Sitting alone in a tepee-like shelter made from sticks collected by a dry African riverbed in 1974, 24-year-old Debbie Dortzbach stitched the words of Psalm 34:4 onto a white bandage from her captors’ helicopter first aid kit. The phrase “I sought the Lord and he heard me” alternated colors, as thread was in short supply. Her embroidery continued: “He delivered me from all my fears.”
Less than 48 hours earlier, guerrillas from the Eritrean Liberation Front had stormed the Compassion of Jesus Hospital in Ethiopia where Dortzbach worked as a volunteer nurse. They forced Debbie and her Dutch colleague, Anna Strikwerda, to run with them into the mountains.
Within 30 minutes, Strikwerda struggled to keep up over the rugged terrain. Debbie looked back when she heard the gunshot kill her friend. Two hours later, she flew with the rebels to their military compound in the Tigray region of Eritrea. After a week, militants relocated her to a smaller site farther away, where the commander slept in her tent and—with pistol in hand—made sexual advances. Thankfully, he was unsuccessful.
Debbie’s husband, Karl, who was away from the hospital at the time, answered the militants’ ransom letters as he negotiated the release of his pregnant wife. The couple was near the end of a yearlong vision trip to explore overseas ministry. Karl, a student at Westminster Theological Seminary, had come to Ethiopia to teach the children of the missionary surgeon at Compassion of Jesus and assist at a small Presbyterian church plant.
Twenty-six days later, the guerillas released Debbie unharmed and without payment.
Debbie and Karl, who both turn 77 this week, would eventually return to Africa, where they spent more than 20 years as missionaries working in global health and peacemaking. Debbie’s kidnapping, they said, provided the formative experience that launched and shaped their ministry to come.
“God met us in our pain,” Karl said, “and gave us something to share with those in the depth of trauma and violent conflict, who cannot imagine a way out.”
Both raised by pastors, the couple grew up in homes that centered Christian service. Debbie, one of nine children, recalled world maps on the kitchen table during her father’s Baptist pastorates in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and eastern Canada. Karl’s father shepherded an interracial Presbyterian church in Denver and welcomed recovering alcoholics to their home.
They met at Wheaton College in 1967 while volunteering in a special needs Sunday school class. Debbie was interested in helping because her twin brother had cerebral palsy, while Karl joined because his cousin, who lived with his family for seven years, had Down Syndrome.
Their dating relationship continued despite each transferring to other colleges, Debbie to Columbia University for nursing and Karl to Georgia State for special education. He desired to plant a special needs–accommodating church, but after they got engaged during their senior year, Debbie felt a calling to serve God overseas while they attended the Urbana missions conference. Karl knew the importance of missions but was less sure at the time.
Karl enrolled at Westminster Seminary in 1971, taking the vision trip with the Orthodox Presbyterian Church’s mission two years later. Their son Joshua—meaning “God’s salvation”—was born four months after Debbie’s release. Karl finished his MDiv as the couple published a book about their ordeal and embarked on a yearlong speaking tour to recount God’s faithfulness. In spite of the kidnapping, the Dortzbachs wanted to go back.
Political unrest— along with their desire to minister in the States before moving overseas—delayed their return to Ethiopia. Their daughter, Hannah, was born in 1976 as the couple planted a church in Illinois, followed by another son, Jesse, in 1980. The following year, they went with World Presbyterian Mission (later Mission to the World) to Kenya to church plant and serve with a medical team.
Their rural service eventually shifted to Nairobi, and the family briefly returned to the US in 1989 for Debbie to get her master’s degree in nursing and public health at Emory University. But when Jesse suffered a life-threatening illness, they discovered an inherited cardiac condition that delayed their return to Africa. Shifting to stateside ministry in the interim, they worked with MAP International, a Christian medical organization, to develop curricula for adult health education.
Stuck in America, what could have been a routine assignment ended up becoming preparation for the rest of their Africa ministry. Debbie educated churches on the emerging AIDS crisis. Karl focused on Liberia, where civil war and ethnic conflict eventually killed more than 150,000 people.
Visiting the country for one month, Karl navigated checkpoints manned by teenage gun-toting soldiers that would have retraumatized Debbie. One victim described how he was tied to a chair and forced to watch his family be tortured. And as Karl worked on a trauma healing course, local pastors doubted his credentials. “What do you know of suffering?” they questioned. “We have already forgiven and forgotten and don’t want to be reminded.”
Karl knew his experience did not compare with theirs, nor did he have any training in reconciliation. But he modeled a process of healing with two versions of his own family story. He spoke first of Debbie’s kidnapping with all its gruesome evil. He had not forgotten any of the details, he told the pastors, and neither, he suspected, had they forgotten their own ordeals.
