Danny and Diana Shaylor Planting Tribal Churches May
Ready or not the rains are here! In May you may have rain and drizzle for days on end with no break in the clouds. Imagine what it feels like when the hot tropical sun finally blazes full strength onto the steaming landscape while the humidity is pushing 100%. Yes that’s exactly the feeling!
As the rains come down the feeder streams are all pouring into the bigger rivers and the bigger rivers are flowing faster and fuller by the day. Dead trees some them huge ride the roiling current creating a serious hazard for navigation Once the river crests for the first time most of the floating debris will be gone but as long as the water remains high the danger will always be there. Sometimes animals are swept away by the rising waters. On more than one occasion we have found a sloth clinging on for dear life to the tip top branches of a bush in the middle of some backwash.
Almost without fail during the first serious rain in May (not counting thunderstorms which usually don’t happen in May) the termites fly. You may have thought your house was termite free but during that first rain you’ll find out otherwise. Out there in the jungle it is literally almost impossible to make your house termite proof. On a side note I’ve noticed that in May termites sprout wings here in Florida as well.
The tribal folks know the rains in May will bring a bountiful harvest of protein. Hundreds, thousands, probably hundreds of thousands or millions of tree frogs come down to the swamps and backwaters to lay their their eggs. Each species has a very distinctive croak but it’s all sweet music to the jungle folk. They catch them by the hundreds to cook in leaves on their fires. As is the case with so many good things there is a deadly downside to frog catching. Snakes also love frogs and where people and snakes hunt frogs together you can guess what happens. Death by snakebite is an ever present danger and catching frogs is a particularly dangerous time. I remember an incident very clearly when a frog hunter’s life was spared by the antivenin we were able to administer. Tragically others died because there was no help available.
May is when the season changes for good that is rain, rain and more rain till those rains slacken off in August. Rainy season may be a little cooler in general than the dry season but a ‘little cooler’ still means very hot. It feels just like what you’d expect in a rain forrest a few degrees off the Equator a few hundred feet above sea level.
PDF JOEL
Not quite two years after my parents came to live in the jungle town in the country of these posts, my brother Joel joined our family. My Mother had chosen not to make the trip down river to where there was a doctor and at least a semblance of a hospital. There were midwives in town and there were other missionary wives on hand to help. The birth went well and now we were a family of six. Bob, Peg and we four boys Dan, Mike, John and Joel. Philip and Sara wouldn’t join the family till later.
Fast forward to the summer of 1958. My Father had just moved his family several days travel further up river deeper into the jungle nearer to where most of the missionaries were working. As field director he wanted to be closer to their tribal locations so as to be of more direct help to them. A small school for missionaries children had been established out there as well as a fuel depot of sorts for the tribal workers. It was near the end of July just weeks after our move when my Father left on a supply run to another jungle location hundreds of river miles away. He was to be gone for several weeks. It was a difficult time for my Mother. We were by now six kids, the youngest Sara only three months old, all crowded into a very small jungle home that had been built to house a single lady missionary. The area was new to Mother and she was barely oriented to her new surroundings and the potential dangers.
That day July 25, 1958 I was gone on an overnight with the handful of high schoolers at a neighboring Indian village. My brothers Mike and John were down at the river fishing. The river was still pretty much at maximum height and was very swift. There was a kind of backwash at the spot where they were fishing and the water literally boiled up from below before swirling off downstream. The bank at that place was rock and dropped off immediately to a great depth. Joel had slipped out of the house unnoticed and made his way down the narrow path to the river in order to watch his brothers fish. Somehow he lost his footing and slipped into the swift moving water. He had not yet learned to swim and Mike and John knew they couldn’t help him. They shouted for my Mother who came running down the path and without hesitation jumped in. The current had pulled Joel away from the shore and by the time my Mother jumped in he had come to the surface and gone back under for the third and final time. She tried to dive down to find him but between the swift current and the river being at least 30 feet deep finding him was an impossibility.
