GMTM 15 - 1973 Brazil -Part 2 - I didn't know where I was going

For 50 years I never really knew where I went until I plotted our route on this map.

There is a sense in which none of us know with certainty where we’re going. After all, who can predict what will happen in the coming months and years? For that matter, we don’t even know for sure about tomorrow. We make plans and take the steps necessary to get to a place or achieve a goal, and only time will tell whether we succeed.

From the time I was 16, mission work in Brazil had been my goal in life, and in 1972, at the age of 25, against all the odds, I was in Brazil with Abbie and our two children. In 1973, we cemented our relationship with the new country. We not only had a car, now we had definite ties to Brazil: child #3, Jeff, was born there, He was under 2 when we left the country in 1975, but when he had a chance to go back to Brazil in the summer between his 2^nd and 3^rd years of university, his application for a visa at the Brazilian consulate was denied. The officials issued him a Brazilian passport instead. We have a Brazilian national in our family. That also meant that, because he was the right age for military service, if he had stayed in Brazil for over 6 months, he would have had to report for duty.

By 1973, the first step in our journey was effectively completed. I was in the country of my dreams, and I knew where I was. The challenge? I still didn’t know where I was going. Brazil, after all, is a huge place. Where was I supposed to go in that country? I wrestled in prayer over that question throughout the year and considered several possibilities.

I was ready to move on, but I was waiting on a clear indication from God about the next step. One of the factors that entered into consideration was Abbie’s pregnancy. As her pregnancy progressed, there was even talk of her going to a doctor and hospital in São Paulo. Sis. Ross, who had given birth to children there, suggested that as an option. That would have meant moving 250 miles and working in another part of the mission field, in the metropolis of São Paulo. I grew up on a farm and as the saying goes, “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” I was praying for something much less urban, and by halfway through Abbie’s pregnancy, we decided we needed to stay in Santa Cruz, at least through September after the baby was born. Over the course of the year, besides the São Paulo option, the names of other states came up, like Mato Grosso and Goiás. But nothing says “the uttermost ends of the earth” like the place where the Brazilian states of Paraná and Santa Catarina border Paraguay and Argentina.   

I DIDN’T KNOW WHERE I WAS AND I HAD NO IDEA WHERE I WAS GOING

Life is like that for many people. We can put a name on a momentary experience or event, but we don’t know how that fits in with the bigger picture. We need the Bible to orient us on the path to whatever happens after we end this life. We need a global view of history, both universal and personal, to know where we are in time and space. This trip was a personal example of that.

GETTING TO THE STARTING POINT

In February, my missionary colleague Steve Montgomery and I flew in his Cessna 180 to Foz do Iguassu, about 500 miles SW of our home in Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, in the state of São Paulo. For 5 days we travelled another 500 miles by Jeep over unpaved roads that sometimes were little more than forest trails. All I knew were the names of the towns we passed through. Now, 50 years later, thanks to Google Maps, I can match those names with places on a map and trace our route. The map shows the route we took, the inset indicating the area in relation to where we lived. This was the closest I came to having a real “missionary experience”, as many people envision missionary work: dense forest, limited comfort and plenty of mud. It was the rainy season.

On Friday, we flew to Pereira Barreto in the west of São Paulo state, where we spent the weekend ministering to two churches in the area, before flying south on Monday to Foz do Iguaçu, in the state of Paraná, on the border with Paraguay. We were the “guests” of Sr. Francisco, a member of a Baptist church there. We had met him when we crossed into Paraguay some months earlier in 1972. He was the head agent of the Brazilian Institute of Coffee, whose job was to patrol the Brazilian border with Paraguay and Argentina and watch for smugglers. Knowing I was looking for a pioneer mission field, he invited us to accompany him on one of his monthly inspection trips. That week, Steve and I rode in a Jeep through areas of mountainous national forest reserves where, at times, there seemed to be no roads, and any roads we found were unpaved. In the February rainy season, the highways were basically muddy, rutted tracks winding through endless forests.  

We were crammed into uncomfortable positions in an already not-so-comfortable 4WD Jeep. Francisco drove. For 4 days and over 500 miles, I sat with the Jeep’s door handle poking me in the side, while I half-leaned out the door with the glass rolled down to make room for Steve, who sat between Francisco and me. Steve was constantly having to shift his legs every time Francisco had to shift gears, and on those unimproved roads, that was an almost continual maneuver. Francisco’s assistant and our bags took up whatever room was left in the back seat.

For Francisco’s monthly inspection round, using a Jeep was not optional. Even it got stuck once, and we had to get out and push it out of the deep muddy ruts. We crossed the Iguaçu River on a ferry that operated on a cable across the swift current. (     on the map). A tractor was specifically stationed there to pull buses up the hill from the river, as the ruts were so deep and the mud so slick passengers had to get off and walk up the hill while their bus was towed to the top of the slope. We noticed that people walked barefoot along the roads in PR and SC and carried their shoes in their hands. Roadside foot-washing facilities were common, and, for those who wore shoes, mudscrapers were found on the front porch of every house.

The road was often steep and treacherously slick. When the Jeep got stuck on the deeply rutted slope down to the river, we had to get out and push. As Steve was walking down the hill, his feet flew out from under him. He landed flat on his back in the muddy clay, and he couldn’t have been comfortable sitting with a mud-caked back for the rest of the day. I didn’t laugh when he fell. Honest. Not out loud, anyway.

