A Glimpse Of
Chapter Ten Pages 225-245
“THAT SEED DID GROW.”
My Genny
1921 ~ 2001
More than 40 years after we left the jungle Genny was trying to recover from a series of cerebral strokes. I use the word trying because every week she was more helpless than the week before. It finally became evident that Genny wasn’t going to be with us much longer. We both knew Genny was dying, and we talked about her death and burial. After considering several options Genny told me she wanted to be buried near our home on the banks of the Maranon River, at the Cusu Mission, where we’d worked and raised our family. She was aware that it meant she’d be cremated and I’d take her ashes to the jungles of Peru. A few months after Genny’s death I traveled alone to Peru with a small brass box in my carry-on luggage.
I got off the plane at the modern airport of Callao that served Lima and saw it was nothing like the old Lima-Tambo airport I’d known that was close to downtown. I used to know Lima like the back of my hand, but when I got on a crowded bus and headed for the city, I didn’t recognize any streets. We were on Avenida Faucett, but it sure didn’t look like it. Some things hadn’t changed, though. The noise, the traffic, the smells were just as I remembered them. I wondered if the jungle would be like I remembered.
I traveled across the Andes in a modern air-conditioned bus that went from Chiclayo to Bagua Chica. That evening I had to find a driver to take me to the mission station, called New Horizons. It would be another 8-hour journey, this time over the newly built trans-Amazon highway. A highway it was not. Late in the afternoon I reached my destination, the New Horizons Nazarene mission station.
The tabernacle at New Horizons. It seats 600 people.
From where I stood on the edge of the bluff looking across the Maranon River, I could see the port of Yama Yakat, the old mission station built by Roger Winans where Elvin and Jane Douglas labored for 10 years. I felt like I was home. Our house at the Cusu Mission was only a few hours downriver. From where I was standing on the bluff at New Horizons I could even see the sandbar where my first big cargo raft ran aground. It was great to be back.
I’ve gone back to the jungle three more times since my trip to bury Genny. It’s been great to return and see the sites I left so many years ago. The Peruvian government takes a sincere interest in the rain forest as well as the indigenous people who live in it. Peru is attempting to civilize the Aguaruna people and assimilate them into the Peruvian culture. They no longer treat them like animals.
Although remnants of the old ways of living remain, the government is encouraging the Indians to settle in permanent towns. The backbone of their plan was to establish government schools, with permanent communities built around them. Children already in those schools are now taught to speak and read Spanish. Aguaruna is still spoken by the elders, but it’s no longer the primary language of the community. Everywhere I went I found people who understood my Spanish. There are hundreds of schools now, and each is a little municipality.
These communities are small towns with streets, a mayor and a city council. The government has dug wells, so the populace no longer drinks river water. Some towns even have an electric generator. Many of their buildings are built with concrete blocks and metal roofs. Homes are furnished with crude tables, chairs and benches manufactured by entrepreneurial Indians. Women cook with kerosene instead of three-log, open fires. You don’t often see naked children or half-naked adults. They wear store-bought clothes. I met one of the Indian seamstresses who make those clothes.
I casually observed many of these changes in some of the new towns the Peruvian government has developed. Since I was only a tourist passing through and didn’t make a study of all the implications, my evaluation of the changes is probably not valid, so who am I to say whether they’re good or bad? I didn’t have an opportunity to talk to the people to learn how they felt. The old-timers would have had vivid memories of the “good old days,” how it used to be, but there’s also a new generation of young people who don’t know any other life. They like going to school. They take clean drinking water for granted. They’re comfortable living in a nice home. For them it’s great to share a cold Coca-Cola with friends. Who am I to decide what’s best for them?
We can take all the benefits of modern civilization to primitive cultures, but that isn’t enough. Laws, schools, Western dress and modernized communities will never be enough to penetrate the darkness. The only thing we have that will permanently better the lives of primitive peoples is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. On one of my most recent trips to Peru I visited a jungle community where the Gospel has made just such an eternal difference. Go with me to the place we went on that trip, deeper into the jungle than any government program has ever reached. I’ll take you to a village so far into the interior no missionary had even visited it. The village is called Ajachin.
The chapel we built at Ajachin
I was with a team of 18 Americans who’d gone with me to build a chapel in that isolated village. I say isolated because that was how it was. It was like I was right back where I was when I arrived on the Amazon basin 5 decades before.
One afternoon, while my co-workers were hard at work, I slipped away from the job to visit the families of the little village. I purposely didn’t go to the homes of the believers because I wanted to see how the non-Christian families lived. Whatever change I saw in those heathen homes didn’t occur because of the encroachment of civilization, because civilization hadn’t yet reached that village. Nor was it from the influence of any missionary’s lifestyle. They had never seen how a missionary lives. It didn’t come from schools, because there was no government school at Ajachin. Nevertheless, I discovered some things that amazed me. The village didn’t have a shaman, a witch doctor. I visited several homes and didn’t see one crock for masato, the Indians’ home brew. I didn’t find any family where the patriarch had more than one wife. Their children were loved and cared for, so very unlike the homes I had known around the Cusu Mission.
Dr. Garman told me there are scores, if not hundreds, of villages scattered throughout the tribe where you can see the same positive influence of the church.
I asked him, “How many Aguaruna believers are there today in Peru? About a hundred?”
“More,” he said.
“Maybe 500?” I said.
“Try 4,000.”
Dr. Garman has retired. No missionary will replace him, but the work has not been abandoned. The home the Garman’s built is now occupied by an Aguaruna Indian who is director of New Horizons. The Bible school teachers and Bible school staff are all Aguaruna. An Indian with training in the medical field is director of the medical program. The Amazon region is divided into four church districts, each with a capable, seminary-trained district superintendent who is a full-blooded Aguaruna. Nearly 350 organized churches and preaching points have Bible School graduates as their pastors. It’s incredible what God has done through the Church of the Nazarene’s ministry with aboriginal Indians in the jungles of Peru.
Now that I’m an old man reminiscing about these experiences in the jungle, I recognize more than ever the sacrifices Genny and my children made in order for us to do what we did. Was it worth that sacrifice? I have friends who think it was foolishness, but maybe Jim Elliott was right when he said, “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”
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