Mission Statement : Modern Christians, Armed With Medicines and Computers, Take the Bible to World’s Few Remaining Isolated Peoples

YARINACOCHA, Peru —  For five years, missionaries Ivagene Shive and Mary Ann Lord trekked through the Amazon rain forest, searching for a group of Indians hidden away for generations.

The women camped on riverbanks, hoping to find the Indians gathering turtle eggs. They hung gifts--pots, spoons, knives and packets of plastic beads--in trees. They flew over the jungle and dropped bundles of food and cloth.

Last year, Shive and Lord interrupted their search when they were summoned to give medical aid to some Indians discovered by local loggers.

Most of the sick Indians--malnourished and shivering with pneumonia--wore only belts of thin vine. One Indian woman, however, had a red-and-white cloth around her waist. To Shive, it was stunningly familiar. It was her old bedroom curtain.

“It fell from the sky,” the Indian woman said, pointing up.

Grinning, Shive realized the search was over. “I think we’ve made contact,” she said.

“God worked it all out,” Lord agreed, “because we never could have.”

It is the stuff missionaries live and die for: to penetrate forbidding jungles, discover people untouched by the outside world and teach them Christian beliefs.

For almost 2,000 years, missionaries have scoured remote corners of the Earth, bringing faith and sometimes catastrophe. Today, they are at the end of the line.

Anthropologists estimate that fewer than 100 groups of isolated indigenous people are left in the world, mostly living in the Amazon rain forest and western Papua New Guinea. Men hunt with bows and arrows carved from river bamboo, or with blowguns and darts dipped in frog venom. Their languages exist only in spoken form. And their beliefs are based on spirits and demons that inhabit nature.

Every day, their isolation is disturbed, by military helicopters chasing drug traffickers, by gold miners, oil crews, ranchers and loggers. “There are fewer and fewer places for these people to hide,” said Harvard University anthropologist Ted MacDonald. “It’s inevitable that they will be contacted.”

Missionaries are leading the race to reach them. What Shive and Lord accomplished last year is a contemporary episode in the age-old crusade to expand the Christian church. Their work offers a glimpse of the most modern of missionaries--armed with medicines and laptop computers, trained in linguistics and anthropology--delivering an ancient message to the most primitive people on Earth.

Shive, 40, and Lord, 41, are members of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, an affiliate of Wycliffe Bible Translators. It is the largest linguistics operation in the world and aims to translate the Bible into every language.

It is a painstaking, dangerous, often unsuccessful and, some say, misguided effort.

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‘We’ve been criticized and attacked for changing cultures, and some people even say that we work for the CIA,” said Lou Hohulin, director of linguistics for the institute. “Most secular people do not understand why we would take our families and live for decades in some of these isolated places.

“Sometimes we get discouraged. And sometimes we’re frustrated. We’re very normal people. But God gives us an extra dose of cope.”

Translating the New Testament can be a life’s work, taking 20 years or longer. Founded in 1935, Wycliffe has completed 430 translations and is working on versions in more than 1,000 languages.

The group balks at calling its members missionaries, instead viewing their work as scholarly. Wycliffe has developed linguistics data used by universities worldwide. Its 5,400 members are highly trained: More than 400 have doctorates, nearly two-thirds have master’s degrees. They say they don’t engage in “church planting,” a term used to describe setting up congregations and regular worship services.

Still, they bring the Word.

Cameron Townsend, Wycliffe’s founder, believed that for people to grasp Christianity, they must be able to read the Bible in terms that make the most sense to them.

While working on translations in indigenous communities, even those as remote as the Matses Indians’ in the Amazon jungle, the linguists provide medical care, help file land claims, start livestock programs, dig wells and build schools. Institute officials say their efforts help save lives, languages and, therefore, cultures.

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‘Giving these people a written vocabulary and then teaching them to read and write gives them skills they can use to confront the challenges of the modern world,” said Steve Sheldon, executive director of Wycliffe International.

Many people disapprove of any form of proselytizing, but anthropologists are particularly critical of such efforts among isolated peoples. Robert L. Carneiro, an expert on Amazon Indians with the Museum of Natural History in New York, said that missionaries often cross the line between education and intrusion on native ways of life.

Through the centuries, missionaries have killed nonbelievers, kidnapped natives, enslaved populations, separated children from parents, banned languages and annihilated traditions. Even today, Carneiro said, they discourage practices including polygyny, rites of passage and spirit ceremonies that give natives pride as a people and perhaps help them survive.

“Missionary work is theological imperialism,” Carneiro said.

MacDonald, the Harvard anthropologist, acknowledges that missionaries provide important humanitarian services not otherwise available. Latin American governments often are too poor or unstable to see to the needs of Indian citizens. But MacDonald is still concerned.

“Their work is extremely disruptive of Indian belief systems,” he said. “Their overall mission is to change these people’s cultures, and they feel God has given them that authority.”

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Wycliffe members offer an unusual defense to criticism that they impose their beliefs. Although they win some converts, the translators say, more often they don’t. The majority of indigenous people Wycliffe works with become little more than “skin Christians.” Although intrigued by Bible stories, they cling to native beliefs.

“They would come to our prayer meetings one day,” said Thomas Headland, an institute anthropologist who spent 30 years with the Agta of the Philippines, “and on the next, they would have seances and sacrifice animals to their native gods.”

Christians, from the beginning, have pushed to translate the Bible from Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic to reach broader audiences.

By the end of the 19th century, the New Testament had been translated into more than 100 languages. Many translations were distressingly imperfect, some laughable. But all were significant, said Andrew Walls, author of “The Missionary Movement in Christian History.”

“The translations allowed indigenous people to own Christianity, to make it a part of their culture,” Walls said.