That first day, after 50 miles of paved highway, we turned at Medianeira, and “slid, rattled, pushed and bounced” another 100 miles along the Brazilian side of the border with Argentina to Barracão. Like Foz do Iguaçu, it’s a divided town. The border between the states of Paraná and Santa Catarina runs through the town. South of the border in Santa Catarina, the town is called Dionísio Cerqueira; Barração is in Paraná on the north side of the line. The largest of the three cities, Bernardino Irigoyen, lies on the Argentine side of the border that runs N-S through the town. These aren’t twin cities; they’re triplet cities. In Paraná, Barracão had one church, an Assembly of God.

The rain continued the next day.

I MET THE BRAZILIAN VERSION OF WILD BILL HICKOCK

We spent the day looking at a bit of everything. We had a meeting with the mayor of the municipality (county) on the SC side, which has a population of 13,000. We talked with the head of the Federal Police, whom I described in my journal as “looking all the world like Wild Bill Hickock, with his hat, moustache and long hair”. Steve and I walked in the rain to the PO to send a telegram back to our wives, since there was no telephone. But the man couldn’t send a telegram because he didn’t have the new price list.

I remember the German-run hotel we stayed in because it was there that I ate tripe for the first time. We took refuge from the cold and wet weather in the kitchen, where it was warm. A mixed crowd consisting of a Syrian, an Italian, Germans, Americans, and Brazilians swapped stories of police and soldiers chasing gangs of outlaws. There were tales of gunfights and feuds over land and water rights. The “Wild Bill Hickock” look of the head of the Federal Police was perfectly suited to the Brazilian wild west surroundings we found ourselves in.

We crossed the border into Argentina. I remember the crossing as being a foot bridge across a stream, with an army post. I described the hospital we visited as more like a 3-bedroom house, and I couldn’t understand anything the Argentinian there said. I wrote in my journal, “It was all noise to me, like a dog barking.”

            “Wet” would be the word of the week. It described the weather and our clothes, which never dried out from the first day of the trip. On Thursday, we drove 150 miles to Francisco Beltrão, by way of São Miguel do Oeste, from which point the road wound through a national forest. I use the word “road” loosely. I wrote in my journal, “At times we drove through pastures where there was hardly anything to distinguish the road from the pastures. In places, only a Jeep could get by.” It was an off-road experience. There was no need for signs warning of speed limits; right-of-way was yielded based on the size of the infrequent oncoming truck and how much of the roadway it occupied. No signage required. Francisco knew the way through the forested mountains and valleys to get to Francisco Beltrão in SC without any highway signs. There he met with the head of the army in that district and the conversation again was all about chasing down drug smugglers. As for me, I wasn’t in any condition to chase anything or anyone. As we stopped for the night in what I described as “a dump of a place”, I was ‘quebrado’ (literally “broken”---I felt like I had failed to yield the right-of-way to one of those oncoming trucks). My back hurt from hours of sitting awkwardly twisted, half leaning out the Jeep window.

HOME AT LAST

Mercifully, the next day, Friday, was the last day of our travels by Jeep. Unmercifully, we were on the road 11 hours; mercifully, during the last two hours we were on a paved road and got into Foz do Iguassu about 20h30. The visit to Barracão gave me a lot to think about…could that be where God was leading us to go? But the priority now was to get home the next day to my pregnant wife after being away from home for 8 days without any way to communicate with her. I was confident I knew where she was, but she had no idea where I was or when I would be coming home. Steve flew the Cessna back, and we got home about 4 o’clock Saturday afternoon. Then I had to go to SP on Monday to change money, where I spent the night and got home Tuesday evening at 6.30.

NO NEWS IS … NO NEWS

Whenever I travelled to visit churches in other towns, or I went to SP to change money, there was no way of communicating with Abbie if she stayed home. We communicated with our folks here in the States by mail, but occasionally, we could find a ham radio operator who made contact with one in the US, who, in turn, could make a phone patch to our parents. Due to time differences and weather conditions, that was iffy and many times it didn’t work out. That was the best we could do. In July, Abbie’s mother, brother, and sister were in a serious car accident in the Ozark Mountains. A large milk truck coming around a curve turned over on them, and the car behind them couldn’t stop before turning their car into an accordion of steel. It was a week before we learned about the accident through a letter from Abbie’s father. Miraculously, they survived, but Abbie’s brother was hospitalized with a concussion for a couple of weeks, and his vision was never the same afterwards. Abbie’s mother suffered back pains the rest of her life. Not only were we living in a pre-Internet, pre-mobile phone civilization, for us, it was pre-telephone, and it continued so for the first ten years we were in Madeira Island, Portugal.

I was invited to accompany Francisco the following month on his routine rounds along the border, but that never worked out. Barracão was not the place God had for us. I kept looking. Steve and I worked well together, but I was itching to start a work from scratch. He and I were continually dealing with problems in various churches. Maybe what I really wanted was to deal with problems of my own making. There were thoughts of states far away, Brasília, Mato Grosso, Goiás; or there was Ipaussu, a little town 15 miles away. But those doors never opened. It was finally in October when a door 750 miles further south opened and we decided to move. But the One who opens doors also closes them for reasons we may only discover years later, and that is the story of the last three months of 1973.

“I FINALLY THOUGHT I KNEW WHERE I WAS GOING”