September 11, 2000
Texas teens survey Meskito Indian villages this summer
___By Ken Camp
___Texas Baptist Communications
___Eight teenage Texas Baptist Men and four adult sponsors traveled by boat more than 80 miles up the river separating Nicaragua and Honduras this summer, surveying Meskito Indian villages to determine their populations and needs.
___By the end of their five-day journey on the Rio Coco in the company of four native Meskito pastors and a Southern Baptist missionary, the team saw a village transformed by the gospel. And within a month after their visit, a new church was taking root there.
___Bob Mayfield from Western Hills Baptist Church in Wichita Falls and three other adult sponsors took eight Challengers from north and central Texas to Nicaragua in July at the request of Jim and Viola Palmer, Southern Baptist International Mission Board missionaries among the Meskito Indians.
___The team's immediate goal was to get an accurate population count for the hard-to-reach villages, map the area, gauge the physical needs of the people and determine the possibilities for long-range evangelism and church planting.
___Along the way, the volunteers also distributed Meskito- and Spanish-language Christian tracts, and they showed the "Jesus" film depicting the life of Christ.
___"That area is so impoverished and so inaccessible, even the government has little idea of the population," said Mayfield, a regional director for Texas Baptist Men.
___Most maps of the area date back to the 1970s, he noted. However, large groups of people were displaced and resettled during the conflict between the Sandinistas and Contras in the 1980s, and whole villages were destroyed or relocated after Hurricane Mitch in 1998.
___The Texas Baptist volunteers drew new maps of the region and surveyed more than 30 Meskito villages, starting at Waspam and moving up the river to Santa Cruz.
___The team also visited the Suma Indian village of Umbra, located about six miles beyond the river.
___"The people were very impressed when we tried to learn a little bit of their language," Mayfield said. "We were received really well, and the pastors who went with us have been able to do substantial follow-up."
___The team traveled upriver in a 35-foot canoe-style craft with a 45 horsepower motor and a small flat-bottom fiberglass motorboat, journeying about 20 miles per day.
___"It was physically challenging," Mayfield acknowledged. "Every time we stopped, we had to climb 30- to 40-foot banks and hike into the villages carrying our gear."
___The volunteers exhausted their initial 30-gallon supply of water in one day out of Waspam. The next day, team members spent hours processing water and storing it in five-gallon bladders.
___"After the first day or so, I thought, 'What are we doing here?'" said Jack Vick from Woods Chapel Baptist Church in Arlington. "It was grueling, hot, humid, and we were getting rained on. At night you'd sleep for maybe two hours, then wake up and try to go back to sleep again. But after about a day and a half, it was not too bad. We just learned to adapt."
___Most of the villages had about 50 homes each, with seven to 12 family members per dwelling. But two villages had more than 100 homes. The villages had neither electricity nor running water.
___The most memorable--and painful--sight the team witnessed was the children who desperately needed medical attention, said Charles Happel, an adult sponsor from Woods Chapel Baptist Church in Arlington.
___"What we had in our medical kits just wouldn't do it," Happel said. "There were a lot of worms and some staph infections, and antibiotic cream wouldn't take care of them. They needed more help than we could give.
___"I just hope now that we've established where the villages are, Christians can begin to address the problems."
___Each evening at dusk, the Texans would make camp in a different village where they would show the "Jesus" film.
___"The first three nights, we had little response," Mayfield said. The fourth night, the volunteers arrived late at the village of Santa Fe, and they considered not showing the film.
___However, several local residents had learned about the film when it was seen in a neighboring village, and they asked to see it.
___"The people went down the hill in the dark to get the equipment for us," Vick recalled.
___"In our part of the world, a lot of people are hardened to the gospel. But those people stood for an hour and a half to two hours in the dark to watch the film."
___The film presentation of the life of Christ had more immediate relevance to the isolated villagers than it might to people in more developed countries, Happel noted.
___"They didn't know it happened 2,000 years ago. To them, it could have been a year ago or last week," he said.
___Fourteen people made public faith commitments that night. When an evangelistic crusade was held in the region in August, four of those new believers paddled down river more than four hours to attend the event and to ask how a church could be started in their village.
___A Bible study that likely will grow into a church now is in place.
Send this story to a friend
Contents/ Masthead / Why We're Here / Links / Archive / E-mail us/ SUBSCRIBE!