The Shoebox Method

That philosophy inspired Wycliffe founder Townsend, who set out in 1917 with college friends to sell Bibles to indigenous families in Guatemala. One Indian he met asked, “If your God is so smart, how come he does not speak in my language?”

Townsend, who built a home of dried cornstalks among the Cakchiquel Indians, completed a Cakchiquel translation of the New Testament 10 years later.

He sounded out words and recorded them on 3-by-5 note cards, filed in shoe boxes--one box for verbs, one for nouns, one for adjectives, one for pronouns. He shuffled cards from box to box as he learned about the words.

Institute linguists now carry laptop computers, solar panels and car batteries into the jungle. They manage data with a specially designed software system--nostalgically named Shoebox.

Still, many translators rely on age-old techniques. When Lord began her study of Chitonahua--the language spoken by the newly discovered Peru tribe--she and an Indian woman named Minima played show and tell.

Each morning, Lord held up pictures of animals and waited for Minima to tell her what they were. Lord roamed the camp, pointing at palm trees, flowers, clouds.

Minima “wasn’t used to working like that for long periods of time, so she seemed reluctant sometimes,” Lord said. “But I reminded her of my promise to give her a dress and a stew pot for her help. She went along with me after that.”

Lord and Shive first heard reports about the Chitonahua, which means “naked people,” in 1992.

Shive and Lord were assigned to look for the tribe and began a five-year trek over hundreds of miles of jungle in the southeast corner of Peru. They never caught a glimpse of the Indians.

Then, in January 1996, loggers in that area were attacked by Indians with bows and arrows. One Indian was shot and taken prisoner.

The loggers fed and treated the Indian. When the man recovered, the loggers asked him to deliver an ultimatum to his people: Come out peacefully from their jungle hide-out, and they would be given food and machetes. Refuse, the loggers warned, and they would be killed.

Two weeks later, about 35 men, women and children laid down bows and arrows. The truce was consummated with turtle stew.

Within days, however, the Chitonahua fell ill with flu and parasites. With virtually no immunities, isolated people must be inoculated and treated with antibiotics shortly after contact with outsiders.

A Catholic priest in the area called the Summer Institute of Linguistics for medical help. Shive and Lord were dispatched with Merrilee Goins, a physician’s assistant.

When the women arrived, the Chitonahua watched the missionaries’ every move, pulling children close. “We heard them say, ‘Tall, bad strangers come,’ ” Lord said. “ ‘Are we going to die?’ ”

Shive and Lord had studied languages in college and became interested in Wycliffe because it would allow them to combine linguistics with their desire to serve God. Each speaks two Panoan Indian languages as well as Spanish.

As they began work with the Chitonahua, the missionaries put aside their interest in the Indians’ language just to keep them alive. Two children--a boy, Tsadas, 13, and a girl, Yoyo, 6--were so emaciated that Shive and Lord did not think they would last a week.

Tsadas, a gentle boy, cooperated with the missionaries. Yoyo resisted, clamping her mouth shut when they tried to give her antibiotics. Upset at seeing the girl squirm, her grandfather, the Chitonahua chief, insisted that he take the pills. Through him, he said, she would be cured.

Exasperated, Goins made one last effort. She mixed the medicine with sugar water. Yoyo guzzled the syrupy concoction. In 48 hours, her skin had regained its honey color. Tsadas recovered as well.

The chief was so pleased, he embraced the missionaries as family. “He told us how each person would be related to us,” said Shive. “It is their way of saying that we are their people.”

Life for a ‘Refuge Group’

The missionaries believe that the Indians are a “refuge group,” which is how anthropologists describe communities that had negative contact with outsiders and went into hiding.

During the rubber boom at the turn of the century, thousands of Amazon Indians were enslaved by rubber tappers. Many died from disease, starved or were massacred.

Those who were strong enough fled, and groups such as the Chitonahua are their descendants. Although they have had limited contact with outsiders, their isolation has caused them to change from sedentary farmers into nomads who survive by hunting and scavenging. Shive and Lord estimate that the Chitonahua have been on the run for 50 to 100 years. Some men recall that their fathers worked for loggers. The Chitonahua said that the patron, a Spanish word for boss, wore a fedora like the one Shive wore. The Indians still use Portuguese words he taught them for pots and eating utensils.

The Chitonahua know about money but have never used it. They have words for numbers 1 to 3.

The Indians worry about offending the spirits of animals they hunt and the souls of dead relatives. When a person dies of illness, the Chitonahua blame it on a curse by an angry spirit. “They are so afraid of the spirits of dead people that when one dies, the rest of the people in the village pack up and move to a new place,” Lord said.

Several months ago, the Chitonahua moved again. Shive and Lord say that they don’t know exactly where the Indians are but that they are traveling with Yaminahua Indians and looking for fertile hunting grounds. “Unless there is some fight between them, the Chitonahua will intermarry with the Yaminahua and be absorbed,” Lord said.

“Their language will likely die out,” Shive added.

For that reason, the linguists have decided not to translate the Bible into Chitonahua. A Yaminahua translation is due within a year. Before the missionaries and Chitonahua parted, Lord shared her belief that God created the world and that souls of believers go to heaven. She also taught them Christian songs.

The Chitonahua, Lord said, liked taped music and sing-alongs because they were fun and new. “I personally don’t think they have an understanding of God,” she said.

Lord is more hopeful: “Whatever the reason, they wanted to learn the songs. I feel that as they sing the songs over and over again, they will learn the message. God will reach them.”

Next Saturday: Part 2 looks at an indigenous Amazon community that embraced the ways of missionaries who brought T-shirts, Tupperware and their faith.