Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (6 page)

Some evidence already exists that the Pirahãs are not originally from the part of the jungle where they currently reside, from the lack of native vocabulary for some species of monkeys found around the Maici. The Brazilian monkey
paguacu
(a name from the Tupi-Guarani linguistic family) is referred to by the Pirahãs by the same name, for example. That makes
paguacu
a loan word, one borrowed from Portuguese or one of the two Tupi-Guarani groups, the Parintintin and the Tenharim, that the Pirahãs have had long contact with. Since there is no evidence that the Pirahãs have ever given up one of their own words in order to borrow a word from another language, this suggests that the language had no word for this species of monkey because it wasn’t found in their homeland, wherever that might have been.

Since Pirahã is not related to any other known living language, I came to realize that we had not been assigned to work merely with a difficult language, but with a unique language.

We adjusted as a family to life in the Amazon, completely on our own, with no one but ourselves to turn to for help. We became closer than we had ever been, taking great satisfaction and enjoyment in family companionship. We thought that we were in control of our lives as we had never been before. But the Amazon was about to remind us who was boss.

3                  The Cost of Discipleship

W
e went as disciples of Christ to the Pirahãs. And the Bible warns disciples that service is fraught with dangers. So we began to discover. One late afternoon Keren began to complain that the Pirahãs were making her tense. She was frying the meat from an anteater that Kóhoi had killed. She was surrounded as usual by about a dozen Pirahãs, curious about our cooking and eating habits (and hungry for some anteater steak). She asked me to walk with her on our airstrip. The airstrip was like our personal park. It didn’t just serve as a landing site for the plane, it gave us a place to walk, to jog, and to escape the village once in a while.

“I can’t take this anymore,” Keren reported in a shaky voice.

“What’s bothering you?” I asked. It was common for me to complain about how difficult the constant scrutiny of the Pirahãs was. But Keren rarely noticed it. And when she did notice that she was surrounded by staring, curious Pirahãs, she didn’t seem to mind at all; she’d just amicably talk to them.

I told her I would finish cooking dinner and that she should try to get some rest. As we walked back on the path to our hut, she mentioned that her back was aching and that she was starting to get a headache. We didn’t understand the significance of these symptoms at the time, though, and chalked them up to tension.

That night, Keren’s head was aching even more. Her spine was hurting so that she frequently arched her back. Then she began to feel hot and feverish. I got out our medical manual and started to read about her symptoms. As I was reading, our older daughter, Shannon, began to complain that her head was hurting too. I felt her forehead with the back of my hand. She radiated heat.

We had medicine enough for any common Amazonian health problem, I thought. I was sure that all I needed to do was to read about the different sets of symptoms in my missionary medical book and the diagnosis would be easy. As I looked through the symptoms, I concluded that Keren and Shannon had typhoid fever. I believed this because I had contracted typhoid during our jungle training in Mexico and their symptoms were like mine had been.

I began antibiotic treatment for typhoid fever. Neither one improved at all. They were both getting very ill very quickly, and Keren’s decline in health was dangerously fast. She stopped eating. She did not want to drink anything, though occasionally she would take some water. I tried to record her temperature with a thermometer, but the mercury rose to the end and never fell, no matter how many times I took it. Shannon’s fever hovered between 103 and 104 degrees.

The hot tropical sun was not helping. While I cared (ineptly) for Keren and Shannon, I also had to cook and clean for Caleb (then only two) and Kris, four years old. I was unable to sleep. Keren and Shannon had diarrhea, so I had to help them on and off the chamber pot at night, empty and clean the pot, and help them back to bed.

At the head of our bed we had given ourselves a small bit of privacy by putting up a wall of
paxiuba
palm slats. The Pirahãs crowded close and peered in through the slats. They knew something was wrong. I later learned that everyone in the village except me and my family knew that Keren and Shannon had malaria.

The lack of privacy, my concern about my wife’s and daughter’s health, and my exhaustion from work and lack of sleep all aggravated my natural tendency to worry, so that by the end of five days, I was desperate for help. Keren was nearly comatose. She and Shannon were moaning in pain, and Keren was starting to have spells of delirium, sitting up and shouting at people who were not there, saying things that made no sense, slapping me, Kris, and Caleb if we passed too closely to her when she was sitting during one of her hallucinations.

The fourth night of her illness, during a thunderstorm so loud that I could hear almost nothing except wind and thunder and rain, Keren sat up and told me that Caleb had fallen out of his hammock in the next room.

