Welcome to the Jungle

After resting for a couple days in Quito, my team excitedly began to organize our first jungle adventure. The Amazon basin stretches into several countries, and Ecuador was our team’s first chance to enter the Amazon region. Since our team has grown so much, we decided to divide into two smaller groups while traveling into the jungle. It would be logistically easier to travel into remote areas with less people. I was placed with some of my closest friends and couldn’t wait to minister in the jungle with them.

Our entire trip would be completely dependent on the Holy Spirit and the divine connections the Lord would provide for us. We looked at a map, and each team chose a general area of the country to head to. We would hop on a bus and play it by ear from there.

We packed our bags with little idea of what we were actually packing for. Since I wasn’t sure exactly where we’d end up or what the weather would be like, I tried to pack clothes for any situation. After stuffing my sleeping bag, mat, tent, food, clothes, and toiletries into my hiking pack, my bag was so full that I had trouble balancing when it was strapped to my back. The morning our jungle adventure began, our team took two bus rides on local transport awkwardly balancing our bulky hiking packs. After about an hour and a half, we arrived at the main bus terminal in Quito. We split into our two smaller teams, bid each other farewell, and bought tickets to different areas of the jungle.

               After nine hours or so on a bus, we arrived at a little jungle town in the Amazon. We stayed overnight in a small hostel and decided we would boat or bus deeper into the jungle the following morning. The next day, we met as a team and decided to take taxis to a bustling market area where locals catch boats to remote jungle areas. We prayed for a divine connection, because we needed to find a local who would bring us into his or her village. The majority of the team waited while Jesse, David, and Liney began their search for access to the jungle. The rest of us explored the market and sampled wood larvae on a stick, juicy grubs that explode in your mouth when you bite into their bodies. I almost gagged after the tiniest of bites and prayed I wouldn’t be forced to eat anything like this once we got into the jungle. Meanwhile, David and Jesse met a young local named Nongue, a member of the Waorani tribe. His tribe is notorious for spearing Jim Elliot and Nate Saint to death in the 1950s. The name “Waorani” made me a smidge nervous, but I quickly realized that things had changed drastically in the last sixty years. It was obvious that Nongue had been raised in a civilized and more developed environment. He glanced at his cell phone as he volunteered to take us back to his village and let us camp out in his property for the next few days.

Nongue helped us hitch a ride across the river on a large canoe. We were forced into a gated area coming from the dock. We reached the end of the gate where some sort of jungle official met us and explained that we needed permission to enter Ecuadorian jungle villages. The oil companies owned and controlled the land and required outsiders to prove some sort of legitimate connection to the local tribes before entering. We explained that we were friends of Nongue and were planning to spend the next couple nights in his village. The officials looked at us warily and asked us to wait. After much deliberation, they announced that we were not welcome.

I assumed Nongue would continue his journey to his village without us, but instead of ditching us he offered an alternate solution. He said we could boat to the city of Coca and take a bus into the jungle from there. He had an uncle in a remote village a few hours outside of Coca. His uncle was currently living with several other relatives whom Nongue had never met. He said his uncle would welcome us on his property, and Nongue would have a chance to meet other people from his tribe. After a few days, he would backtrack to his own village.

Thankful for Nongue’s flexibility and willingness to help us, we opted for the boat ride and docked in Coca a couple hours later. From there, we walked to the bus station and got tickets to the village of Nongue’s uncle. About two and half hours later, we were instructed to hop off the bus in the middle of a dirt road far removed from any signs of civilization. We followed Nongue onto the only property in sight, comprised of a dusty terrain, a couple small wooden cabins and a large grass hut. His uncle, Cata, as well as a group of Waorani women and children greeted us and escorted us to the grass hut. They told us we could set up our tents inside the hut and sleep there for the next couple nights. We thanked them for their hospitality and set up our tents before it got dark.

