The DMZ Page 18
The Aztecs and Mayans and Incas had reached that point before the arrival of the Spanish, hence the remnants of their great civilizations. The scattered jungle tribes, isolated from mainstream society as many still were today, had not. And since the I’paa had no written language, and survivors tended to edit history to their own liking, who was to say now what the past history of the I’paa really was—except those present-day tribal liaisons whose cultural dictates entailed telling their foreign benefactors exactly what they wanted to hear. Their very continued existence argued that they’d been no less aggressive than their jungle neighbors.
As for this so-called symbiotic relationship with Mother Earth that Dr. Renken described as some sort of amiable communion between the I’paa and benevolent spirit guides who steered the tribe into ecological practices and sent the occasional challenge to their bravery and manhood—where had this woman been? Certainly not with the same tribal people Julie had known.
The relationship the jungle tribes had maintained with nature had never been one of love. Always, it had been a relationship of fear. Fear of famine and disease and flood and enemy attack and countless other disasters that could—and frequently did—wipe out their fragile grip on existence. Fear of the spirit beings they believed responsible for every aspect of their world and who must be kept constantly placated if disaster were to be averted. Fear of the witch doctor who claimed to stand between them and the spirit world and who in turn controlled their lives with his threats of cursing and death for anyone who crossed him.
The world of a jungle tribe was harsh, full of treachery and attack, dominated by taboos that were their way of trying to control a nature whose forces they did not understand and at whose constant mercy they lived. Julie had seen firsthand how quickly fear could turn to viciousness against anyone accused of breaking those taboos. If bad times came, it was safest to point a finger before fingers could be pointed in return.
And so to other fears was added the fear and distrust of each other.
As for the devil masks and amulets with their bizarre ingredients, the witch doctor’s ceremonies and spirit dances that anthropologists like Dr. Renken interpreted as folk art and attractive cultural rituals—could they not see the desperation behind them, the terror of invisible forces they were designed to drive away?
“Hey, what are you reading now?”
It was her seatmate, back from across the aisle. From Sondra’s satisfied expression, her mission had been successful. She glanced over Julie’s shoulder. “I’ve read that one—used it in one of my specials. Those poor Indians—they sure did get the short end of the stick. All those conquistadors. And then the missionaries coming in to finish where the Spanish left off.”
Julie’s grip tightened on the edge of the pages in her hands, but she kept her voice even. “What do you mean by that?”
“Oh, you know, Julie—destroying the local culture. Forcing their own morality on them.” Sondra’s expression suddenly grew quizzical, and she nodded toward the report. “Baker—that name’s in there. Those missionaries who screwed up the I’paa. They’re no relation to you, are they? You said you’d been in the area.”
Julie didn’t answer, but something in her face must have pierced the correspondent’s self-absorption because she got up hastily. “You know, speaking of religious types, Moral Majority back there has a seat open. I think I’ll check him out.”
As Sondra disappeared up the aisle, Julie looked down to find the edges of the page crumpled in her grip. She scanned through the rest of the report. Yes, there were the names—Richard and Elizabeth Baker.
Dr. Renken’s terse phrases jumped out: “Western missionaries’ invasion of indigenous settlements … corruption of native cultures … interference with indigenous healing practices … contamination with the outside world … lack of respect for native spirituality … imported religious practices … narrow-minded … intolerant …”
Julie’s eyes burned hot as she wadded up the report and stuffed it into the seat pocket in front of her. What did Sondra Kharrazi or this Dr. Renken, who spoke of change as though it were some terminal disease rather than a normal part of any viable culture, know of people like her parents? How dare she judge them?
To the anthropologists and environmentalists, the I’paa were some kind of living museum exhibit they wanted to freeze in time for their own study purposes.
To Richard and Elizabeth Baker, they were individuals with dreams and hopes and ideas of their own, whose needs and problems were no ongoing anthropological study but something the Bakers had the knowledge to immediately ease. A mother whose dying child had not been healed by all the chants and rattle-shaking of the witch doctor—did she cry “contamination” when a shot of antibiotics restored her baby to her arms? Was it “corruption” to teach nutrition and more efficient agricultural practices so I’paa children could grow up strong and healthy instead of dying in infancy? Was it “interference” to broker peace with a neighboring tribe and put an end to the continuous bloodshed or to intervene with state authorities when settlers began encroaching on I’paa land?
Was it “narrow-minded” and “intolerant” to offer these people the love of a Creator-God in place of fear and bondage?
That was the element these anthropologists didn’t seem to grasp—the love that had led Richard and Elizabeth Baker and tens of thousands of other missionaries over the years to leave comfortable homes to toil for people who more often than not neither accepted them nor appreciated them.
Perhaps they had made mistakes. It was always easy to pick out flaws from hindsight, especially for those who had never left the comfort of their own easy chairs, and missionaries were as human and as bound by their own cultural baggage as anyone else. But they did not exploit these people as had the conquistadors and the multinationals, the mestizo settlers and the guerrillas and paramilitaries—or even the environmentalists and anthropologists with their own agendas in tow.