As Mother in her own pain and sorrow comforted Mike, John and Philip (Sara was only three months) word was sent to the Indian village where I was and another missionary took word to my Father. I was able to get home the next day but it would be several days before my Father made it back.
It was times like this that built and reinforced the sense of community we came to feel out there in the jungle. I referred to that reality in my first post “The Beginning”. Everyone came together and rallied around anyone who was in need or hurting. One of our jungle neighbors, a man who lived downriver a few hours found Joel’s body caught in some brush. He without hesitation used some of his precious gasoline to bring him back to our family. The Piranha’s had been at his face and it was not a pretty sight. In fact the tribal neighbors and missionaries who made his little coffin didn’t even want the family members to see his face. Several of us dug the grave and the simple service was the model for others both tribal folks and missionaries who would be buried there. Joel was the first of the many who will rise together at the rapture of the saints from that little jungle village.
Why didn’t God spare my Mother and Father the loss of their child when they had already given Him everything including their own lives? Only God Himself knows the complete and full answer but I’m convinced part of the answer lies in the help and comfort they were able to give others who passed through similar difficult times. Indeed within a little over a decade my father succumbed to hepatitis and lies buried beside Joel. Before the Lord called my Mother home she buried Philip and Sara, both deaths being tied directly or indirectly to their having lived in the jungle.
Mother has been with the Lord for five years now and wherever she has lived, folks still speak of the encouragement and blessing her life was to them. Her life was a living example of 11 Cor. 1:3,4. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort; who comforts us in all our affliction so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God”.
Man Overboard or Where’s The Bacon
Like much of life, supply runs had a lot of side acts happening along with the main show. The transporting of people and supplies obviously occupied center stage but just the doing of it generated a lot of sometimes serious and sometimes funny happenings.
Many were the occasions when the loaded boats were laboring against the swift current a man or a family would paddle out from shore frantically waving for the boats to stop. The family would be living under the jungle canopy near the shore working rubber or some other jungle product for a patron. A child may have come down with malaria or the man might have gashed his leg with an ax. Whatever the case the these folks had recognized the sound of the missionaries engines from a long way out and knew they could count on getting help.
In those days when lady missionaries traveled by river they wore skirts over pantaloons. Why not just wear jeans or slacks you might ask? Not in those times, it just wasn’t the thing to do. Anyway, on one trip some passengers were on the prow of the boat talking or singing or just enjoying the passing scenery when suddenly one of the ladies became aware that a wasp had somehow gotten inside one leg of her pantaloons. Hastening to a more secluded area of the boat to take care of the problem was of utmost urgency but it just wasn’t happening fast enough. By now the poor wasp knew something had gone terrible wrong and was frantically trying to exit the scene The more desperate the wasp, the more it stung and moved about which of course elicited more shrieks, screams and slapping from the by this time very unhappy lady. The river guide, an Indian man focused on his work of keeping the boats in the channel had been observing this whole scene from his seat a few feet back in the main boat. By this time he was practically falling out of his chair with laughter. In the end the problem was resolved for the lady, maybe not so satisfactorily for the wasp? I heard the river guide tell the story with all the audio and motions many times.
Another trip we came across a herd of wild pigs swimming across the river. We needed meat so a few of us jumped into our dugout and gave chase while the big boats idled along. We would knock a pig over the head with a long pole, go back to the main rig and heave it onto the big boats. We had gotten several pigs this way and were out after another when we heard shouts from the big boats. Looking back we could hardly believe our eyes. Those supposedly dispatched pigs were ‘coming back to life’ running around terrorizing the passengers and finally jumping back into the river. I guess in the final analysis things didn’t end so bad after all. The pigs did get a new lease on life and and well, we still had the old standby of rice and sardines to fall back on with an abundant supply of coffee for those sardines to swim around in down there.