               Afterwards, I went outside to hang out with the Waorani women. Most of them stared and laughed as they observed us. One woman kept touching Natalie’s hair and speaking to the other women about her. After a few moments, the women announced that they wanted to give each of us a Waorani name. They had our team line up, and they clumped together in front of us, eyeing us up and down one by one. They would glance at each of us, then suddenly focus in on one person, stare extra hard, and burst into giggles as they rattled off in Waorani. Nongue translated for us from Waorani to Spanish, then Liney from Spanish to English. The women stated a name and then gave an explanation where it had come from. Most of the women named us after relatives. My Waorani name was Gacamo, the name of one of their grandmothers who had been a great warrior. Katherine’s name was “worker bee” in Waorani; Taylor was named after the sun and moon; Breck was a fruit, Jesse a fish, and David was given the name of a maggot. The rest of my teammates were named after family warriors. Ben was actually given the name of the most ruthless warrior who slaughtered everyone he encountered. It sure seemed like they had a lot of pride in their warrior descendants. I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about that….

After receiving our tribal names, we hung out with the locals, which I found a bit awkward since the only word in Waorani I knew was the name of their murderer grandmother I’d just been given. We walked around the compound a bit and found a local fruit called guama growing in the trees. One of the little boys gladly scampered up the trees and cut down pieces for us. I’d never seen guama before or tasted anything quite like it. The outside of the fruit looks like a meter-long squash and opens up to reveal large black seeds covered in a soft sweet fruit that resembles cotton. You suck the cotton-like material off the seeds and eat its sweet flavoring without eating the seeds. Before we knew the actual name for the fruit, we noticed the likeness of the cotton wisps to a bunny tail and affectionately referred to the fruit as “bunny farts.”

                After snacking on bunny farts for a bit, Nongue took us across the “street” to another home where some other relatives were waiting for us. We were greeted by an elderly woman who chanted for over an hour and asked us to chant along with her. We quickly caught on to the repetitive tune and awkwardly chanted with the Waorani grandmother. Meanwhile, another relative offered us a soup of plantains and insisted each of us must suck a portion of the soup down, pass it to the next person, and finish it quickly. The soup tasted good but had such large stringy chunks of plantain that is was difficult to swallow. You had to suck, chew, and swallow all at the same time. Luckily, we put in a team effort and successfully disposed of the soup. I was still pretty hungry after my couple sips and was pleasantly surprised when we were invited back to the other compound for a meal of rice and wild boar. After a long day of travel, it felt amazing to have a good meal and a full belly. Satisfied and grateful, I walked over to our grass hut and snuggled into my tent.

We woke up the next morning to the sound of Jesse’s voice asking us to hurry and wake up, because people from the village had gathered in Cata’s compound for prayer. I quickly got dressed and went outside to find several of the Waorani, anxiously awaiting our team to come pray for them. We sat on wooden boards outside, forming a circle that invited intimacy and epic storytelling. David briefly shared the story of Jesus, explaining it in a culturally relevant way, very similar to a folklore-like style. Afterwards, we asked if we could pray for each person and spent quite a bit of time blessing the family. One of the women explained that she had met some missionaries many years ago who offered to baptize her. At the time, she was not ready to accept Christ and refused the offer. Throughout the following years, she became very ill and suffered from various health problems. She believed God had punished her, but now that He had sent more missionaries, she thought God was giving her a second chance. My heart broke when I saw that this woman had been believing lies and suffering from guilt for years. Liney sat with her for quite some time and explained that God doesn’t manipulate but operates out of love. He is not a God of condemnation and finds no pleasure in causing His children to suffer. Liney explained who God truly is—a loving father who wants nothing more than His children to know their inheritance in His kingdom. God doesgive second chances, but that is not dependent on a group of white people. It comes only from the love of a heavenly father.

                After praying and chatting, the Waoranis said that they wanted to divide our team into men and women for a bit. The guys on our team were taken out into the jungle with blow darts and spears to go hunting, and we girls were left behind with the women and their handicrafts. We were getting very hungry and hoped the men would come back with some type of animal, but unfortunately the hunt was not a success. The guys returned and reported that not only had they not caught anything, they had not even seen a single animal in the jungle aside from a small bird. They rejoined us girls in the grass hut, where we sat for hours more, realizing the slow pace of jungle life. Cata came to join us to tell stories of the past. Once again, Nongue and Liney translated for us. Cata explained that he had once been a great warrior in a brutal tribe that doesn’t believe in any type of “civilized” living. He spent his youth traveling the jungle. You could see huge holes in his ears, gauged over an inch in diameter, where tribal piercings had once existed. Cata explained that he fell in love with a woman who wanted to live a more civilized life. She wanted to wear clothes and brush her teeth and use soap—things that were enemy to Cata’s native tribe. Yet, Cata let love rule in his life and left his barbaric tribe to be with the woman he loved. There was sadness in his eyes as he explained how he’d abandoned the life he truly loved. Breck asked him to share his happiest moment from the past with us. Nongue stopped in the middle of translating and told us that there is no word for “happy” in Waorani. We tried to rephrase the question, but Cata simply stared, a distant look in his eyes, empty and sad. There was no joy in this tribe, no hope, no smiling. It broke my heart to see the complete lack of hope in the Waorani tribe. I pray God will bring joy to Cata and his people. I don’t know what will happen to them; all I know is that they will never find true joy if they don’t find the true God. 

