Texas Hunger Offering aids Rock People of Thailand
___By Ken Camp
___Texas Baptist Communications
___Medical missionary Ascanio Peguero found his work among the Rock People of northern Thailand difficult and discouraging, until he learned to draw a parable from the practices of local rice farmers.
___Four years ago, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship assigned Peguero and his wife, Yanira, to Southeast Asia to do community-based health development.
___Their work focuses on sharing their faith through a health and hygiene project among
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ASCANIO PEGUERO gives medicine to an infant among the Rock people of Thailand. Peguero is involved in a hunger project funded by the World Hunger Offering of the Baptist General Convention of Texas.
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the Rock People, an unreached people group so named because they live in barely habitable rocky, mountainous areas.
___The Texas Baptist Offering for World Hunger provides the funds for the community health development project among the Rock People.
___"At the beginning, it was very hard just to get the people to receive us," said Peguero, a graduate of the University of Santa Domingo and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
___The Rock People's religious beliefs are a homegrown mixture of Animism and Buddhism, and Christianity's teachings are foreign in every sense to them.
___"They were cautious and suspicious," he said. "It took months and months of working with them."
___Peguero found his work disheartening until he noticed how the rice farmers in northern Thailand did their work.
___"They would break the ground, then water the land, then break the ground again, then water it again before they would ever plant the seeds," he recalled.
___He realized the gospel message of Jesus that he was eager to share was like the seed, and the local culture was hard ground that would have to be softened and broken up before he could even think about evangelism.
___"I would have to break the ground and water the land. How? By loving the people and showing them God's love in every way possible," he said.
___The Pegueros and their three children--ages 7, 13 and 14--live and work among the Gmong Khmur group of Rock People. The Rock People are believed to number between 500,000 and 1 million in Southeast Asia, with 5,000 to 6,000 of them living in northern Thailand.
___The Pegueros set up clinics in nine villages throughout Thailand's Chiang Mai province, where they provided health care and taught hygiene and nutrition.
___"I sometimes see 100 a day in the clinics," Peguero said.
___While the Pegueros have been ministering throughout the province for four years, much of their work has focused on the village of Huai Makliam.
___The missionaries surveyed the village and drew detailed maps that numbered the homes, provided census-type information about residents, identified health-related problems, explored the existence--or lack--of sanitation systems and identified water sources.
___They discovered 115 families living in 97 homes. Only 27 of the homes had sanitary latrines, while 25 had latrines Peguero classified as non-sanitary and 45 had no latrines at all. Of the 479 people surveyed, 202 did not use latrines, and 117 used non-sanitary latrines.
___The Pegueros met with village elders to explain that by spreading human waste on the fields surrounding the village, their people were transmitting parasites, spreading disease and attracting flies and rodents. They taught them how to build sanitary latrines and helped them train their people to use them.
___"What does that have to do with hunger? By using the latrines, the people were avoiding the transmission of parasites. And it enabled them to keep grain in their homes to feed their families, because there were fewer rodents," Peguero explained.
___The Pegueros also have distributed food and vitamins to pregnant women and infants, and they have taught the people the importance of nutrition.
___Black beans grow wild in the region, and the Rock People commonly have picked the beans and sold them as livestock feed. Yanira has taught them how to cook the highly nutritious beans with rice as a food source for their families.
___As they have worked month after month with the Rock People and earned their trust, the Pegueros slowly have been able to see a few embrace the Christian faith. One example was Soy, a 16-year-old girl who came to live with the Pegueros to help them in the clinics.
___"At first, her mother was doubtful. This is a culture where young girls are sold into prostitution," Peguero recalled. "But the head man in the village went to her and said, 'You can trust these people. They are Christians.'"
___Soy's mother grudgingly agreed. She not only allowed her daughter to work with the Baptist couple, but also began to attend classes they offered in her village.
___"Eventually, she came to the Lord," Peguero said. "In time her husband, who had a serious drinking problem, also came to know the Lord. And his drinking problem stopped."
___The Pegueros, who currently are on furlough in Texas, plan to return to Thailand in June. Their long-term goal is to see the Rock People learn how to become self-sufficient, providing a healthy environment and adequate food for their families. But even more than that, they want to see indigenous churches develop in the villages where they work.
___"The people are becoming more open to the gospel as they come to have a better quality of life," Peguero said.
The Baptist Standard
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