival, rumors began flying that the Air Force was closing San Pablo Air Force Base.  We also heard that the boarding school was being sent north to Zaragosa Air Force Base (ZAB).  Zaragosa was an abandoned base in northern Spain which was slated to be re-opened.
     Ted was told that he would be rotated back to the states and could have his choice of three bases.  We discussed it and he asked me, "If we go back to the states, who will minister to the kids?"  As eager as we were to go home, our hearts were still with these kids.  I remember looking at him and saying, "Well, it looks like our "base of choice" is, Zaragosa!"  Shortly after that Ted was told that he would be sent to Zaragosa to help open the tower, then he'd be rotated back to the states.  He asked them about the possibility that he could just transfer permanently to ZAB and they told them that it would be impossible, because they were bringing in a whole new wing for ZAB.
     Ted and several other airmen from Moron left us for ZAB when Jennifer was two weeks old.  It was hard on us as a family because we no longer had the fellowship, we had a new baby and many of our friends had already left Sevilla.  We missed our Dad and our future was "up in the air".  We existed like that for about three weeks when Ted came up with a great idea.  We had friends, the Harrisons, who were stationed at Madrid at Torrejon Air Force Base. He called them and asked if we could live with them for a couple weeks so he could come there on the weekends and see us. (Madrid was a little over an hour from Zaragosa.)  They said, "Sure!" So Ted took a couple days off and came down to move us temporarily to Madrid.
     We stayed with the Harrisons for a week and a half during that time, Ted came to visit us twice.  The second time he came, he took us back to ZAB for the weekend.  There we met Chaplin Mosher and his family.  We got acquainted with many of the people at the Chapel and one of them, Captain Harry Evans, had a tent.  He came up with the idea that we should set up his tent in the "park" on base and camp out there for as long as we wanted... so we did.  We borrowed the tent and other folks began showing up with lawn chairs, a camp stove, a pup tent for the boys, sleeping bags, a cooler and a small table.  Ted went to the empty barracks and borrowed two mattresses.  It was a three room tent, so the girls had one mattress in one "bedroom" and Ted and I had the other.  The boys slept in the pup tent.  We were right down the hill from the swimming pool and there we had bathroom facilities, showers and a laundry room.  We were all set.  That became our home for the next six weeks.
     We began to pray that Ted would get orders for ZAB.  Chaplin Mosher said he was going to need a good youth worker when all those boarding school kids arrived and Ted looked just like the guy for the job.  Of course we already wanted to stay there.  It just didn't seem right for us to leave at this time.
     We loved camping there.  We cooked our meals outside and slept like babies in our snug little bedrooms.  The kids swam every day. They would get up, eat their breakfast, pack a couple p.b. & j.'s, grab towels and I didn't see them again until lunch.  After lunch they'd take off up the hill again until supper time.  They were so brown and blond at the end of summer that they ceased to look like Gehrke's.  (At least the fair, Irish/Polish side.)
     During our time there we had neighbors that joined us for a couple weeks.  They were the Stoners.  They were missionary family from Vitoria, Spain.  They had four boys and one little girl, so our kids were joined by playmates and we had a couple to visit with at night.  Every night we had dinner together, then sat around the campfire and sang, while Rosie played her accordion, until it got late and our tired kids all fell asleep one at a time.  We'd distribute them to their beds then, Bill, Rosie, Ted and I would talk until the wee hours.  It was such a special time and we grew very close to the Stoners.  We still are.
     During that time also, we had a terrible wind storm in the middle of the night.  Zaragosa was always windy.  The base was situated in a valley between two mountains and the wind whistled down through it constantly, but one night the speed picked up.  We had straight line winds that night that reached 75 mph.   We laid in our beds and prayed.  So did our neighbors.  I kept asking Ted if we should go to the Chapel or the gym and take shelter. He would go out and check the tent pegs and come back in and say that they were holding fine, so we could stay put.  We did put the boys into the car to finish out the night and all our camping equipment was stuffed into the trunk, but we stayed in our tents.  Of course none of us slept.  The next morning we discovered trees down in the park all around us and all over the base.  God had protected us and the Stoners.  So as we cleaned up the next morning, we thanked Him.  It was exciting!

Flight Line at ZAB

     We kept praying for orders to ZAB.  The Moshers were praying, Captain Evens and family were praying and now the Stoners were praying, because they had asked us to take one of their teenage boys for the school year, while the Moshers took another.  So we were all "storming the gates of heaven" for orders to Zaragosa.
     Finally, the thirty-first of August arrived and our faces were long.  There were still no orders for Ted and we had to take our children back to Sevilla, to enroll them in school, in another day or two.  I went to see Nan Mosher that morning and said to her, "Well it looks like we're going back to Sevilla.  I don't know how we could have been so wrong.  We were just sure the Lord wanted us here, but I guess we're supposed to go back to the states."  I was almost in tears.  Nan hugged me and prayed with me that the Lord would give me peace about it.
     That afternoon about 3:30 Ted came roaring into camp.  He jumped out of the car and I knew by the look on his face that something had happened.  He was waving a sheet of paper and smiling.  I greeted him at the tent door and shushed him because the baby was asleep.
     "Wake her up!" he said,  "We got orders!" Then he laughed and hugged me.
     "Where to?" I asked and held my breath.
     " ZAB!  Where else?" he exclaimed.
     We stood there rejoicing together for a few minutes, then I said.  "Don't you dare go tell the Moshers without me!  Go get Kelly from the pool to babysit and we'll go together to tell Nan and Bill."


Christmas in our home at Zaragosa

      So that's what we did  Of course there are many more stories to tell about ZAB and our time there so they will probably crop up from time to time.  The important thing is what we learned about how God calls a person's heart before He moves their bodies.  After our hearts were transferred we were willing to go to any length to cooperate with Him. Even living in a tent for six weeks was not a burden but a blessing.  Jennifer was two and a half months old when we received orders for ZAB and she had lived in a tent for most of her life.  We had never been fond of camping.  Ted used to jokingly say that his idea of "roughing it" was running barefoot through a Holiday Inn.  But our time camping out in the ZAB park was one of the happiest times of our lives.  We learned that it doesn't matter how or where you live, when your heart is at home.  When your purpose for living is higher than yourself and there are people who need and welcome you into their lives, you will have joy.  For us that home had become Zaragosa Air Force Base and a little piece of our hearts will always be there.