3/2/2024 0 Comments Ordinary journey f95![]() In the center of the village is the school, equipped with a couple of chalkboards and a few dozen tattered textbooks that Fields has written. “And I haven’t had a problem with it since.” “I let him fill one of my teeth,” Fields says. He uses rudimentary tools – a World-War-II-era drill powered by a sewing machine treadle – and sometimes runs out of Novocain. But their limited services are better than none at all, Fields says.Īcross the village is the dentist, Benito Demash, who never finished grade school and was trained by missionaries to pull and fill teeth. They don’t speak Spanish, so they can’t read the health manual kept in a medicine cabinet. The “sanitarios” have fourth-grade educations. Roosters and trumpeter birds wander in search of food.Īt one end is the clinic, staffed by three Matses who were trained by Fields and Kneeland to give shots and treat basic jungle illnesses like malaria, flu and snake bites. Lemon and grapefruit trees, introduced by Fields and Kneeland, fill the air with tart scents. The village is a collection of rickety bungalows on stilts with roofs of woven palm leaves. The nearest town is a three-day canoe trip away. “I’m not the go-grab-them-by-the-beard type.”īuenas Lomas sits in a cluster of hills an hour west of the Chobayacu River, with water so dark the Matses call it the Black River. “I’m much more fearful than Harriet,” Kneeland says. It took a lot of nudging from God to get her to Peru, she says. Kneeland, 55, who returned to Missouri two years ago to care for her mother, says she’s not a natural pioneer. “I didn’t want to follow in someone else’s footsteps.” “I didn’t want to build on someone else’s work,” she says. She will turn 70 in November, and still lives among the Matses. “I guess I’m probably an adventurer,” says Fields, a former insurance office secretary who grew up on a farm. When Fields and Kneeland talk about what motivated them to embark on their extraordinary mission with the Matses, they describe it as the ultimate challenge and test of faith. They do not want to fight,” he concludes. “Now, when outsiders come, our children are not afraid. All we could find were footprints in the mud to tell us which way they went. Marciano Tumi says, “Outsiders took my mother. They would cut down all our yuca, so we had nothing to eat,” he adds. We hid in the trees when the outsiders came. But when asked whether that life was good, everyone hushed. Solomon Tumi looks over and brags, “My father stole a woman, and that woman was my mother.” His father, Marciano Tumi Dunu, 76, straightens his hunched back and gives a toothless grin. “We were warriors,” Solomon Tumi, 60, says. On a recent Sunday afternoon, the Matses talked about their past. Their stories – shared with a reporter who spent a month in the Amazon – offer an opportunity to examine the journey of a primitive people catapulted into the world of clothes, vaccinations, books, airplanes and money. Baltimore Sun eNewspaper Home Page Close Menu
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