Once on still another trip we were tied up to the bank for the night in a backwash where the current swung us back and forth all night long. We were doing the usual preparations for a crack of dawn departure next morning when a very valuable piece of equipment fell overboard. The better part of wisdom would have left it on the bottom of the river but…….! The situation was kind of like the baby stroller incident of an earlier post except this time the river was much bigger and it was pitch black. We stuck a long pole into the bottom of the river as in the stroller case and I sent down hand under hand to the bottom and thankfully found the item on the first 360 around the pole. We all thanked the Lord!
Then there was the time four of us including the Indian river guide of the wasp story were traveling upriver in a smaller dugout at a pretty fast clip when without warning we ran onto a sand bar about an inch under water. As we ground to an abrupt stop everything and everybody was thrown unceremoniously forward. One of the missionaries was a hefty fellow who happened to land right on top of a big aluminum cooking pot completely smashing it. Our guide loved to tell and retell that story as much as he did ‘the lady and the wasp’ story.
At one time or another everybody for one reason or another ends up eating humble pie. During the rainy season of, I think it was 1996, our little school in the jungle was honored by a visit from an editor of a well known Christian periodical. I was one of the those who showed him around our neck of the woods. Actually other than jungle, water and sky there wasn’t that much you could see. The water was the highest I’d ever seen it, great for river travel but not good for seeing much dry land simply because most land was covered by the flood waters. This one day we were exploring a smaller tributary in a small flat bottomed speed boat kind of craft. Our editor had an improvised butterfly net and we were chasing this beautiful blue butterfly around the sharp bends of the river. I had forgotten this boat didn’t have any keel to speak of and as we made a very sharp turn in the chase the boat went literally right up on it’s side. We were very fortunate the boat didn’t flip over! Well, our editor friend went flying right out into the river. He lost his camera and I of course felt very badly I’d dumped him overboard. The good part is that back home in civilization he was able to replace his camera and the best part of all is that he remains a good friend to this day. There is a possibility he may read this post and I want to thank you Mr. editor for your friendship. A couple of things to remember; 1. Always make sure your boat has a good keel and 2. It’s easier to eat humble pie when your friends can laugh with you.
April
April’s first week or two can tend to be toward the dry season on the weather chart but even at that the rains will be picking up. The last couple of weeks you can’t count on anything but the rains and lots of electrical storms blowing down the river. Having said that I must add that I’ve seen years when the water was still very low the first of May, but that wasn’t the norm.
Those jungle palms along the river banks (including the now famous Acai palm) will have their fruit pods showing anytime now. Their fruit however won’t be ready to harvest for several months yet when the water is deep and the jungle floor is flooded. The jungle animals and birds will be anticipating a change of diet as the fruits and berries common to wet season begin to show.
April is the last opportunity a procrastinating jungle gardener will have to fire his garden before May’s grey skies and tropical downpours end all chance of a dry clean burn. Even at that it may be too late already. Those that fired their gardens weeks ago are already planting their sites. Remember that when a garden is burned off what is left looks like a giant game of pick-up-sticks. Ideally the leaves, branches and smaller trunks will be burned to ashes but the bigger trunks will still be there and will still be there when the site is abandoned several years hence. The better the burn the more ashes and the more ashes the better the cassava, pineapples, taro, sugar cane, bananas etc. will grow. After the site is abandoned ( left because the weeds are uncontrollable and the soil has lost it’s nutrients) brush begins to grow on the backs of the weeds and eventually trees will once again grace that spot on the river bank.
At dawn you might hear a diehard turkey singing but the turtles big and small will have stopped laying till next dry season. Soon all the sand bars will be under water and the only way for a turtle to even sun itself will be to crawl onto a log along the river bank. The rocks, sand bars and river banks all wait wait for the cool, cleansing waters from the rains upriver to wash and cover them for the next few months. Come next dry season the once again uncovered rocks will be right where the waters covered them but some of the sand bars will have shifted. The swift current is perpetually marching the millions of grains of sand downstream and while most of those grains of sand that collectively make up the sand bars end up in the same configuration as last year, some, because of the river’s current will end up as part of a sand bar that didn’t exist at that spot last year.
