Events Overtake 2 Held in Kabul

They are the last known Americans in the Afghan capital of Kabul, these two young women imprisoned on charges of spreading Christianity. Until the morning of their arrest Aug. 3, their mission was feeding the impoverished and looking after widows and orphans. Now they are unwitting participants in a much larger crisis.

One grew up in the Washington bedroom community of Vienna, Va. (town motto: “Where everybody knows your name”), the other in Nashville. Both sets of parents are divorced; three parents are in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, awaiting news of their daughters.

Both women attended Baylor University, the conservative religious school in Waco, Texas, where Bible study and chapel attendance are graduation requirements. They were members of the same evangelical church in Waco, where they led small groups in religious study. They met there and became friends.

And, ultimately, both decided they were needed in faraway Afghanistan as members of a German-based Christian relief organization called Shelter Now International.

One of them, Dayna Curry, 29, already had spent more than a year there. She came home for a leave, then returned in March. The other, Heather Mercer, 24, less than two years out of college, left on her personal aid mission last spring.

Then came their arrests, along with four Germans and two Australians, on charges of teaching the Christian gospel in a nation where doing so is banned. At first, it seemed their punishment would be modest, perhaps a few days in prison, or simply expulsion from the country. The trial for their crimes was underway.

But the Sept. 11 suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon changed all that. The two women suddenly were thrust into the spotlight as President Bush demanded their release in his first speech to the nation after the attacks.

The ruling Taliban government’s response to that call for two weeks was silence, even as those who might have helped them--diplomats and aid workers--left the country. All outside contact with the arrested relief workers was severed. They were moved from a reformatory to a jail operated by the Taliban intelligence service, according to news reports from Kabul.

The latest development in the case came Thursday, when diplomats and the lawyer for the eight foreign aid workers said the defendants’ trial might resume Saturday.

What caused them to be arrested in the first place remains unclear. One news report said they were caught showing a video about the life of Jesus. Another account has the two women co-signing a “confession” in which they said they gave a family two books about Jesus and “we sang alone, one song about God, not about Jesus.”

Curry’s father, Tilden Curry, is the dean of Tennessee State University’s School of Business. Her mother, Nancy Cassell, is a teacher in Thompsons Station, a Nashville suburb.

While in college working on a degree in social work, Curry spent several summers abroad, including in Mexico and Guatemala, working with the poor. After graduation, she took a position as a social worker at a tough high school for troubled youths in Waco.

Jack Henderson, former principal of Caesar Chavez Academy, said the search committee for a social worker had been impressed by Curry’s overseas experience. “We thought this was someone who could work in the trenches and help when you really needed it,” he said. “But she was also someone who could represent us at the country club.”

Over time, he said, the staff at the school became protective of Curry because of her naivete. “There was a certain innocence about her,” Henderson recalled, “like she was going through life in rose-colored glasses.”

At about that time, Curry became a member of the Antioch Community Church in Waco. The Rev. Kevin Johnson, an associate pastor of the nondenominational congregation, said he began to see her interest focusing on Afghanistan.

“She really did deliberate in her heart about where she should walk,” Johnson said. “I think the bottom line was that she saw there was so much more need there and that she had the opportunity to help.”

Tilden Curry said he was not enthusiastic about his daughter’s decision. “I strongly recommended against it, frankly,” he said. “Most fathers would not want their daughter in that position.”

She went anyway, leaving behind the 1,000 members of the Antioch Church who had been such a major focus of her life. One member of the congregation she had come to know was Heather Mercer.

Mercer’s story bore similarities to Curry’s: a middle-class background, a Baylor education, membership in the same church, a desire to help people. Mercer was a German major.

“She was a very religious person,” said Frauke Harvey, her German teacher at Baylor. “I always thought she came from a very sheltered background. She was a typical Baylor coed--inexperienced, a good girl, very idealistic. I hope these people who sent her to Afghanistan told her what she was in for.”

A friend and former roommate, Jeannie McGinniss, recalled meeting Mercer through church. She told of how Mercer once took her new tennis shoes off her feet and gave them to a poor woman on the street, of how she often fixed meals and collected canned goods for those in need. McGinniss also said Mercer was fascinated by Afghanistan.

“Ever since I knew her, she’s wanted to go to Afghanistan,” she said. “We had maps on the wall, and books. Sometime while she was at Baylor, she received a calling to go there. So she started praying for the country consistently.”

Like Curry, Mercer had been on missions in both Europe and Mexico. By the time she moved to Afghanistan this year, she had already been in that country twice, hooking up with relief agencies in Peshawar--the Pakistani city on the Afghan border--as a means of getting into the isolated country. But her father, too, was not pleased to learn she was moving to Kabul with Shelter Now International.

“Both her mother and I did talk to her quite a bit,” said John Mercer. “But when a child grows up, you have to let her do what she wants to do.”

Since Sept. 11, the parents have lost contact with their daughters. John Mercer is in Islamabad, as is his former wife, Deborah Oddy. Cassell waits for news of Curry there as well, while Tilden Curry stays in daily contact from Nashville.

John Mercer made a plea to the Taliban to trade places with his daughter, but he was rebuffed. All are waiting for the time when the Pakistani lawyer hired to defend the two relief workers will be allowed to enter the country.

Tilden Curry characterized his daughter’s work as humanitarian rather than religious. He recalled how his daughter had come home from Afghanistan that first time.

“She was really happy in what she was doing,” he said. “The people there needed her help. She’d devoted her life to them.”