Fr Tom was aware of the risks Yemen posed

The terrorists came around 8.30am and they could easily enter the home as it was Friday, the day for visitors. They shot the security men and then went on spraying bullets. Luckily, the Mother Superior, Sally, who was inside the store room hid behind the door. I was in Taiz, around 150km from Aden when I got a call from Sally informing that many had died and Father Tom had been abducted.

We had a premonition of such incidents as things had turned worse since the beginning of the civil war, which resulted in thousands of deaths. But we decided to stay put for the sake of the orphaned inmates who were old and could not be abandoned.

The Salesians of Don Bosco had set up four old age homes at Sanaa, Taiz, Aden and Hodeidah. These centres were initially run by priests from South Africa before it came under the administration of the Salesian province of Bengaluru, where I belong.

The centre does not do conversions. Our only aim was to help the poorest of the poor. In

Yemen

, public prayers by Christians are disallowed and we converted rooms in the old age home to prayer halls, mainly for congregation sisters and expats employed in Yemen.

I reached Yemen in 2010 and was serving the chapels attached to the old-age homes. Though father Tom came back to India in 2015, he decided to join us again after three months despite being aware of the risks. He was not afraid of death and used to say that God will take care of us.

Yemen had sizable number of Christians during the colonial British rule but they left after a communist dictatorial government came into power. The Salesian charity work began in 1975 and the first Malayali Salesian to work here was father Mathew Vadassery who arrived in 1987.

Father Tom, who was two years senior to me at the Christhujayanthi College where we studied theology, had a strong faith in God and this

is

perhaps the reason he could survive the harrowing 18 months in the captivity of terrorists. He was acutely diabetic and needed daily insulin injections.

I was worried whether the terrorists would provide him the required medicine. But they needed him alive in order to keep the pressure on those negotiating for his release. Otherwise, they would have killed him along with 15 other inmates of the old age centre at Aden on March 4, 2016.

There are still seven sisters trapped in the old-age home in Sanaa as the air space is controlled by a Saudi coalition group. Besides, they do not want to abandon the hapless inmates. I too would have stayed back but for my visa which got expired by March last year.

Today, the interior of the only remaining church in Aden has been destroyed by the rebels, though they have kept the structure intact. The building was spared as locals who feared the bombing would destroy their homes pleaded against it.

I used to find it difficult to travel form one old-age home to another as we were constantly questioned and asked to produce our ID cards.

Yemen, like Syria, boasts of one of the oldest pre-Islamic cultures in the world. Instead of nurturing these old civilizations, the world seemed to be moving in the wrong direction, against love and humanity propagated by every religion.

(As told to Viju B)