They had simply loved them and given their lives to them.
So who was this Winifred Renken and others like her to accuse and criticize? What had they done for these people but study them and walk away? It had been the missionaries, in fact, who had preserved hundreds of tribal languages by reducing them to writing, an accomplishment whose cultural value was not lessened by the fact that the missionaries’ purpose had been the translation of the Bible into those dialects. Many developing nations had acknowledged the missionaries’ role in preserving their tribal groups, even if the anthropologists refused to do so.
Ultimately, however, maybe the anthropologists hadn’t been so far off. Because in the end, Julie thought, it had all proved for nothing—both for her parents and for the people to whom they had gone.
Julie felt her hands trembling again. No, she did not want to go where those memories led!
But she could hold it off no longer. Not when below the plane’s wing she could see the wide, muddy river on which she had learned to paddle her first canoe. Around that bend was the sleepy riverside town where she’d taken her first breath twenty-three years ago.
A jungle is a jungle is a jungle, Julie repeated like a litany. But it wasn’t true. This was her jungle, and like a dam bursting, the memories she’d kept firmly bottled up since she’d stepped onto the plane in Washington, D.C., swept over her.
* * *
It was almost forty years now since Richard and Elizabeth Baker had arrived in San Ignacio. He was an army doctor whose enlistment had expired just in time to miss Vietnam; she was a beautiful young conservatory grad who had given up a concert career to follow her husband to the jungles of Colombia. Elizabeth Baker’s beauty had faded by the time Julie knew her, but there had been a picture kept on the battered piano some American church group had shipped in that showed a radiant young bride in white lace beside a tall, handsome officer in dress uniform.
That picture and a few snapshots of Julie herself were all she had salvaged from San Ignacio.
The Ipa River was t
he only access into the region in those years, and the day Richard Baker’s Cessna, equipped with removable pontoons for either land or river travel, touched down on its mud-colored surface was still a red-letter date in San Ignacio history. Had her parents been dismayed by the bamboo huts and dirt streets and total lack of conveniences? If they had, Julie had never heard it. They set to work building the area’s first clinic. The generator Julie’s father brought in by river launch to power his medical equipment provided the region’s first electricity.
A measles epidemic triggered by injudicious contact with mestizo colonists brought the Bakers’ first contact with the I’paa. Both Richard and Elizabeth had set themselves to learn the I’paa language, and Julie herself had grown up chattering it as easily as English or Spanish. It was Julie’s mother who began the arduous task of reducing the dialect to grammatical structure and written word. The Gospel of John had been the I’paa’s first printed book—no easy task when much of the vocabulary did not even exist in the I’paa’s simpler language. Elizabeth Baker had continued by translating other parts of the New Testament. What had ever happened to that manuscript?
Julie herself had been a joyous surprise to the Bakers after more than a decade of childlessness. Dr. Baker performed the delivery, an unseasonable monsoon having interrupted plans to airlift his wife to the city. Her mother had told Julie the story of her birth, the water flooding across the cement floor of their bedroom, the rain rattling on the tiles loud enough to drown out her screams. There had been no further children, and if Julie would have enjoyed siblings, being a long-awaited and cherished only daughter had its pluses, and she had a whole village of other children with whom to play and squabble.
For the first eight years of her life, San Ignacio and the I’paa village had been the natural boundaries of Julie’s world. Then it was time to join the other missionary kids at the mission boarding school across the border in Venezuela.
“It isn’t that you’re better or more deserving of privilege than your friends,” her mother had explained carefully. “But you are different, and we want you to have the advantages of a better education and at least some acquaintance with your own culture, more than we can give you here. Besides, it’s safer there—not so much sickness.”
Had she been lonely at boarding school? Not really—at least not after the first months when she’d cried herself to sleep aching for her parents’ good-night hug. Independent, yes. Boarding school did that to you. You got up, got yourself dressed and ready, and as long as you did your chores and homework and didn’t get into any trouble, no one bothered you. There were compensations in the outstanding education her mother had promised and in plenty of social activities with other kids in the same boat, and if your friends were always coming and going as missionary families arrived and departed from the field, you learned not to depend too much on any particular others in your life.
It had certainly made possible the years that came after.
No, Julie hadn’t resented the unusual circumstances of her life.
At least not for herself!
When had been the first time she’d returned home from boarding school to notice how old and haggard her parents looked? She’d never known them young. By the time she went off to boarding school, her father was graying, his tall frame stooped with overwork and his constant bending to a shorter people. The radiant bride in the wedding portrait was thin, the fresh young complexion yellowed with quinine and etched deep by bouts of malaria and typhoid and other tropical fevers that seemed to be the indigenous people’s revenge for the measles and chicken pox and other deadly European diseases colonization had unleashed on them.
But the twinkle in her parents’ eyes was still youthful, and no amount of hard times could squelch it. Years of patient service had written wisdom and kindness and tolerance into every line and wrinkle of their faces, making them far more beautiful to Julie than the movie-star pose of their wedding day portrait. She had adored them with the fierceness of a child having only one point of family reference in her life.