Though rainy season isn’t as pleasant for living in the jungle, it is as necessary for the jungle’s life cycle as is the dry season and when April comes around you know rainy season is waiting to appear any day from behind the next storm cloud.
A Kid
YES
We all know a simple, straight forward ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to a difficult question can sometimes be the hardest thing to get out. And it was that way when God used a very reluctant ‘yes’ to keep the way open for the light of His Good News to shine in the dark jungles of the country of these posts.
The six month permits under which the missionaries had been working were cumbersome and impractical due to the difficulties encountered in travel and communication. On August 4th of 1953 a permit with an indefinite expiration date was granted, but revocable at any time with three months notice. The work continued on under that permit for over fifty years till it was revoked in 2005. Here is the shortened version of that miracle.
My father and another missionary were in the capital city working on a permit which would give the missionaries more time to actually stay in the jungle villages for more than a few months at a time. They were staying in a cramped little room at a no frills boarding house in the downtown area. The days, weeks and months had been dragging on with limited progress. They were down to eating one square a day because that’s all they could afford.
When they weren’t pounding the streets going from office to office they were on their knees in their little room pouring out their hearts to God for a breakthrough. The Spiritual implications of their quest was vividly real to them. My father said as they prayed, at times it seemed the room was full of demons, mocking and laughing at them saying things like “you’ll never get that permit” and “those jungle people are ours”. The battle indeed must have been very real and very hard because I don’t remember my father describing a spiritual battle in those terms very often.
In the final analysis everything depended on a report the Minister of Justice would receive from an entity directly under his authority called “The Indian Commission” The granting of the permit would turn on a simple yes or no, unanimous, answer to the following question; “Has the work of the missionaries been beneficial to the Indians”? The man running the Indian Commission, whose title was ‘technical advisor’ had carefully studied the reports my Father had been handing in on the missionaries activities which included medical work, literacy programs and language analysis. He also studied independent accounts from various official expeditions into the largely unknown jungle areas who had to their surprise found missionaries out in the furtherest reaches of the navigable streams. The missionaries had been of invaluable help in the success of these expeditions. The technical advisor was a fair man and presented all the accumulated information to the other members of the commission.
As the time of discussion came to an end the members were reminded that the answer was to be a straight forward, yes or no and it was to be unanimous. Every member with the exception of one said ‘yes’. That one member who was one of the most important and influential, said “yes but” and was not about to be persuaded by the technical advisor’s reminder of the minister’s very specific instructions. This man’s importance can’t be overstated and he probably thought he could deny the missionaries their permit by virtue of the fact the minister himself would likely cave in. So Mr. technical advisor handed in his report saying ‘here’s the report but it’s not what you wanted’. The minister was not happy and sent the commission back to do it all over again. This time around the ‘yes but’ man gave a very, very reluctant, plain and simple ‘yes’ answer. From the very beginning the evidence was overwhelming in favor of granting the permit but this man had a deep resentment against the presence of the missionaries no matter how much good they were doing.
After the permit had been granted a representative from another mission told my father he had not even prayed for it’s granting because he had been so sure it would be turned down. He knew there wasn’t the slightest chance it could happen and indeed there wasn’t. But God had a different perspective, God knew the answer was going to be YES and that it was going to be UNANIMOUS.
Let me share a line from a couple of hymns those early missionaries sang with commitment, determination and passion. A.B. Simpson-M. M. Simpson. “To the regions beyond I must go, I must go, where the story has never been told, to the millions that never have heard of His love, I must tell the sweet story of old”. Oscar Eliason. “Got any rivers you think are uncrossable, got any mountains you can’t tunnel thru? God specializes in things thought impossible; He does the things others can-not do”. It was God’s good timing that those jungle peoples living in that “region beyond” hear “the sweet story of old” and God used the faith, prayers and efforts of those missionary pioneers in that jungle to bring the story to where it “had never been told”.
