One oppressively hot night in 1985 in the south of Pakistan I lay on my bed punching the wall. I was very angry. A local landlord was mistreating some of our Christians in a dreadful way. I had been several times to speak to him and at first thought I was doing some good, but now realised that my intervention would change very little. The landlord was a particularly violent man, but the system itself was brutal and too old and too ingrained to give way just because one Western missionary thought it should. The people I was trying to help were powerless and so was I and that made me furious. The landlord had lots of enemies. If only one of those enemies would take a revolver to him, put out a contract on him - it happened all the time in this violent society - then our problems would be solved