A Kid

I don’t remember much of life on the farm in Pennsylvania, I do remember some of my parent’s missionary training in California, but the real remembering part of my childhood began when my parents arrived in that little border town in the jungle where three rivers meet, when I was six years old.

My mother kept shoes or the local sandals on my brother’s and my feet for the first months, but soon we were barefoot most of the time like the town boys.  We forced down or better said we were forced to down a de-worming (as in parasites) medication called ‘castroids’ in the form of huge pills, like clock work every six months.  The time period here is from late 1949 till early 1954.  During those years my father spent many months away from home.  Sometimes he would be gone further south into the jungle on survey and administrative trips and sometimes he’d be gone north to the big city working on permits such as has been described in previous posts.

Even when Dad was away my mother did much of the hosting for the missionaries as they came and went, plus caring for us three brothers soon to be four brothers. I was the oldest so I got to do a lot of ‘brother sitting’ and other more or less helpful things when Dad was away.  Helping to get the benches ready for the services in the front room sticks vividly in my mind.

There was no great variety available when it came to food so my mother  served a lot of fish (remember three big rivers) to the missionaries and others who showed up at mealtime.  One missionary in particular could always be counted on to comment on the ‘dead fish served again for supper’.  For meat you might have the choice between canned ‘herford corned beef’ or canned ‘spam’.  For breakfast what you ate was oatmeal, known to the locals as simply ‘quaker’.  There was always a small herd of cattle roaming around town, but nobody ever milked the cows.  If you had milk, it was the powdered variety.

During the times the missionaries were required by the authorities to be in town the single ones among them treated us kids very well.  Several of the single men taught me how to swim and spent hours playing tic-tac-toe with the kids. The school for missionaries children wasn’t even thought of at that time so a couple of the single ladies helped the kids with what was a kind of home schooling.  In those early years schooling for the missionary kids was a hit and miss kind of thing with more miss than hit.

Depending on the season of the year the town boys would play tops or marbles and sometimes both.  It was great fun to go up and down the one dirt street through town spinning tops with the boys.  The houses that looked down at the barefoot urchins so intent on knocking other tops out of play were the typical palm thatch, dirt wall, dirt floor variety.  To build such a house was simple enough, place poles in the ground according to how you wanted the place laid out, tie some cross strips to the poles with vines and fill everything in with stomped mud, cow manure and dried grass.  Eventually the mud would harden and long after the termites had eaten the poles off at ground  level the hardened mud walls would hold the house up, or at least that was the idea!

Because the town had been founded at the three rivers, fishing and the eating of fish was of number one priority to the townspeople.  As the fishermen would come paddling their tiny one man canoes back to town in the late afternoon they would be met at the shoreline by a host of people and buzzards.  The people came to buy the fish and the buzzards came to claim their share of the bounty.  As the folk cleaned the fish the buzzards put on their daily act of  leaping and hopping about, making that special unforgettable buzzard sound  as they fought to get their share of the fish guts being tossed their way.

The town boys taught us their own way of fishing right from the shore.  You take a bottle, tie a string around the big end, soak it with gasoline, light it and the end will break off nicely right where the string was.  Now you put some cassava bait toward the narrow end of the bottle, put it in the water and wait for a fish to swim in after the bait, and you’ve got yourself supper.

Pretty much every afternoon we boys wound up at the river swimming in that beautiful clear black water.  The dry season was the best for swimming because of the beautiful white sand beach that appeared every year when the water went down.

When mangos were in season we would gather under the trees like the buzzards at the shore.  West was directly in front of our end of town and the sunsets were spectacular.  Huge flocks of  Orioles would fly in from the neighboring country (right across the river) in the evening to roost in the mango trees for the night.  To see hundreds of them  silhouetted against the bright red sunset was something not even a kid could ever forget.

As far as we know my father was the first missionary aviator in the country of these posts.  He flew for only a year or so because the fabric went bad on his Stinson airplane and out there in the little border town back in 1950 there was no way he could repair it. During it’s short life however it performed a very important task which I shall write about later.  It was great fun when I’d get to fly with him.  My brothers were all too young to enjoy flying.

The necessity of my father being gone for months at a time was probably the hardest item on that page of life for my mother.  Reflecting back on what was required of missionary wives in those days one stands in awe at the level of their commitment.