That Mysterious Spirit
In the beginning days the missionaries themselves purchased the medical supplies needed to treat the jungle folks. The missionary was the medical supply company, the pediatrician, the doctor, the nurse, the pharmacist and on and on. It seemed you could never keep an adequate supply of everything you needed for treating malaria to pneumonia and snakebite to leshmaniasis. Supplies always ran out or got dangerously low before the next supply run to town. Supply runs you’ll remember happened only every two to three months. In the drier months especially, the round trip could be a thousand river miles.
In time the authorities became aware of the very important contribution the missionaries were making toward the betterment of the jungle peoples health. Two doctors from the department of health were instrumental in working together with the missionaries in setting up the training of tribal rural medics and providing medicines and supplies for them to work with. I’ve mentioned this very beneficial program in previous posts. Prior to the start up of this training in town these two doctors initially came out to the jungle and trained several of the missionaries over a two week period.
The doctors stayed with our family in our palm roofed house complete with its dirt walls, dirt floor and of course the well worn path out the back door leading straight to the outhouse. They took all the limitations and inconveniences of jungle living in stride. There was however one element of living and working with the missionaries for those weeks they struggled to define. They saw how the missionaries genuinely cared about the Indians health concerns. They observed and experienced first hand the sacrifices the missionaries made every day just to be there. They heard the prayers at the table thanking God for the food and for the doctors themselves. They were perplexed as to why these missionaries had come from so far away just to help the tribal folks. You must understand this was still very much a transitional period from when tribal folks were not considered by many to be humans on the same level as the National peoples. The doctors of course didn’t feel that way but it was an attitude held by many. Not having anything in their personal experience as a yardstick to compare with what they were feeling, they began referring to ‘THAT MYSTERIOUS SPIRIT’ to define what it was about the missionaries they couldn’t understand and the reason for them being there.
Though the doctors didn’t comprehend the love of Christ as being the motivation behind the missionaries lives and work, to their credit they saw there was no hidden agenda. Sadly over the years many individuals and groups have accused the missionaries of having nefarious motives for being there in the jungle. Some because they just could not believe the missionaries good intentions while others in spite of knowing the truth used it as a pretext to getting the missionaries removed. Their real issue had to do with the message of Christ the missionaries brought.
Both doctors became good friends and in time one of them was appointed minister of health over the entire country with an office in the capital city appropriate to the impotence of his position. It so happened that a number of years later one of those jungle missionaries died with leukemia in that same capital city. His widow wanted him to be buried among the tribal folks he loved. Our missionary pilot friend was on standby with his faithful little airplane to fly the body to the jungle but time was running out to get the needed permissions. The Lord brought our friend the minister of health to mind and we tried contacting his office not knowing if his secretary would believe our story of having met the doctor years ago in the jungle. Well, she did, and within the hour another missionary and I were ushered into the office, had the permission we needed and were on the way to the airport. The little airplane made the jungle strip before dark and the burial ceremony was carried out with the tribal friends and believers, the fruit of his labors, present and participating. The missionary’s widow continued on for many years serving the people she loved.
March
March is the ‘last hurrah’ month of the dry season. April could bring some dry season like conditions but you couldn’t count on it. March is when the gardeners in all the villages and settlements along the rivers really got serious about burning off the garden plots they’d begun work on the end of last year. A few might wait till the first part of April but they’d be risking the beginning of the rains which would make the possibility of a good clean burn less likely.
Even though the rivers are still very low the peacock bass are getting harder to catch. The Piranha are still (and always will be) biting as faithfully as ever. Stringing ten to twenty balsa wood floats across the river is a good way to catch two species of the best eating catfish but it’ll be several weeks before the river is deep enough for that to happen. The hunting is still good and the turkeys are still singing away but soon they won’t be starting as early in the morning and they’ll be tapering off soon after daybreak. The biggest species of turtle will still be laying their eggs on the sand bars. Hopefully the wet season won’t begin earlier than usual and cover the eggs with water before they get a chance to hatch.