I replied confidently, “No, he’s OK. I’ve been awake and listening this whole time. I didn’t hear him fall.”

Keren became agitated and said, “Go help Caleb! He’s on the dirty floor with the cockroaches.”

To humor her I got up and went into the kids’ room, next to our half-walled bedroom. Their room had three-foot-high board walls, with the four-foot space above them closed by plastic screen. Caleb and Kristene shared a mosquito net. Caleb slept in a hammock and Kristene in a single bed beneath him. We also had put a chemical camping toilet in this room, with privacy given by curtains hung around the toilet. We kept a kerosene lamp in the room as well. Each evening after bathing in the river and eating dinner, we would retreat to the relative comfort and privacy of the kids’ room and I would read out loud to the family—from books like the
Chronicles of Narnia, To Kill a Mockingbird,
and
The Lord of the Rings.

I walked into the room with my flashlight. Caleb was on the floor, cockroaches nearby. He was trying to get back to sleep but looked bewildered and uncomfortable. I picked him up and hugged him and put him back in his hammock. Keren’s motherly sensitivity had overcome her malaria to alert her to the fact that her son needed help.

The next morning I knew that I had to do something. Shannon and Keren were too ill for me just to sit by and watch. But I didn’t know how to get back to Porto Velho on my own. The mission plane had flown us in, so I had not traveled the river before. Without the plane we were lost. And at this time the Brazilian government would not allow foreigners to have two-way radios, so we had no contact with the outside world. I did not have a boat capable of traveling dependably, nor did I even have enough gasoline to make a river trip.

However, there was a Catholic lay missionary, Vicenzo, visiting the Pirahãs, and he had a small aluminum canoe with a new 6.5-horsepower Johnson outboard and nearly fifty liters of gasoline. I asked him the enormous favor of loaning me his boat for an indefinite period of time. If he did this, he would himself be stranded among the Pirahãs. He immediately agreed, though he assured me, wrongly it turned out, that whatever Keren and Shannon had, they must have brought it with them because there were no diseases among the Pirahãs. (Only two weeks after I left the Pirahãs Vicenzo nearly died of malaria contracted among the Pirahãs.) I asked him then if he could tell me how to get to the nearest settlement with a doctor and a hospital.

Vicenzo told me I would need to get to either Humaitá or Manicoré (ma-ni-ko-REH), two small towns along the Madeira River. He recommended Humaitá because there was a road from there to Porto Velho, the capital of the state of Rondônia and, unbeknownst to him, the location of my mission’s headquarters. To get to Humaitá, he said, I would need to travel down the Maici and Marmelos rivers for about twelve hours to a place called Santa Luzia, which he pronounced “SANta loo CHEE-a.” From there I could get men to help me carry my family across a jungle path connecting the Marmelos and Madeira rivers. On the Madeira I would go to a settlement called the Auxiliadora (named for “Our Lady the Helper”), a small town founded about twenty years previously by Salesian priests. From there we could catch a large boat to Humaitá, a place I had never heard of until this conversation. It now seemed like Mecca.

I went home and began packing for the trip, though I had no idea what that would entail or what we would need. Vicenzo wasn’t sure how long the boat trip from the Auxiliadora to Humaitá would take, since he had never made that trip. I didn’t know if we’d need to take our own food. But there was barely enough room in his canoe for the five of us plus the gasoline, so I would be able to take very little in any event.

By now it was too late to leave. We’d have to get an early start the next day. It was too dangerous to risk getting stranded on the river after dark. I packed some canned meat and canned peaches, spoons, and a couple of enamel-coated tin plates. I gathered a machete, matches and candles, two changes of clothes for everyone, and a container for water. I set these things aside and prayed. Then I went to bed. The next morning, as soon as the sun came up, I brought Vicenzo’s canoe over to the bank in front of my house and began to load it. The sun was already bright at seven and the sky was cobalt blue. A morning breeze cooled me as I worked.

After the supplies were in, I carried Shannon down and laid her in the canoe. It tipped a bit with her weight. Pirahãs lined the banks of the river, watching. I next walked Caleb and Kristene down and told them to stand by the canoe. Then I went to the house and picked up Keren, thinking how much lighter she seemed (she had weighed ninety-eight pounds before getting ill and had lost, I calculated, perhaps ten pounds in the past five days). She was only semiconscious when I started from the house. As we got to the riverbank and I began my careful descent, Keren awakened and started yelling and struggling.

“What are you doing?! Are you running away? Don’t you believe in God? Don’t you have any faith? We have to stay here and reach these people for Jesus!”

