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Ready or not the rains are here!  In May you may have rain and drizzle for days on end with no break in the clouds.  Imagine what it feels like when the hot tropical sun finally blazes full strength onto the steaming landscape while the humidity is pushing 100%.  Yes that’s exactly the feeling! As […]

Not quite two years after my parents came to live in the jungle town in the country of these posts, my brother Joel joined our family.  My Mother had chosen not to make the trip down river to where there was a doctor and at least a semblance of a hospital.  There were midwives in […]

Like much of life, supply runs had a lot of side acts happening along with the main show.  The transporting of people and supplies  obviously occupied center stage but just the doing of it generated a lot of sometimes serious and sometimes funny happenings. Many were the  occasions when the loaded boats were laboring against […]

April’s first week or two can tend to be toward the dry season on the weather chart but even at that the rains will be picking up.  The last couple of weeks you can’t count on anything but the rains and lots of electrical storms blowing down the river.  Having said that I must add […]

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 […]

We all know a simple, straight forward ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to a difficult question can sometimes be the hardest thing to get out.  And it was that way when God used a very reluctant ‘yes’ to keep the way open for the light of His Good News to shine in the dark jungles of […]

In the beginning days the missionaries themselves purchased the medical supplies needed to treat the jungle folks.  The missionary was the medical supply company, the pediatrician, the doctor, the nurse, the pharmacist and on and on.  It seemed you could never keep an adequate supply of everything you needed for treating malaria to pneumonia and […]

March is the ‘last hurrah’ month of the dry season. April could bring some dry season like conditions but you couldn’t count on it.  March is when the gardeners in all the villages and settlements along the rivers really got serious about burning off  the garden plots they’d begun work on the end of last […]

Baby strollers are a good invention and work just fine, but strollers aren’t all things to all surfaces.  From first hand experience, they do very poorly on water. A married co-worker couple with their little girl and I were traveling from one village to another in a downriver direction. They were in their faster boat […]

In the early 1950’s it became necessary for the missionaries to have a written permission from the highest authorities in order to continue their work among the town folks and the expanding efforts to contact the tribal peoples. This document was granted in the capital city and had to be renewed every six months.  Travel […]