The country’s biggest river flows generally from South to North which means the river’s headwaters begin closer to the equator at about 2% and enter the caribbean at between 8% and 10%. The further South you are, that is, closer to the headwaters, the earlier the seasons begin and end as compared to further North and the river’s mouth. We lived in the jungle region which was further South than North which meant the dry season ended weeks earlier than it did on the Caribbean coast.
On the sand bars the jejen or no-seeums, tiny little bloodsucking insects, tended to be horrendous toward the end of dry season. In March they could be unbearable. For some reason they liked a person’s head and hair. It didn’t matter if you had a thick head of hair, these little critters wold get to your scalp in no time. Eventually a person could get more or less used to the larger blood suckers we called ‘gnats’ but I never saw anyone get used to the jejen. They would literally attack you in such numbers your head would be enveloped in a cloud So much for March.
Of Bushmasters & Baby Strollers
Baby strollers are a good invention and work just fine, but strollers aren’t all things to all surfaces. From first hand experience, they do very poorly on water.
A married co-worker couple with their little girl and I were traveling from one village to another in a downriver direction. They were in their faster boat and I was driving the traditional dugout powered by an outboard. My rig was much slower but my co-workers stayed with me because we had several big rapids to portage over, through and around. We needed each other’s help. Having successfully pulled and motored our way down through all the rapids my co-workers sped on ahead. To give them more room we had loaded their baby stroller onto my boat. They’d arrive at the next village around noon and I pull in several hours later. It was to be a very uneventful ride. Of course you had to look out for sand bars, rocks and snags but that was just routine, no big deal.
Sitting there at the back of the dugout, left hand on the steering tiller of the outboard, the engine droning on with the sun beating down, it was hard to keep awake. By and by I felt the call of nature and started searching the passing river banks for a good place to pull the dugout into. Seeing a spot where the bank wasn’t too steep I pulled in, made my way to the front of the boat, picked up the chain, jumped onto the bank, tied the chain to the nearest tree and made my way into the jungle. After a few minutes I was ready to continue on downriver and was approaching the tree to untie the boat when I noticed a very big bushmaster snake coiled at the base of the tree with head raised and pointed in my direction. One of the important things you learn about the jungle is that you don’t mess with bushmasters. Too many friends have died or lost a foot or lower leg to these poisonous reptiles. The first thing I did was thank the Lord for His protection. I hadn’t even noticed the snake when I had tied the boat. It was now exacting revenge for being disturbed by laying claim to my dugout. I say that because I couldn’t even get to the boat let alone untie it. In all the years of living in the jungle I’d never had a snake steal anything from me. I wanted my dugout back and came up with a plan.
I got into the water downstream from the flickering tongue, swam out to the stern of the boat and clambered in over the side. Once back in the boat it was a simple matter to find an implement with which to dispatch the bushmaster. There is a lot of meat on a six foot snake so I laid it down in the boat with the evening meal in mind. I untied the boat and shoved off into the current.
Well the current was strong and pushed us, that is the snake and me into the brush where a branch reached out and cleanly flipped the baby stroller into the water where it immediately sank. My first reaction was to think, “I can’t loose this stroller”. There was no place within hundreds of river miles and days of travel where you could get another one. I quickly tied the boat back up and started getting things into perspective. First a bushmaster had tried to steal my boat and now the river was intent on stealing the baby stroller. Getting the boat back hadn’t been too difficult but the stroller was another matter. No matter how hard I tried to think of an alternative I knew the only way to get the stroller back was to dive for it. This was not a happy thought because the current was swift, the location of the stroller wasn’t known and you couldn’t see anything on the river bottom. This was also anaconda country and one of those really big snakes could be anywhere.
