Hesston College held a service Wednesday in honor of an American U.N. worker killed while on a mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Earlier this month, Michael J. Sharp, 34, was was one of six people abducted by an unidentified militia group in the DRC. His body, along with those of two others, was found in a shallow grave on Monday.
Sharp's father is a professor at Hesston College, north of Wichita. Tim Huber, brother of KMUW Morning Edition host Jonathan Huber, was a colleague and friend of Michael Sharp. The pair worked together on humanitarian efforts in Germany.
"When we heard the news that he was abducted, one of the things I didn't feel was surprise because we knew he was drawn to war and conflict and to making a difference in those places," Huber says.
He says Sharp's Mennonite faith drew him to oppose violence with real action.
"He routinely found ways to make relationships with individuals caught up in conflict and found real transformation in specific lives," Huber says of their time in Germany. "He could be friends with very divergent demographics of people and he used that skill to his advantage everywhere he went."
Hear NPR's 2015 profile of Michael Sharp.
Huber, who works for a Mennonite publication based in Newton, has been covering his friend's death as a reporter.
"It's been incredibly hard covering a friend like this," he says. "There's kind of a near distance that you almost employ as you're working with the facts."
Huber added that while Michael, who Hubers refers to as M.J., is being grieved by his parents' community in Hesston, that's only a sliver of those who will be impacted by his death.
"He had a community all over the world. He was living a bit most recently in Albuequerque. He grew up in Indiana and Pennsylvania. He went to college in Virginia. He lived in Germany, Congo and other places, so his community is spread all over these places," Huber says.
As a whole, however, Huber says the community is thinking of their friend's family and all they have lost over the past month.
"His network of friends that are all over the country and the world are definitely seeking out each other and talking to each other about what we've lost," Huber says, "and how his story inspires us to go forward and keep following that path to peace and justice."
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