The next morning, we returned to Coca and arranged a contact for the next jungle village we would head to. Jesse had met a woman in a tourist shop during our first passing through Coca and said we could go back to her shop to arrange to visit her tribe. She was a Shuar, a tribe we were hoping to get to if possible. As a few of the girls from the team talked about the woman Jesse had met, I felt an uneasy feeling and knew in my heart we were not meant to go to this woman’s village. Liney said she was going to walk to the tourist shop and speak to the woman, so Liz and I volunteered to go with her. We prayed that God would give us discernment and that He would provide us with a divine appointment with a different contact if this woman was not the person we were supposed to travel with. Sure enough, the second we found the woman, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of uneasiness. She told Liney our team could come visit her Shuar village if we paid a large lump of cash. She would charge us one hundred dollars to stay at her property and one hundred more to buy the “freedom” to walk around the village and pray for people. It was very clear that this woman was no genuine, and my heart felt no peace.

Fortunately, as we were speaking with the Shuar woman, God honored our prayer and sent a man named Bartolome who overheard our conversation. He politely interjected and asked us where we wanted to go and what we were trying to do. Liney explained that we were actually hoping to go pray for people and be a blessing to one of the local villages. She insisted that we were not tourists looking for some jungle tour and didn’t have the money to pay off the woman in the tourist shop.

Bartolome simply responded, “Why would you have to pay to bless people? You can come stay at my village for free. Just bring your own food. I’m a religious leader in my tribe, and it would be great to have you come and pray for people. We need the love of God in our village.”

After talking for a few more minutes, we found out that Bartolome was also a Shuar and would bring us to the exact type of village we were hoping to minister in. I could feel warmth in his heart and knew he was the man we’d been praying for. His bus was leaving very briefly, so we exchanged contact info and agreed to meet him in his village later. Liney, Liz, and I walked back to find the rest of our team, excited and at peace about where God was taking us.

                The next morning, we got on a bus towards Bartolome’s village. We disembarked the bus where he’d instructed Liney and waited for Bartolome in the middle of a jungle road. He appeared from out of the jungle with another man who looked almost identical to him. He introduced us to his brother and said he would be hosting us for the next couple days. Bartolome gave us the option of getting to his home via an hour and a half hike through the jungle or a thirty-minute boat ride. We opted for the boat ride. The boat was too small to fit our entire team, so we rode in shifts.

I rode with the second crew, excited to be canoeing through a river in the Amazon jungle. The scenery was so gorgeous that I felt like I was paddling through a dream. Our small canoe tipped and rocked as we weaved between logs and tree branches hanging over the muddy jungle water. Gorgeous birds flew overhead, and patches of sapphire sky emerged from between the trees. This was exactly how I’d pictured the perfect untouched Amazon. My team had finally arrived.

We docked our boat by a muddy patch of land and walked up a steep slick path, desperately trying to avoid slipping in the mud. Once we reached the top of the hill, I noticed a small dirt opening surrounded by three tiny wooden buildings—a small chicken coop, a tight kitchen, and an open-walled cabin. The rest of our team was waiting for us inside the cabin. We put our hiking packs down on the floor, and were immediately instructed to walk over to the kitchen to accept a drink that one of Bartolome’s relatives had prepared for us. Our teammates explained that they had just drunk the mysterious potion, and the smirks on their faces said more about the flavor than words could have. The drink was made from ground-up yucca that had been fermented over time. We were told the locals chewed the yucca to grind it and then spit it into a bowl to let it ferment. Liney said that they’d been warned if we didn’t drink every last gulp, the cook would throw the liquid into our faces for insulting the culture. My teammates had just drunk three bowls as a group, and our next boatload was expected to consume the same. Despite feeling sick at the thought of drinking a stranger’s saliva, I figured it would be worse to insult the family who was so kindly hosting us. I held my breath and began to gulp down as much of the yucca liquid as I could. The fermentation poisoned the flavor, giving the drink a taste similar to tomato soup that had been laced with nail polish remover. I would take a big sip, then pass the bowl to someone else. But as soon as I got rid of a bowl, a new one was passed to me. There were only six of us, and we had three large bowls to finish. After suffering through the soupy mixture and choking down mysterious orange and yellow, we finally finished up our bowls. As soon as we were done, the rest of our teammates burst into laughter and told us they’d made up the rumor about people spitting into the soup. Turns out, chewing and spitting was the traditional way to make the soup, but now they just grind the yucca with a utensil. Mentally, it would have been a lot easier to drink the soup not believing it was full of an indigenous woman’s saliva, but we’d completed the task nonetheless. I was proud of my team.

