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Picture this: A young female student nurse works the midnight shift in a London hospital annex when she meets a young male "house officer" (intern) during a medical emergency. It is summer in England. The young nurse and young doctor slip away during their break to meet outside in the rhubarb patch, illuminated by the moonlight, to read aloud to one another the poetry of Yeats, Browning, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

And this: A mother of three young children pursues master's degrees in economics and sociology (at night, so as not to be away from the children during the day); later assumes a teaching position at a local university; writes a book in which she upbraids the "physiognomy of hatred" propagated by hard-line Marxist/Leninist esprit breeding at the school. Her book is covered by a leading columnist for the London Times in three consecutive issues; these columns (so she's told) influence both politicians and academics.

And this: A grandmother "lives the life of a truck driver," eating and sleeping out of a 32-ton truck for a week in Poland, having traveled there because her name appeared in the letterhead of a relief organization as a "patron" and she didn't like the idea of "just being a name on the writing paper." She went in the truck convoy to "assess the situation" and to "meet the people."

And this: As nurse, crusader, mother, grandmother, and Christian, she leads a delegation of lawyers, professors, and human-rights workers, on foot, through the line of fire, up the brow of a hill waving a white tablecloth attached to a branch, across the border of Azerbaijan (a former Soviet republic) to "talk to" the Azeris. She had been visiting Christian Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh (part of historic Armenia relocated by Stalin as an isolated enclave in Azerbaijan) who had been under heavy attack by the Azeris—including ransacking and torching homes, forcibly driving residents off their land, beheading citizens. She wanted to meet the Azeris face to face so they would take her "seriously."

Meet Baroness Caroline Cox, of Queensbury—Lady Caroline to some, and Caroline to her friends, who are just about everyone she meets. ("The title shows God's sense of humor," she says.) While Michael Horowitz was rousing the slumbering conscience of the American evangelical community to the plight of persecuted believers in faraway lands, Caroline Cox was in those lands, crossing borders, riding in jeeps and trucks, delivering medicines to the dying and maimed, buying back children who had been commandeered as slaves; in short, extending a hand of Christian solidarity to those who—in her words—are bereft of aid and advocacy; who are among the most isolated, outcast, and deprived in the world. The ones who told her "we thought the world had forgotten us."

"As indeed it had," she hastens to add.

WHO IS THIS LADY?
Caroline Cox—a deputy speaker in the British House of Lords and (among other things) president of the uk branch of Christian Solidarity International—has found herself in the frontlines of advocacy for persecuted Christians almost serendipitously. It started in the 1980s with the truck trips to Poland ("the truck drivers were gentlemen," she adds) on behalf of the Medical Aid for Poland Fund. This introduced her to the members of the Polish Solidarity movement (and earned her Poland's highest award for a foreigner, the Commander Cross of the Order of Merit). "I was so humbled and inspired by the Polish people's courage and humor and generosity," she says. "They had nothing, but would give everything."

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September 1 1997, Vol. 41, No. 10