A Book About A TRŪe Amazon Adventure - "Beyond The Call" By Harry G. Flinner (retired) Missionary of the Church of the Nazarene

  
A Glimpse Of

Chapter Eight   Pages 201-210

 

“THE PASTOR KILLED THE BABY”

 

Amazon Mission  

Not being able to communicate with the people was a terrible frustration.  But I had another shortcoming that was just as aggravating.  There were some days when as many as eighteen people stood at our door begging for medical help.  Every day when Genny and I saw them we were filled with anxiety, and sometimes terror; not knowing if we would be capable of doing anything for them.  Sometimes the problem was a simple thing we could deal with, but other cases were far beyond our ability to diagnose and treat.  Neither of us had any medical training.   I sit here at my computer fifty years later and wonder how two kids fresh out of college accomplished anything.  In this chapter I will tell you about some of the medical work we attempted to do.

 

Mothers with their children waiting to receive medical attention

 

Try to put yourselves in our shoes alone, there in the jungle.  Before we were even out of bed there were a dozen sick and injured people at our door clamoring for medical help.  The message of this chapter is not that Harry and Genny were great missionaries, but that our God is a great God.  If God wanted a medical doctor to do this work He would have called a medical doctor.  Instead he called a little boy and sent him to the jungle with no medical training because that is how God wanted to do it.

            I knew I had to be careful about treating people.  I was aware of the law of the jungle.  If the shaman treated a person and the patient died they would kill the witch doctor that very day.   I knew if I gave as much as an aspirin tablet to a baby and that baby died the Indians would kill me and probably kill my family before the end of the day.

            One Sunday morning a mother came to us with a tiny sick child.  The baby was possibly three months old.  It appeared to me that she had pneumonia.  Her lungs were congested.  She had a high fever.  I injected a few CCs of penicillin into the child and told the mother to take her over to the clinic where it was warm and dry.  It was raining hard.  I told her I would be there in a little bit to check on them.  When I went to the clinic they were gone. 

That morning we had about 75 people in the chapel for church service.  My sermon was interrupted by the sight of six canoes coming down the Cusu River with six or eight Indians in each dugout standing up, armed with shotguns, blowguns, spears and machetes.  The mother was standing in the front of the first canoe, in a torrential rain, holding the baby in her hands stretched out in front of her -- like an offering to the gods.

“The pastor killed the baby. 

The pastor killed the baby.”

 

It was my people in the chapel chanting those words.  They knew the baby had died by the dole some death wail coming from the scores of angry Indians in those canoes. 

            “The pastor killed the baby.  

The pastor killed the baby.”

 

            I knew that we were in grave danger that Sunday morning if that baby had died.   Genny, our four children and myself would have been slaughtered that very afternoon if that child were dead.  I was paralyzed with fear.  Those Indians coming down from up river were not friendly.  I was not certain that any of the Aguarunas in church that morning would have defended us.  It was a perilous situation.

            Six canoes tied up at our port.  More than thirty armed, angry Indians trudged up the hillside to the chapel.  That dreadful day is clear in my memory.  It was raining in torrents.  I stood along side the chapel under the overhang of the corrugated aluminum roof.  A sheet of rainwater blurred from my sight the angry crowd standing on the hillside.  I asked the mother to bring the baby to me, and she did. I held the naked child in my arms.  Its little body was ice cold.  The little girl was ashen, almost gray color.  Her little frame was stiff like a board.  Her eyes were rolled back in her head.  It did not appear that the child was breathing.   Maybe they were right.  Maybe she was dead.  I don’t know.  The mother and those angry Indians certainly thought she was dead.  I did not have faith to believe God could bring a child back from the dead.  That is not how I prayed.

 

“Lord God, don’t let this baby die. 

You know, Lord that if this child dies my family will be killed today.  

Please, Lord, don’t let this baby die...”

 

            While I prayed I felt the rigid body of that little girl soften in my arms.  I looked down and her eyes were open.  She was breathing.  Genny and I took that baby inside the clinic and examined her.  She had no fever.  She had no congestion.  She was bawling her head off.  I wrapped the child in a dry bath towel and handed her to her mother.  Those people got in their canoes and left.  No one said, “Thank you pastor.”   But I knew whom to thank.

            I have awakened many nights since then, in a cold sweat, contemplating what would have happened that rainy Sunday afternoon if that child had died.  Those thirty or more angry Indians armed to the teeth with their primitive weapons had not come to me for prayer or help.  They weren’t bringing a sick child, expecting me to do a healing miracle.  They knew the baby was dead, and they came to kill my family.  There would have been no ceremony, no discussion, and no kangaroo court to condemn me.  No one would have come to my defense.  Within minutes, there on that muddy hillside I would have watched those savage headhunters split the skulls of my four children and then that of Genny, knowing my turn was next.  Our bloody bodies would have been left lying in the mud for the vultures.  They would have burned our home and every other mission building to rid the jungle of our spirits.  I wondered how long would it take for word of that massacre to reach the outside world?  Friends, that was a serious incident.  Only God’s intervention spared our family that day.  Every time my mind goes back to that near tragedy I can only say, “Thank you Jesus.”