After our unique appetizer, Bartolome asked us to go pray for one of his relatives, an elderly woman who was suffering from seizures and other health problems. Doctors had pretty much given up on her, but she desperately wanted to be healed. Bartolome warned us that the route to her house entailed some jungle trekking. We would need to cross a “treacherous bridge” and should only come if we were able to cross. We were also warned to watch below our feet for snakes and around our arms for poisonous spiders. If we needed to grab any trees to prevent slipping on the muddy trails, we were putting our hands in danger of touching poison spiders.

In the grand scheme of things, spiders and a bridge didn’t really faze me. I began the trek through the jungle, hoping for the best. We reached the “bridge” and saw that it was simply a fallen log over a river. It was covered in slippery moss, and I thought there was a good chance I’d fall into the river if I walked across. I grabbed someone’s hand, finding security in the possibility of falling into the river together and breathed a sigh of relief when we both made it across successfully. We continued onward, trekking through patches of mud, slipping and sliding through the jungle. After a while, we arrived at a small wooden house where we were greeted by a local family. There was a beautiful elderly woman sitting on a wooden bed in a corner. Her family had built a fire by her bed to keep her frail body warm, and she constantly coughed as she inhaled the smoke. I kneeled by her bed and laid my hands on her. The team gathered and prayed for her healing. She was relatively unresponsive, so it hard to tell if anything was happening in her body. We prayed for some other family members as well and promised to return the following day.

We trekked back through the jungle, this time as the sun was setting. The terrain beneath our feet was getting darker and darker, and I prayed I wouldn’t touch any poisonous spiders or encounter any snakes since I couldn’t really see what I was walking over or touching. I slid in the mud and grabbed at branches to save me, but most of them snapped as I pulled on them. Somehow, I avoided falling off the path or into the river. Finally, we made it back to our jungle oasis. We ate dinner, and a woman from the jungle appeared at our homestay after getting word that missionaries were in the village. She had severely injured her leg a while back and had much difficulty walking. She asked us to pray for her. We gathered around her and asked God to heal her leg. After a few minutes she said it felt a little bit better but not completely. We prayed a bit more, and she said the same. We continued still, and once again she reported that it felt a tiny bit better. We carried on with this process for quite a while and finally told her if she wanted to go home to rest, we would come visit her house the next day and continue with the prayers.

The following morning, Bartolome left early for a distant village and said he wouldn’t see us anymore. He left us in the care of his brothers and explained that one of them would accompany us to visit peoples’ homes in the afternoon to continue to pray. They left the morning free to hunt or explore the jungle. Several of the guys excitedly got out their blow darts and spears and headed for the river in the hopes of capturing a crocodile. The brothers asked us if we could swim as they rattled off a list of animals we might encounter in the river including anacondas, crocodiles, and piranhas. When we asked what size the piranhas were, they simply replied, “normal”, as they put their hands about a foot apart to demonstrate. Personally, I thought asking if we could swim was a bit irrelevant since there was no way I was getting in that river without a boat. However, I decided to explore a bit and enjoyed a mini trek through the jungle with a few of my teammates. After exploring, one of Bartolome’s brothers led some of us in a hike back to the elderly woman’s house as well as the house of the woman with the injured leg.