It wasn’t until she went away to boarding school that Julie realized just how primitive were her parents’ circumstances. The cinder-block house with cement floor and a tiled roof that sprang new leaks at every storm. The hand-built furniture that seemed shabbier every time Julie came home. The water tank in the back patio where clothes were washed by hand. The Coleman lanterns that only in the last year had been replaced by a single electric light dangling on its cord from the rafters. The constant battle against dirt and the cockroaches, tarantulas, and other creepy-crawlies that came like an inexorable tide under doors and over walls.
And always, the people.
Pounding on the door in the middle of the night for a medical emergency. Standing patiently in never-ending lines for the daily clinic. Demanding an airlift out of the jungle for reasons that might be urgent or not. Pleading for someone with knowledge of the law to intervene on their behalf with the local authorities. Requesting Don Ricardo’s aging Toyota pickup to haul something too big to carry on mule back. A tribal messenger conveying the chief’s request for a lift to the larger I’paa settlement a Cessna flight away.
If her parents complained, it was not in Julie’s hearing, though she sometimes heard low, troubled murmurs behind their closed door at night. Nor had she ever seen them cry, not even when they left her at boarding school with a fierce hug that reassured her she’d be missed. During Christmas vacation of Julie’s freshman year, a fresh leak in the living-room roof had damaged the battered upright piano out of which her mother coaxed such beautiful melodies. Some days later, Julie had walked in to find her mother seated at the piano bench, head bowed on the worn ivory keys. At Julie’s footsteps, she’d sat up and slammed down the lid, wiping her eyes quickly before swinging around to greet her daughter with a semblance of her usual serenity. When Julie tried the piano later, she discovered that the water had rusted the strings into uselessness. Julie had never again seen the lid raised on the keys, and her mother never mentioned her loss.
No, it was not her parents but Julie who with each visit home resented their poverty more and more. The knock at the door that interrupted every vacation plan. The way these people intruded on her parents, not even seeming to notice or care what their demands were costing. The way every extra penny that came in went to medical supplies or teaching materials rather than the smallest comfort for themselves.
Dr. Richard Baker was a brilliant pathologist. An award from the American Medical Association, mounted in a dusty frame on his clinic wall, for having identified and developed a vaccine for a new strain of tropical fever, said so. So did a letter offering him a research position in a prestigious medical university in North America. Her father should have been in suit and tie on a conference platform, not bandaging machete wounds from a drunken bar brawl or taking the temperature of naked I’paa children.
And her mother, who had once played Rubinstein’s Komenoi Ostrow on a Chicago concert stage. She belonged at a grand piano, receiving the applause of the crowd, not bent over a sickbed in a bamboo hut whose occupants couldn’t even be bothered to sweep the food scraps from the dirt floor. Her long, graceful fingers that had once spanned an octave and a half became roughened and chapped.
Perhaps Julie would have felt differently if Richard and Elizabeth Baker’s sacrifice had been for anything in the end.
But it hadn’t.
The arrival of the guerrillas had revealed how much the Bakers’ love and giving meant to the people of San Ignacio. The little brick church they’d built next to the clinic had emptied out, the vacant benches showing just how shallow was the villagers’ commitment to the God of whom the Bakers taught. Her parents were shunned, the knocks coming no longer on the door except in the dead of night and under dire necessity. Julie’s own friends—or the town youth she’d liked to consider her friends during vacations from boarding school—had evaporated with the coming of the horsemen. Not one had come around to say goodbye.
They saved those people’s lives! Julie reminded herself now with anguish. And in return, what villager had dared approach their house when the Bakers, exhausted, contracted the disease themselves? How many of the people they’d birthed and doctored and taught over the years had stood up to the guerrillas to demand that they be airlifted out for medical attention?
Julie began worrying when her parents’ weekly letters quit coming, but a well-regulated postal service had never been one of Colombia’s strong points, and the ham radio with which the Bakers maintained contact with their mission base was one of the first things the guerrillas had confiscated.
Ironically, Norm Hutchens, an intimidating figure Julie remembered only vaguely from the Bakers’ infrequent visits stateside, had proved better informed. His own news sources had alerted him to the cholera epidemic and the guerrilla blockade. It was his furious badgering of the embassy, of the Colombian government, of the local officials, and even of the guerrillas themselves that finally won safe passage for a Red Cross team into the area—too late.
With the deaths of Richard and Elizabeth Baker, the last of their labor crumbled into sand. The I’paa, whose language her parents had so painstakingly learned and reduced to writing, drifted away into the jungle. Who knew if they remembered or even cared about any of the things the Bakers had taught them? The two Colombian pastors in the region, whom her father had trained and ordained, had been found murdered not long after her parents’ deaths. As the guerrillas’ reign of terror tightened, church doors slammed shut all over the jungle region. A lifetime of selfless ministry had been stamped out as though it had never been.