“One hundred soldiers with machine guns circled the few acres surrounding the Lao Biblical Training School. It was 1975, the year the Communists conquered Laos. Along with the
other sixty students and our teachers, I was held in a small room for two weeks while we were interrogated. One by one, we were called before the soldiers who tried to get us to denounce Christ. We had little food and ate grass out in the school yard.
“The Communist army then brought three hundred government students to scream at us in an organized ‘demonstration of the people.’ These government students surrounded our school shooting, ‘Everything belongs to the
government! Your pigs and fish are ours!’ The soldiers then took all the animals that the Bible school had been using for food.
“Finally, the soldiers gave up trying to convert us to follow Marxand Lenin, the founders of Communism. Most of us were allowed to go home after two weeks.
But Brother Barout chose not to go home.
“On the Sunday morning we were released, I decided to escape to Thailand to have more freedom to share Christ.
Thousands of Laotian refugees who had fled from the Communists lived in camps in Thailand, just across the Mekong River. There were only three Christians among them.
“Another Bible student decided to come with me. We could not say good-bye to our families. First, there was no time; and second, we could not trust them since they were not Christians. The government had turned families against each
other.
“The Mekong River is very wide, and that winter was the coldest we had seen. I was also sick with a fever and thought I might die. Standing in the bush on the edge of the water, I asked my Christian friend, ‘How can we go?’
“He replied courageously, ‘We are Christians. We will go to heaven if we drown. If we die, we die together.’
“At 10:00 p.m. we entered the cold, muddy river. We both had Bibles in large plastic bags tied on our backs. I thought, ‘Lord, if we die, at least when they find our Bibles, they will know that we are Christians.’
“We were swimming only fifty yards from one of the guard towers on shore. My friend was so cold that he was shaking. When he shifted his plastic bag to his chest to try to float on top of it, I told him to get off or they would see him. He splashed a little as he got back down in the water, so a
spotlight came over from the shore to where the bag had splashed. We heard the guards say, ‘Oh, a big fish.’
“Finally, in the darkness, we climbed up on the muddy river bank in Thailand. Looking at our waterproof watches we saw that our swim had taken 48 minutes. We were free and continued to serve the Lord.”