This made it very hard for me to continue with plans to depart. I was already tired, uncertain, and insecure. Now if something went wrong, if someone got hurt or worse, I would be morally wrong as well. But I knew that I had no choice. Keren, and maybe Shannon, would die if I did not press on and get us out of there. And, nontrivially, I simply was at the end of my endurance. I was too tired to keep up with the demands of a sick family in the village.

For many reasons, it had been hard for me to make the decision to leave. There were the uncertainty and danger of the journey, and the complications and stress of handling everyone on my own, as I was already exhausted. I was sure that the other missionaries at home base would share Keren’s view that I was a faithless coward. (As it turned out, they were not condemning but were very understanding and helpful.) I also knew that in just over a week a supply flight was scheduled to arrive in the village. This plane could take the family out to Porto Velho. But if I waited, I thought the chances were strong that Keren would die. The risks of leaving earlier were less than the risk of waiting for the flight. But really I simply did not want to wait, with each additional lost night’s sleep wearing me down until I was useless to myself and my family. I had to do something.

As I came up the bank to get Keren, Xabagi, an old Pirahã man, approached to ask me if I could bring back matches, blankets, and other goods when I returned from the city. I responded angrily, “Keren is sick. Shannon is sick. I am not going to buy anything” (if I had known how to say
goddammit
in Pirahã, I would have). “I’m going to the city to take them to get water [medicine] to make them well again.”

I was angry, and I am sure that it showed. Here I was, my entire family in danger, and all the Pirahãs could think of was themselves? I pull-started the small Johnson engine and it came to life. The canoe tipped from side to side, a danger before we were even under way, since we had only about three inches of freeboard, and the water was deep, over fifty feet in most places this time of year. If I tipped us over from my lack of experience, there would be a disaster. I had no life vests but I did have two small children and two very sick passengers who could not swim to shore. I could not have saved them all in the powerful current of the Maici. But I had no choice.

OK, God. Now I am in one of those missionary stories that used to inspire me so much. Keep us safe, God, I thought.

We pulled away from the bank. The Pirahãs were shouting, “Don’t forget the matches! Don’t forget the blankets! Bring back manioc meal. And canned meat!” And the list went on. Above the whine of the two-cycle motor, I could hear the cawing of a pair of red macaws flying overheard, indifferent to me as they flew to their nest. The sun was shining brightly. It was already in the upper seventies and it wasn’t yet 8 a.m.

But the canoe’s nine miles per hour speed gave us a breeze. Keren’s and Shannon’s faces were bright in the sunlight. We’d been going for an hour or so when Kristene said she was hungry. I slowed down and opened a can of peaches. I told Kristene to wash her hands over the side in the river, then just pull peaches out of the can with her hands. Caleb did the same. Kristene turned to Keren and asked, “Mommy, you want some peaches?” Keren surprised me by sitting up and slapping Kristene on the face. She told her to shut up. Then Keren collapsed. Kristene didn’t cry. She gave me a pained and puzzled expression. I said, “Mommy’s sick, sweetie. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.” Kristene knew this already. So did Caleb. Shannon didn’t want anything. So we finished the peaches and I let Kristene and Caleb drink the syrup from the can.

The jungle passed us on both sides, an impassive green. No other boats were on the river. The water was high so I had to be careful to stay on the main channel and not follow false channels into swamps. Fortunately, the main current was usually easy to spot. But not always. When the water suddenly spread out before me into what looked like a swamp instead of a river, or into several apparent channels at once, I became disoriented.

After another hour or so, Keren sat up and asked for water. I tried to pour her some, but she jerked the canteen out of my hand and took the cup. Then she held the cup away from her and began to empty the can teen into her lap. I tried to get it back from her by saying, “Honey, let me do this for you. You’re just spilling the water.”

She looked at me angrily and replied, “This trip would be a lot more fun if you weren’t along.” She then put the canteen in her mouth and had a drink. I gave Shannon some too and we continued on.

Several hours later I saw a house in a clearing on the bank to my left. I pulled over. Could we already be at the path to the Madeira? My Portuguese was still rudimentary, but I went up the bank and clapped in front of the house until a woman came to the window opening. I asked her if this was Santa “Loo-CHEE-a.”

The woman said, “I never heard of that place.”

“Is there anyone else who could help me?” I nearly pleaded.

It was about two in the afternoon and we had less than a quarter of a tank of gasoline left, enough for one or two more hours. If I didn’t find Santa Luzia soon, I would have to paddle. We might have to spend the night sleeping in the canoe.