River Stories

Guest blog by Tom Pflederer

Porto De Moz
Porto De Moz is a small city about ten hours by boat north of Altamira, and Josh and I joined a group last week who were going down to visit there. It’s another weird thing to talk about going down to a place that is north, but around here the direction of the river trumps the directions of the rest of the world.

I take a travel book about Brazil with me to read, and I learn about who the bandierantes were before Toyota named Josh’s truck after them. They were Brazil’s first real adventurers, responsible for exploring Brazil’s interior, raping, pillaging, murdering and enslaving most of this country's Indian population and for extending Brazil’s border deep into the territories of the Spanish-speaking countries that now ring the continent to the north and west.

The jungle and forest that line the river are dense and intriguing, full of life, unfamiliar to us, but every landmark along the way long since memorized by the missionaries who travel with us. Indeed, my friend Luke Huber, who first dreamed 30 years ago of taking the Gospel to the 40,000 villages in the Amazon Basin and was known to some of the missionaries on this trip, has also been on this river.

The Amazon Basin covers some 3.6 million square miles, and every missionary down here is full of stories about exploring and surveying and assessing the needs and resources of this immense area. Bud tells me one day of trying to drive six years ago from Altamira to Porto De Moz on a road that runs parallel to the river. He and three friends take off on motorcycles on a trip that should take about six hours if the road really exists.

Six hours brings them to the middle of nowhere. The road has narrowed to a path and finally disappeared to nothing. They are no longer driving their bikes, but lifting them over and through fallen trees and hacking their way through dense jungle. They estimate they are about halfway between the two cities, they have no food or water, and night is falling. They clear a place to sleep and hang hammocks. In the middle of the night, it rains for three hours, and they huddle under a small plastic tarp. They see the eyes of animals peering at them from the woods around them.

They continue the next day, hacking and heaving and hoping, until they finally find a path again. Eventually they come to a house and beg for water, and then a village, where they are invited in and fed. The village has a generator and someone has a TV. They are asked to explain the news that has broken into the regular soap operas that everyone watches. Airplanes are flying into buildings. Why? Bud thinks at first he’s watching some kind of science fiction movie. But the date is September 11, 2001, and Bud has to explain through his own shock that it’s not a movie.

We visit a swamp village, eight or ten houses built on posts above the water, with a boardwalk in front. Families here live their entire lives surrounded by water, fishing, swimming, raising water buffalo, traveling everywhere by canoe. One of the oldest churches our friends have planted is here, built solidly into the row of houses.

I visit the patriarch of this village with three other men. I am introduced as the guy who knew Luke when he was a teenager. The patriarch, Joao Paulo, brightens immediately. It was Luke who first talked to him about Jesus and who brought him a VHF radio from the US that enabled him for the first time in his life to communicate with people in town in an emergency. Does he still have the radio, I ask. No, he says, it died. But he still has the antenna that Luke helped him put up. We embrace for a picture in front of it.

That night we worship together in the little swamp church above the water with Joao Paulo, his children, and grandchildren and neighbors. Afterwards, he pulls from his Bible a prayer card from 1992, showing Luke and Christine and all their children, two years before Luke fell out of the sky in his ultra-light aircraft and went to be with his Lord.

After church, we are invited into the home next door for cafezinho and water buffalo cheese, but I am still thinking about meeting Luke and Joao Paulo someday in a place that is even more beautiful and other-worldly than this village, worshipping the Lord together in one tongue, exploring the wonders of eternity with Jesus.