I stuck one end of a long pole into the mud at the river bottom and lashed the other end to my boat. Not feeling at all good about what I was doing I got into the water for the second time in less than an hour and began pushing myself, hand under hand to the bottom. To tell the truth I was scared. There were no other human beings for miles in any direction and what I was doing wasn’t safe for any number of reasons. I had a knife in my teeth and once on the bottom I pushed myself 360 degrees around the pole while reaching out with the other hand hoping to find the stroller. No stroller, so back up to the surface to breath and reposition for another try. This time, once on the bottom I wrapped my feet around the pole and extended my whole body outwards and praise the Lord this time my hand felt the stroller. Back up the pole I went and heaved myself and the stroller into the dugout. Meanwhile I’d forgotten about the bushmaster lying there in the bottom of the boat. Well, forgotten or not, it was very much there and I landed right on top of it. Somehow the sensation of landing on that snake combined with the thoughts of anacondas and whatever else was down there all came together and gave me the scare of my life. I literally almost jumped back into the river.
Well, after my heart calmed down I continued on down river, stroller safe on board. I had meat for the evening meal (bushmaster) and the rest of the trip was back to “uneventful like it was supposed to have been in the first place.
I Have It!
In the early 1950′s it became necessary for the missionaries to have a written permission from the highest authorities in order to continue their work among the town folks and the expanding efforts to contact the tribal peoples. This document was granted in the capital city and had to be renewed every six months. Travel and communication being what it was or wasn’t in those days the permit would sometimes expire before the next one was in hand. When this happened the missionaries were required to gather in a certain town to await the granting of a new permit. Eventually a permit of longer duration would be granted. The story of that miracle of God will come in a later post.
In the meantime on the morning of Oct. 9, 1952 my father was in the capital city working on a new permit. Most of the other missionaries had gathered in their designated town and were eagerly awaiting word of a new permit. As the day was getting under way they were visited by some of the town authorities summoning all the men to a meeting at the Mayors’ office. This was something out of the ordinary for the men but off they went to meet with the Mayor. He informed them their permit had expired and that the Governor had ordered all the missionaries without exception to leave town and proceed back downriver to the territorial capital. This of course was not welcome news!
One of the missionary men had understood the Governor to have ordered them downriver to await the issuance of a new permit. The other men understood the Governor to have ordered them to leave the territory altogether. Either way the men knew they needed time to think the order through and decide how to proceed. They needed to make sure the two families working in a couple of outlying villages, who had not been unable to join the others, be made aware of this unexpected development. In this day of much, much better communication it’s hard for us to imagine the dilemma these missionaries faced. What were they to do? They had, everyone of them, given their lives to share the Gospel with these jungle folks. They had sold or given away whatever they had back where they came from. In the case of my parents I know they had come with the idea they likely would die out there in the jungle. If that was in God’s permissive will for their lives, they were prepared to do that. The thought of having to leave just when they were on the cusp of getting out to the Tribesmen up the rivers was almost too much to bear.
The first thing the missionaries did was to gather together to worship the Lord and cry out to Him. At that prayer and strategy meeting they decided to stay put until they were forced to leave or until they knew for sure my Father had been issued an order signed by the governor mandating their expulsion. They also decided to try sending my Father a radiogram not knowing if he’d receive it, but it was the best they could do. This is what it said; “Mayor informed us permit expired. Ordered us to territorial capital. Decided to stay here till governor has informed you. Please acknowledge receipt this radiogram”.
As the men walked down the dirt street to the radio office their hearts clung to the conviction that in spite of the uncertainty of their situation God would get His message to the tribal groups no matter what. They listened in silence to the radio operator send the message and as they were about to leave they heard an incoming radiogram from my Father, which said; I HAVE IT. Not sure my return date. The men began hugging one another and praising the Lord. As the radio man handed them the typed radiogram he began hugging the missionaries too. Other prominent citizens who had not been in favor of sending the missionaries away joined in the celebration.
One of those citizens joining in the celebration was Don Jose you’ll remember from the Don Jose post. God was confirming in the missionaries and Don Jose’s heart that He was very much in control. There were still many seemingly insurmountable obstacles ahead to be overcome, but the issuance of this permit was part of the foundation God was laying upon which to launch the spreading of His Good news to all the Tribal groups of the jungles and rivers beyond the National towns.