Writings By Phil

Thoughts On This And That

Sunday Mornin’ Rain Comin’ Down

Pension, Central Bolivia

Saturday, February 18, 1978

I stayed in camp with Wally Pouncy today.  Our other three coworkers walked our gift trail hoping to find some trinkets missing, an indication that the nomads were in the area and had taken some of the things we put out for them. They planned to walk about nine miles out, setting out more gifts and raising all the ones we put up the other day to a higher level. While they were gone, Wally and I cleared brush around camp.

Ticks were a big problem for us! All of us had found the parasitic arachnids on our bodies. Most of them were tiny and one had to look carefully to find them, or they could be mistaken for a freckle. 

In the afternoon, the others returned to camp safe, but tired!  All the gifts we hung the other day were still out there, so the illusive people we wanted to befriend were not in our area. However, we still had hope that they would come!

After supper, Alan Foster turned on his short-wave radio and tuned in the Voice of America. Our present reality of muddy jungle and hot humid days was far different from that making the headlines on the news.  We were so isolated! The world I left just a few short weeks before was just a memory. There were things I missed about the States, and there were things I hated about my present location, but life seemed simpler in the jungle, no televisions, no newspapers, no deadlines. Gone was the dreaded hustle of rushing to and fro, and the keeping of time almost seemed pointless. We got up when it was light and went to bed when it was dark, or when we could no longer stand the hungry mosquitos sucking the life out of us. Jungle life was hard, but more relaxed. I liked that second part!

Sunday, February 19,1978

We woke this morning to the sound of rain.  We all slept in till after seven o’clock.  It was cloudy all day and rained for a good part of it. There was so much vegetation around us that even during brief cessations of the rain, water continued to drip from leaf to leaf in its fall to hit the ground and the sound was deceiving. I thought it was still raining!

Being Sunday, we had a short church service with open sharing and a time of prayer. We prayed that the Yuqui would come. We prayed for those of our team back on the Rio Heidondo. We prayed that God would keep us all safe.

The rain kept us under the thatched roof most of the day. There wasn’t much for us to do except feed mosquitos; Against our will, of course! My reading and writing were interrupted time and again by the blood suckers landing on my jeans, shirt sleeves, on my exposed skin, or buzzing around my head. I always found  time to give them a hand! Oh what joy if that hand could smash their little bodies flat against my clothes or skin.  My heart clamoring for revenge, I decided to kill one hundred mosquitos before nightfall.  In less than an hour, I reached my goal. I should have set it for 1000. I’m sure I would have easily killed that many before supper!

I finished my book on Lincoln today. There was not much else around camp to read, at least not to my liking. I wished that I had brought more books with me. I preferred books on history, autobiographies, and the like, not so much the Louis L’amor westerns that so many others in recent years had the rage to read. Without a good book to read, I feared that if it rained for days or weeks on end, and it could, I would get really bored! That might force me to read a western!

Before Alan married his wife, Vicki, he had spent a lot of time with the Yuqui over on the Chimore River. He was fluent, or at least well on the way to speaking like a Mbia (what the Yuqui called themselves). He was the only Yuqui speaker on our team.  It was decided that he would teach us some of the their language on Sundays, phrases that would be helpful for us to know should we contact the Indians. I had not memorized all of them, yet, but we were learning to say such phrases as:

This picture and the Featured Imaged for this post are photographs of the first group of Yuqui befriended by the mission back in the early sixties.

I am your friend- Dequiato yo(n) che aiquio.

I won’t shoot you- Jayibo(m) biti yo ta.

I’ll give you something- Ba amoro ta(n) de je.

I’ll give you something to eat- Ba auquia ta(n) de je.

Don’t shoot me (use sparingly so as not to give the Indians ideas)- Che yibo me.

My friends are coming- Chequiato tagore gua.

Towards evening, the rain had finally stopped. After supper, I took a walk and talked to the Lord. There were things in my life that needed to change. I wanted to talk to God about CJ, as well. I was sure He knew I had feelings for her, but I felt compelled to remind Him, again. Did I really have a chance with her? There were so many obstacles, and by the time I got out of the jungle, if I got out of the jungle, she would probably be married to another man! In the meantime, I prayed that God would make me content and unquestioning in being single.

Monday, February 20, 1978

Today it rained again! It was too muddy to check the gift trails and too wet to work around camp, so we stayed close to home, much of the time under the thatched roof of the Pension. In the jungle, when we worked, we worked hard, and when we couldn’t, we were bored! I was tired of reading and doing the other little “somethings” that filled our days when it was too wet to work. I prayed for nightfall so that I could go to bed and forget about the rain and the mud and escape the mosquitos that seemed most ferocious on rainy days!

This afternoon, some of the guys tried to get a wild parrot to have as a pet. They tried to shoot the bird in the wing to bring it down so they could capture it. They ended up killing a red and blue Macaw!

I was sad to see the life of so magnificent a creature cut short, and all for nothing, Even had they succeeded in just winging it, the bird would have been crippled and maned for life, never to fly again! Let’s not forget about that beak, either. If it could crack the shell of a Brazil nut, imagine what it could do to a man’s finger! Hatched and raised wild, that parrot would not be easy to tame, and those squawks coming out of that bird’s mouth, while being handled by human hands, would have had to be some of the fowlest language ever heard in the jungle! Bolivia’s Green Hell had so many negatives that I believed God put the Macaws, flying in pairs, to remind people like me that life was still beautiful!

FIN

This story was from the category Tales From Green Hell. If you would like to read more of my experiences in the jungles of Bolivia, please click on that link below.

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