I could see sadness in the eyes of the injured woman, and even after praying for her again, she seemed relatively unaffected. I decided to ask her if she had forgiven the person who had injured her, since I knew there was still pain in her heart. Sure enough, the woman responded that she struggled with anger and hadn’t completely offered forgiveness in her heart. I explained that though God loves to heal our bodies, He values healing our hearts even more. We asked if she would consider forgiving the woman who had injured her, and after a moment of hesitation, she agreed. We explained that forgiving the woman wasn’t about that other woman at all; it was about finding freedom in her own heart. Once again we prayed, and the woman began to show some emotion. Taylor took some pictures of her with her husband and children and showed them on the digital screen. Her hard countenance cracked as she laughed at the pictures and smiled at the sight of her children. Something was softening. We gave the family a final blessing and continued our trek to the next woman’s house.

When we returned to see the elderly woman from the previous day, she seemed surprised that we had kept our promise to visit her. We prayed for her once more, and as Liz hugged her, tears welled up in her eyes. David explained that most people who leave deep in the jungle only meet a handful of people their whole lives. Because they live so remotely, it’s rare to ever meet someone from the outside. She was so moved that we’d come all this way just to pray for her and give her a hug.

After our final visit, we returned to our jungle oasis once again. We’d met some Latino hippies on our bus ride from Coca and heard that they were staying just a small trek from where we were camping out. Jesse decided to invite the hippies over for dinner despite reports that they didn’t want to hang out with a bunch of missionaries. Jesse walked to their campsite nonetheless, and the hippies reported that they hadn’t eaten for days and were trying to pick roots from the ground while singing, “We are sons and daughters of the earth; I am a daughter of the earth…” Suddenly, starvation opened them up to hanging out with the “God Squad” and they gladly accepted our invitation to dinner. After eating, the hippies busted out a bunch of local instruments and began to perform a medley of songs for us. Thirty minutes or so later, they asked us to sing a song for them. We weren’t quite as musically talented, but we all knew the same worship songs and sang a few for them. Originally, it had seemed that they were wary of Christians, so I wondered if singing about Jesus would offend them. But as we sang, their faces lit up, and they looked genuinely joyful as they listened. One of the hippies asked David to translate the words from English to Spanish, and he whispered, “He loves us. Oh, how He loves us. And heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss, and my heart beats violently inside of my chest. I don’t have time to maintain these regrets when I think about the way He loves me…” Much to my surprise, she got choked up at the sound of these words, and her voice cracked as she squeaked out, “It’s beautiful.”

Some of Bartolome’s Shuar relatives joined our mini concert as well, so we asked them if they would be willing to share some of their tribal songs with us. They were a bit hesitant, but after some serious conferencing, they performed some offbeat tribal music. It was quite a wild clash of cultures—hippies from throughout South America, indigenous Shuar people, and a group of foreign missionaries. We sang for hours, laughing, dancing, and sharing the hearts of our cultures with one another.

The next morning, we packed our things and got ready to make our departure from the jungle. Before we left, we prayed for the family that had kindly hosted us for the past couple days. We asked if there was anything specific we could pray for, and they simply asked that God would send more missionaries to their village. They were hungry to learn more about Jesus and hoped the Lord would send more people to teach them. It broke my heart to have to leave this beautiful village after only a couple days when they were so hungry to hear more from the Lord. However, we had a commitment to meet the rest of our team and had to move on.

We took a boat back through the jungle to the main road that led to the major bus station in Coca. We waited on the street for a while in hopes of catching a bus but were unsuccessful. Finally, a dump truck camp by and offered to drive us to Coca if we each paid a dollar. We gladly jumped in the back of the dump truck and spent the next hour or so getting faces full of dirt and gravel. From Coca, we bused to yet another village to meet up with the rest of our team. We swapped stories of our adventures in the jungle.

In reflecting upon our time in the jungle, I definitely feel the next time we go into a remote area, we need more time to spend with the locals. So many people are hungry to hear about God, and I wish I could have spent more time with them. I learned a lot during my time in the Amazon, but I know our time was far too quick. It only takes a moment to touch someone and show them love, but I know we could have done much more if we had stayed in the jungle longer. We definitely could have done certain things better, and many parts of our journey could have been smoother. But our travels were well worth it, because our team got a good picture of what jungle ministry should look like for the rest of our trip. Soon, we will be heading into the jungles of Peru and other areas of the Amazon, and we will be better prepared after our time in Ecuador. I’m so thankful for what I experienced and learned and can’t wait to report more soon…