Karl then retold Debbie’s kidnapping in light of God’s grace. God’s presence was with Debbie throughout, as the couple recounted in many testimonies. He was in the beating of her unborn child’s heart, in the movement of a colorful desert lizard, and in the withered hand of an elderly Tigray woman who sought to comfort her. Healing comes not through forgetting, he said, but purposefully remembering how God was at work.
God’s presence came most clearly to Debbie after she yielded to God’s prompting to humble herself and serve tea to her captors, she told CT. For days, they had watched her solitary devotions as she perched on a rock in the arid landscape. Now confronted with an act of kindness, the rebels asked her to help them get Bibles.
The Christian Health Association of Liberia still uses Karl’s manual today, he said.
“The presence of evil can be so overwhelming that it doesn’t help to deny it,” Debbie said. “Without it, we won’t know the reality of God’s power.”
The Dortzbachs returned to Nairobi in 1992. Two years later, Rwanda exploded in ethnic conflict and genocide that killed 800,000 people over a period of 100 days. Refugees flooded into Kenya, and some, including pastors, came to Karl having heard of his work in Liberia.
Karl was reluctant to help because he knew nothing of Hutus and Tutsis and still felt unequipped in reconciliation. Yet he opened his office, assembled desks, and gradually formed a team. Over the next four years, he traveled with them throughout Rwanda and the scattered refugee camps in the region, helping victims process their trauma.
Meanwhile, Debbie met a Kenyan woman named Ruth who had contracted AIDS from her husband, whose mistress had infected him. At the time, Kenyans viewed the virus as a curse from God, Debbie said, shunning the sick from church and society. Ruth was the rare woman willing to tell her story.
“The church was paralyzed,” Debbie said. “It needed to wake up.”
Debbie filmed Ruth as she sought to educate and mobilize God’s people. AIDS comes from immoral behavior, she taught, and Ruth warned that the virus threatened everyone. The key was to strengthen the family unit; maintaining healthy husband-wife relationships would severely curtail the plague. And Ruth was a model—she forgave her husband, moving back home to serve both him and his mistress.
In 1995, UNICEF asked Debbie to develop its AIDS curriculum after witnessing how the Kenyan church extended care to the suffering and dying. Four years later she joined World Relief, eventually becoming its global adviser for health and social development. In 2002, Debbie testified before Congress to support President George W. Bush’s global PEPFAR funding for AIDS. Even China adapted her materials.
The Dortzbachs’ combined experience prompted Karl to join a Kenyan effort to create a think tank for the church in Nairobi’s African International University, a Christian institution. In 1998, Karl became the founding director of the Institute for the Study of African Realities, which would eventually establish centers for the study of world religions, community engagement, and peace building.
That same year, Karl began his PhD in conflict management remotely at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, completing his dissertation in 2002. Two years later they moved to Baltimore for Debbie’s work with World Relief. By then, Karl had turned over leadership of the reconciliation team to a Rwandan.
As children, Debbie and Karl’s families welcomed visiting missionaries. Now, as a side gig, they turned their Baltimore row home into a refuge for international students. Partnering with a Japanese professor from Johns Hopkins University, they eventually obtained a separate residence for housing and ministry.
Debbie continued her work in global health, while Karl worked with Peacemaker Ministries and developed a PhD program in biblical peace studies at the International Graduate School of Leadership. In 2008, the program hosted its first cohort of students. And in 2015, Karl formed Sychar Well as a network of encouragement and ongoing training for alumni.
After 50 years of service, the Dortzbachs retired from formal affiliation with Mission to the World in 2024. They moved into a senior citizen facility that frees them from cooking and home repair, allowing them to write, travel, and continue in ministry.
In one Zoom class on peace studies, Karl noticed two of the 12 participant squares blinking on and off over the course of the six-hour lesson. Students from the Philippines and Nigeria joined with others from Cameroon, Cambodia, England, and elsewhere to learn from Karl. The intermittent connection came from two Ethiopian students who were navigating a new civil conflict and driving around their city looking for a steady internet signal.
One was from Tigray, where the couple originally served. The other student was his ethnic rival.
The Dortzbachs had come full circle. As they look back at their life with “profound gratitude,” Debbie’s embroidery still hangs on the wall of their home. They consider themselves to be God’s foot soldiers “in the thick of it together” with believers around the world. A second testimony, sewn on a Muslim veil from her captors, declares their ongoing faith.
“Magnify the Lord with me,” its multicolored stitching proclaims from Psalm 34:3. “Let us exalt his name together.”
