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 Four   Pages 97 – 116

“VISIT OUR HOME IN THE AMAZON RAINFOREST.”

I want to pick up the story of our family.  Genny and the four children had just arrived and saw for the first time the house I was building for them.   About fifty naked Indians crowded around the plane when the pilot tied up at our port.  I don’t think Genny expected to see all those men, women and children naked.  Our yard was kind of naked too.  I had cut down trees and burned up the brush.  The hillside and the area around our house was ugly, bare mud.  It wasn’t a very pretty place. When Genny and the kids climbed up the riverbank to our jungle yard, and saw the half-built house that would be their home, my stomach churned with anxiety.  “What if they don’t like it here?

I’m the adventurous type.  I enjoyed every minute of what I was doing.   Remember, Genny was a West Virginia girl who would have to get used to life in the jungle.  I wasn’t sure how she would adjust. 

   My family when we went to the jungle

This photo of my family was taken a few weeks before our first trip into the jungle.  Jeff, in his mother’s arms, was only 8 months old.  Try to imagine what it was like for Genny and four little children to go with me to the Amazon rainforest where we would live with a tribe of headhunters.  Don’t you think Genny pondered over the difficult life ahead of her?  What would she feed her kids?  What if one of them got sick?  When a child is screaming with an earache and there is no medicine, what do you do?  When Genny got off that plane on the Maranon River and looked up at the unfinished house I was building she did not know what to expect

             Genny was pleased with our new house.  It was much nicer than she expected.  We liked our home.  I was told you could not build a house like that in the jungle, but I did.

I was glad to see the Indians standing outside our windows, since some of those visitors came for medical treatment.  Most of our patients were mothers with their little children.  A dozen Indians crowded into the house every morning. We weren’t prepared for what it meant to turn our kitchen and dining room into a clinic.

            Genny had to plan menus for everything she would feed our family for eight months and then hope we took in enough stuff with us.  Once we were in the jungle there was no way to get anything back to us.  The nearest place we could buy a box of matches or a bar of soap was at an army base 200 miles down river.

            We had three little girls, and we never let those kids out of our sight.  If they went to the chicken house to gather eggs we watched them go, and we watched them come back.  We never allowed them to be alone with an Indian.

There were some simple rules our kids had to remember if they were going to survive in the jungle.

            “Now listen up you kids.  You don’t put your shoes on before you  shake them out.”

            “You don’t put your hands into your pockets until you are sure

             there is nothing in those pockets.”

            “You don’t reach into your toy box for a toy.  You first dump the toys on the floor to be sure there are no spiders, scorpions or snakes.”

 

Although we won the friendship of a few Aguarunas who lived around us and who came to our church services, there were thousands more who could turn on us at any minute.  If one of the witchdoctors, and there were many, had laid a hex on us, blaming us for some unfortunate situation, my life and the lives of my family would have been in serious jeopardy. The Indians lived by the law of the jungle.  There was no Peruvian law that governed them.  No one would prosecute an Aguaruna for killing us.  I could not expect any protection either from the Peruvian government or my own American government.   Their response would be,  “No one asked you to go back there.  You don’t have to be there.   If you don’t like how they treat, you leave.”