Jungle Trip #2--Kiim
Sun. July 21 - 6:00 PM The plan for last week was to go to Kiim, another Shuar community in the jungle. Kiim, unlike Washintsa, is now recently accessible by road. The road to Makuma, the neighboring town, was just finished in January, so you can drive until just before the entrance to Makuma, park, and hike the last hour into the community. The plan for the week was to set the four wooden columns for the water tower under construction. But, plans never seem to go exactly as you were hoping. Monday morning, just as we were about to leave, we got a call from Alfredo. (Alfredo is an Ecuadorian engineer who has worked with HCJB for 7 years. He married a British woman, Alex, who also works in Community Development with HCJB. Next year I’ll be their neighbors. They and their two kids are coming to Wheaton for a year as they both work on their Masters in Intercultural Studies.) Alfredo had been down to MAF half an hour before to see if there were any messages for him on the radio. For over 50 years radio has been the backbone of rapid communication in the remote jungle communities. Every morning at 7:00 pilots, missionaries, and others send messages and report weather conditions. This morning, a leader from Kiim had walked an hour to Makuma and asked the pastor to leave a message for Alfredo not to come. “We’re not ready,” he said. We later found out they had been unable to cut the four massive legs of the water tower because their chainsaw’s chain had broken and was being repaired. So there was nothing for us to do in Kiim. But Alfredo, after talking with Alex, decided to go ahead and take us to the area anyway, since we were all packed and the arrangements had already been made. So we left Shell, drove 2 hours on the highway, and then turned off to drive on the new road to Makuma. If you’re ever looking for a book to read in your spare time, read Mission to the Headhunters by Frank and Marie Drown. The Drowns were long-time missionaries with GMU (now Avant, my family’s mission). In this book they tell the remarkable story of setting up a mission base in Makuma among the Shuar. Alex and Alfredo lent it to me earlier in the trip and I devoured it, eager to learn about this work among the Shuar done through GMU that I had never really heard about in detail. Here I was in Makuma for the first time, even though my mission has owned property there for over 60 years. We saw the church and met the pastor, who let us sleep in the guest house. The airstrip still runs right down the edge of town, but the grass has been allowed to grow tall and it seems as if it has probably not been used for the past 6 months since the road made it to the town and buses depart regularly for the city. Alfredo showed us the spring that supplied the water to the missionary houses. It was originally built by GMU but HCJB has since made two recent fixes to it. That evening we sat around in the living room and talked. You know you’re among missionaries when between 8 of you you’ve visited around 40 countries. The next morning, after a hearty breakfast of eggs, spaghetti, and sardines, we headed down 2 miles to the river. There, on the Makuma river, is the hydroelectric plant which generates electricity for Makuma and several neighboring villages. The story of the hydro plant is in Mission to the Headhunters and is well worth reading if you read nothing else in the book. The 13 year story of how the twin generators were purchased for $1 each in Iowa, refurbished, shipped to Guayaquil, trucked to Latacunga, flown in to Makuma on a massive airplane that sunk into the soft ground, caught fire and burned to bits, and then laboriously installed on the river is a magnificent testimony to God’s provision every step of the way. As an engineer, it was really cool to see the finished product firsthand. That afternoon, then, we went to Amazonas, a neighboring community that recently completed a water project with the help of HCJB. It was encouraging to see a completed project, but discouraging to see that leaks had developed and only about half of the taps in the community still had water pressure. There was an incident from Amazonas that sticks out in my mind. The government had recently built a new childcare facility in the town complete with concrete walls and tile floors. But as we walked behind the structure we saw two open access holes to what were evidently pipes coming from the building. We asked one of the ladies who told us that one of them came from the kitchen and the other from the bathroom. Kids had stuffed a bunch of toys down the hole from the bathroom and had clogged the drain, so now it was overflowing into a field behind the house and likely eventually into the river 50 m away. A small girl plucked with her bare toes at the head of a dead chicken stuck in the hole. When we looked a little closer we could see floating fecal matter and two swimming parasites in the water. This was possibly the most revolting thing I’ve ever seen in my life. The designers of the childcare facility had built a beautiful building, and yet they had marginalized sanitation needs. All they would have needed was a lid for the access holes that would stop children from clogging them up. And yet even the neglect of such a simple thing was enough to create the perfect breeding ground for diseases and parasites right behind the town daycare! I guess the event emphasized for me the importance of proper sanitation in addition to clean water and how even small inadequacies can ruin an otherwise perfect system. Even though the trip to Kiim didn’t go quite as expected (in fact, we never made it to Kiim) I came away from the two days quite glad at what I had seen. I saw both the wonderful success these projects have made in the area, bringing water and electricity, and the frustrating realism of how these projects don’t always work exactly as they could. For instance, most residents of Makuma and Amazonas don’t pay their water or electrical bills. As they say, “Water is a gift from God. Why should we have to pay for it?" |