|
Ecuador
by Jared Knol
Guest Writer
FILE PHOTO
|
From the day we as freshmen put on our Streetfest T-shirts, Calvin students are taught that one of the best means of imitating Christ and bringing about his kingdom is through serving the poor and disadvantaged. It is not surprising, then, that many Calvin graduates go on to use their professional skills in the service of those who might otherwise not have access to them. Unfortunately, the emphasis we place on missions, particularly overseas missions, can lead to some idealizing and romanticizing of the missionary life; this seems especially true for those of us hoping to enter the health care professions. The popular image of the North American doctor or nurse giving up a comfortable and secure career in the States in order to serve the poorest of the poor resonates especially well with Calvin students – so much so that we run a risk of committing to a career in missions without fully considering the difficulties and headaches that come with it. In the hope of getting a more realistic picture of what such a career actually entails, nine Calvin pre-med and nursing students spent the interim in Ecuador, taking the class, “Exploring Medical Missions."
Ecuador’s capital, Quito, is home to an evangelical mission called HCJB. Started in the thirties as a radio broadcast ministry, the mission now also includes an active community development department and a sizeable health care division. The medical branch of the mission, in addition to running mobile clinics throughout the countryside, operates two of the finest hospitals in the country – one in Quito, the other in Shell, a small town at the edge of the Amazon jungle. Thanks to some convenient connections (one of the HCJB doctors is a Calvin graduate) we were able to spend considerable time in both facilities, observing doctors and gaining some appreciation of just how broad the field of medical missions is.
The Quito hospital is strikingly modern and well equipped; it is in many ways indistinguishable from its North American counterparts. Prior to touring the hospital I had conceived of medical missions as being always at the edge of civilization, with surgeons operating under grass huts and working with only the most basic equipment. While this certainly is the case for some missionary doctors, the missionaries staffing the Quito hospital work in a thoroughly modern environment, and it was eye-opening to see this other side of medical mission work.
The Shell hospital is much more the stereotypical mission hospital; it serves primarily the indigenous people of the Ecuadorian Amazon, many of whom are subsistence farmers and cannot afford the pay the full cost of their care. During our stay in Shell, a young girl suffering from a bacterial infection (a serious problem in the Amazon) was brought into town. Due to the significant distance between the girl’s village and the hospital, her family had waited until the infection was quite advanced before loading her into the back of their pickup truck for the two day journey in from the rain forest. Not surprisingly she arrived at the hospital, in the words of one of the doctors, very close to death. Against all expectations, however, she survived the night and two days later was flown to Quito where she could receive better care. To make a long story shorter, the girl is expected to fully recover, but the flip side of this inspiring story is that the family is now faced with a $4,000 hospital bill of which they cannot possibly pay more than $1,000. Though the hospital has a charity fund to cover such situations, the fund is not unlimited; by observing the decisions made during the course of the girl’s care, we were able to more fully understand the difficult situations that medical missionaries face regularly, as well as the deep need such missions have for funding.
Despite the title of the class, however, much of what we did in Ecuador had little to do with medical work. We spent five days living out in the Amazon with the Waodoni Indians – better known in evangelical Christian circles as the Aucas. “Auca” is a neighboring indigenous group’s word for “savage” a fitting description for the Waodoni’s former lifestyle. Up until just fifty years ago, no one had ever had peaceful contact with the Waodoni; the group is known to anthropologists as one of the most violent ever encountered. Every outsider who ventured into Waodoni territory – Jesuit priests, neighboring Amazonians, oil company employees and, in 1956, five HCJB missionaries, was speared to death. It might be tempting to dismiss this as simply an example of a native group defending its traditions against meddling outsiders were it not for the fact that one of the hallmark traditions of Waodoni culture was the spearing of not only intruders but also each other. The most common cause of death for men was spearing; and each death would, as in the family feuds of American history, incite a violent act of revenge. In a very real sense the Waodoni were spearing themselves out of existence, until, after the killing of the five HCJB missionaries, the wife of one missionary and the sister of another were invited to return. The story is too long for this article, but due largely to the work of the two women the Waodoni abandoned their practice of spearing and began their own Christian church.
One afternoon, three of us went down the river with three Waodoni men in order to gather a poison root used for fishing, and, after an hour of work, hiked back down to the river bank. Unfortunately, the man who stayed back with our dugout canoe had gone down river to visit another village, and we were left for an hour in the pouring rain waiting for his return. Two of the men with us were at least seventy years old, and as we were talking in the rain it occurred to me that both of them undoubtedly had killed several people in their younger days. Sixty years ago this would have been unimaginable, I thought, yet there we were, alone in the jungle with former killers and not at all afraid.
That experience, among others, has made me reconsider some of my skeptical opinions about the value of evangelical Christian missions. Our American intellectual culture sometimes dismisses such missions as arrogant and destructive encroachments on traditional ways of life. Knowing that HCJB is a fairly conservative mission, I went to Ecuador with some cynical preconceptions of what I would find there - I almost expected to be offended by the HCJB missionaries and their worldview. What I found instead was a mission completely dedicated to the welfare of people who are by and large ignored by the Ecuadorian government, staffed by missionaries who more fully embody the Christian ideal of self-sacrificing service than any I’ve ever met in the United States. While I may disagree with some of their interpretations of just what the Christian faith is, I left Ecuador with a deep respect for the work that the mission accomplishes and an appreciation for just how necessary that work is. It would probably be inaccurate to say that all nine of us now plan to pursue overseas medical mission work, but the month we spent in Ecuador certainly at least convinced us of the need to support those who do.
|
