Rain Forest Villagers Happy to Host Missionaries

THE HERALD NEWS, Sunday, April 4, 2004
Story and photos by Greg Rummo


"WE WAIT FOR LIGHT, but behold obscurity; for brightness, but we walk in darkness. We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes: We stumble at noonday as in the night; we are in desolate places as dead men. We roar all like bears, and mourn sore like doves: We look for judgment, but there is none; for salvation, but it is far off from us." Isaiah 59: 9-11

The late morning sun is just starting to burn through the remnants of last night's thunderstorms, which lit up the night sky over the dense jungle. Tendrils of water vapor reach down from the low clouds, intertwining with countless spires of humidity rising up from the jungle canopy. One imagines a thousand translucent church steeples.

The thickness of the air - that's the only way to describe it - muffles the occasional call of a Chichara, a large locust-like bug. A bead of sweat trickles out from under my hat, runs down my cheek and drips onto my soaked shirt. Another day in the rain forest has dawned.

I am sitting on a wooden bench in the home of Clint and Rita Vernoy. The Vernoys, along with their four children, are Baptist missionaries. Seven years ago they were invited by a tribe of Yekwana Indians to come and live in the tiny village of Chajurana, located on the Chajura River, a tributary of the mighty Orinoco River deep in the Venezuelan rain forest.

The Vernoys make their home in a mud-clay brick building with a thatched roof and a cement floor. They have managed significant improvements over the years, including a gravity-fed shower, a generator for electricity during the evening and when clouds obscure their solar panels, and a four-burner propane stove.

Their home is a remarkable achievement, especially in light of the fact that everything they bring into the jungle must fit in a space no larger than the cargo area of a Cessna 206. Considering their surroundings, they have a very comfortable home.

They are able to minister to the Indians in a variety of ways by providing medicine, food and other sundries, which they sometimes use to trade. Their presence also provides a reason for Mission Aviation Fellowship to land one of their two single-engine Cessna's on the 500 meter landing strip on a regular basis, bringing supplies to the Vernoys and providing a window to the outside world for the inhabitants of Chajurana.

Since there are no roads in this part of the world, the only other way to get to their village is by canoe - a 2-week trip filled with dangerous portages through waters infested with anacondas, piranhas and crocodiles.

But of all the work the Vernoys are engaged in, they regard the opportunity to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with the 450 or so Yekwana living in their village, plus the 60 Sanema Indians living on the other side of the Chajura River, their most important work.

"People think it's all perfect harmony here," Clint shares with me. "The secular anthropologists want the Indians to stay the way they are. They gloss over the nudity and the use of alcohol as if it is an essential part of their culture. They try and explain that the Indian's yaraque - an alcoholic homebrew - gives the Yekwana a non-violent 'mellow' drunken stupor. They're not here to help the Indian women after they have been beaten silly by their drunken husbands or to sew up the cuts from machete fights."

"The Indians themselves have often told me that they do not want others telling them to stay the way they are," he continues. "They want to experience progress, they want to be able to determine their own destiny."

Our conversation is interrupted by Zoraida, a young Yekwana mother who enters the Vernoys' home and sits on my left. The Indians are constantly coming into the Vernoys' home, or lined up outside, peering through the screens - there is literally no privacy. The Vernoys accept this as a way of life in this culture.

Zoraida is carrying her baby, Chaves, in her arms. Chaves has been suffering from a bad case of diarrhea.

Moments later, Jorge appears at the door and walks in. He takes a seat on the wooden bench next to me on my right. Jorge has recently contracted malaria.

The rainy season has started here in the Bolivar section of the rain forest and disease is spreading through the small village. The rain showers wash over the jungle and into the rivers carrying with them the detritus and germs which have accumulated on the jungle floor during the month's long dry season. This increases the likelihood of stream-borne illness as the Chajura River is the lifeline of the village. The Indians drink and bathe in it and use its water for cooking. The rains also pool in low places in the forest, creating fertile incubators for mosquitoes, which carry malaria, yellow fever and dengue fever.

As Rita administers a small dose of pink Pepto-Bismol to the crying infant, Jorge explains that he has not been feeling well. Finally, after a half-hour, he gets up and waves weakly, saying goodbye to us in Mike - short for Maquiritare - the language of the Yekwana. It's about time for his afternoon febrile seizure and he wants to go home and lie down.

