Jungle Worms and the Love of Christ
By Dean Pittman*
Namburapa displays shirt received in exchange for Mashca words.
/■T^HE Peruvian’s eyes flashed an grily, “ They’re just savages and you treat them like people! We have to eat chalona and they eat can ned food. You even have them at your table! I’m quitting! You can get some one else to work for you. I won’t be put on a level with the savages. I don’t mind carrying canned food for you and Senor Wheeler, but I won’t carry one single can for a savage!” Wearily the missionary explained that the savages were people just as much as the Peruvians and the grin gos were people; that the savage’s work was to give us the language and we were paying them for the words just as we paid the Peruvians for manual labor; that anyone was free to take his own money and buy can ned food from the mission if he wished to. It was similar to the incident of a few weeks ago when Senor Apostol, a near by rancher, had insisted that the savages were mere animals. “ Why, they even eat worms!” he told the missionary by way of proof. The mis sionary remembered how the Apostle Paul once said “ To the weak I be came weak, that I might gain the weak: I am become all things to all men, that I may be a joint partaker thereof” (1 Cor. 9 :22, 23 R.V.). He recalled too, how a missionary leader *Missionary of Mid-Missions to Peru.
had told a group of candidates sev eral years before about eating ants with a native in Guatemala to win his confidence. “ They’re people, like us. If they eat worms, I will, too,” the missionary told Senor Apostol. These incidents were all but for gotten in the busy weeks ahead. The Peruvian laborer did not quit after all, and the work of trail cutting and clearing, the study of the strange language of the savages, and the Sunday services in Spanish went on. One day a few weeks later the mis sionary was with several of the In dians at a palm-leaf lean-to they had made alongside the trail. The orig inal peaceful contact with the Indians was gradually being cemented into a firm friendship. They still were a bit suspicious, but they could not but see that the missionaries really loved them. No one else had ever shown them love; others had despised or ig nored them. This stranger from an other land, from outside the jungle, beyond the mountains, and over the sea, a stranger from a land incon ceivably remote, loved them and want ed to help them. They had learned that the gringos really believed they were people like everyone else who stood on two legs and used a lan guage. They also no doubt had heard that the missionary had promised to eat their own food. What better way to show them you love them and re
spect them as people than to sit down and eat with them? On this particular day the Indians had brought in some nice, big, fat maggots. These giant-sized four-inch maggots develop from eggs laid by an enormous fly common to the jun gles of eastern Peru. Eight or ten of the maggots were laid on a heyheyam- ba leaf, wrapped up, tied with a piece of bark, and baked in the fire. Then Mbarihe (the only one of their number who spoke Spanish) held one up for the missionary and said, “ Senor Pittman, here’s your mag got!” It is one thing to talk about being willing to eat worms, but quite a different thing to have one actually offered for your consumption! The missionary took one look at it, gulped, took another look, noticed that it was wriggling, and gasped “Why, it’s still alive!” “ ?Como esta viviendo todavia?” Mbarihe asked. “ How could it still be alive?” He was right, of course; it was just out of the fire. Steam escaping from the maggot’s breath ing holes accounted for the move ment. But you just have someone hold a giant maggot up before you which you know you must eat and see if you can think straight! With the maggot still dangling in front of him, with Mbarihe’s face all smiles and expectation because he
Left: Kitchen scene of a Peruvian Indian home. Right: Ma s h c o s taking home their sup per.
Page Sixteen
T H E K I N G ' S B U S I N E S S
Made with FlippingBook Annual report