He thanks the Vernoys for another Mefloquine tablet and walks away, the screen door slamming behind him. Rita explains that there are now four cases of malaria in the village, all in close proximity to the Vernoy's home.

I am not worried. I am taking Mefloquine myself as a prophylactic against the disease, but the Vernoys cannot take it on a constant basis, and there is the risk that they could easily contract malaria. Their oldest son, Joshua, had malaria the previous rainy season.

Tribal missionary work is exciting but can also be very dangerous for reasons other than diseases. Only four weeks before I arrived, five people - three missionaries, a passenger and the pilot - were all killed as a New Tribes Mission Cessna 206 crashed on a mountainside at 7,000 feet, only a few miles from where we had flown just one day ago.

Missionary work among the Maquiritare Indians dates back to the 1970s and the work of the Orinoco River Mission. But these missionaries moved on, leaving a spiritual vacuum in the village of Chajurana. The Vernoys, who have been in Chajurana since 1999, have been accepted by their hosts.

"Indian culture has been abused," Clint says. "Miners have come in and raped the jungle for its gold deposits and the Indian women for pleasure. Anthropologists come here and try and tell the Indians how to live. Then they get on a plane and go home to the comforts of Western Civilization. We gained the right to be heard because we lived among them."

In 1998, there was some concern that the Vernoys would be forced to leave Chajurana. At the urging of a group of anthropologists with an obvious anti-religious and anti-North American bias, the Venezuelan National Guard was ready to order all non-Indians out of the jungle. The tribal leaders called for a meeting to discuss the situation. Hundreds of Indians converged in the tiny village for the three-day pow-wow.

When Clint was given the chance to speak, it became obvious to all the Indians that the only ones willing to live with them were the missionaries. In the end, the chief stood up and said, "These people eat our food, they live here with us. They have brought their children into the jungle with them. They treat our sick with medicine. They comfort our dying. They have even paid the plane fare out of their own pockets to fly our critically sick people to the city for medical attention. They can stay."

Clint looks at his watch and announces that a supply plane for the guesthouse he is building is arriving in about 30 minutes. That's our cue to make our way to the airstrip and help unload the MAF Cessna when it arrives from Ciudad Bolivar with about 450 kilograms of supplies. This turns out to be no easy job and takes us almost two hours in the sweltering heat and humidity. The airstrip is several miles from the village and the plane must be unloaded and each piece of cargo carried from the airstrip down a steep embankment to a 45-foot dugout canoe. From there, it is roughly a mile down the Chajura River to the shores of the village. There, piece by piece, the process is repeated as the cargo is unloaded and carried up a steep embankment to the missionary's home.

On Wednesday of the week I was in Chajurana, the Yekwana held a banquet in my honor. Almost the entire tribe packed into a large, round, thatched-roof structure called a churuwatta, the equivalent of a stateside civic center. They served chicken rice soup (only the men got pieces of meat), and a sour tasting bread called casava, made from the root of a plant grown by the Indians.

The night before I left the rain forest, the Vernoys announced they would show a Christian video entitled Perdona Nuestras Deudas to the village. Word quickly got out and, by the time we had carried the generator, the video player and the small, 9-inch color television to the appointed place outside under the stars, more than 200 people were seated, eagerly awaiting our arrival.

Friday morning comes quickly, and it's time to leave the jungle. Although the rain showers prevent the MAF Cessna from picking me up early in the morning as scheduled, the overcast breaks around noon and I am finally able to fly out later in the afternoon, landing at the airport in Puerto Ayacucho on the Colombia-Venezuela border.

What makes a man move his entire family to a remote "God-forsaken" jungle? I muse over and over in my mind as the Cessna rolls towards the MAF hangar. Then I remember Clint's words to me: "They are brilliant people here in the jungle. Their questions about God are just as good as ours and I love them very dearly."

As the prop spins down, and I realize I am back to civilization, the words of the apostle Paul to the Corinthian church play over in my head: "For the love of Christ compels us." The sacrifices the Vernoys have made to be salt and light to the Indians of the Orinoco rain forest are truly moving. The Yekwana and Sanema are hardly God-forsaken. n

Greg Rummo is a syndicated columnist. Since 1998, he has visited several third-world countries in Central and South America to assist missionaries in the work of evangelism. This year he’ll be trekking through the Peruvian Andes in July as well as traveling to the Yucatan in Mexico with his older son, John. Visit his website, www.GregRummo.com