Last week we received word that our good friend and head man from the village of Jalalusiteli was sick. With no air support and the river so low and no fuel anyway, there was nothing we could do but pray for him. Which we did, but we received word a few days ago that he had passed away. His name was Bosi Coima, We called him Hairy. He was a great friend. He accepted the Lord back in the early 80s and was instrumental in moving his village from way inland out to the banks of the Iyowei. Many people from his village have accepted the Lord since that time. Now however, they are under a lot of pressure to avenge Hairy's death.
As I have said before, no death to the Yanomamö are considered natural and must be avenged. Malaria kills in a way that is easy for the Yanomamö to confuse it with black magic. What normally happens is the person gets sick and slowly makes a recovery. This cycle repeats itself two or three times. (This is if the person does not receive the anti-malaria drugs,) After the cycle repeats two or three times, the person feels good enough to go back to work and many times just falls unconscious out in the garden before even making it home. Well, this is all the people need. As far as they were concerned, he was well, he was out working and someone did black magic and so goes the reasoning.
Because of how respected Hairy was, many people from all over went to his funeral. Most of them now are up there pressuring the village to go on a raid and avenge his death. The Christians are in the minority up there now and are under a lot of pressure to just be quite and let what happens happen. Please be much in prayer for Abraham and Nando, church leaders from here, who went up there to help the believers stand. Also be praying for Levi from Jalalusiteli that he will stand firm. These are difficult days as we are so short handed and are hamstrung due to no fuel to move around. Abraham and Nando and others from here just walked over, which is a long walk. If the base would not have been so short handed I would have walked over with them, I have done it many times, but it takes so long and with all that is going on with the the gove these days, I did not feel it was a good time for me to be gone that long. How my heart longs for the day I had that little experimental airplane flying here and Jalalusiteli was a short 15 minutes away. Jalalusiteli is one of our bases and has an airstrip which is also closed right now.
prayer requests:
Pray the Christians in the village of Jalalusiteli stand firm for the gospel
Pray they might be a strong testimony for Christ and the new life we have in HIM
Pray we might be able to get our airstrips reopened. This is critical. Many many Yanomamö have died with no medical help.
Pray once we get our airstrips opened back up we might be able to get our own air program established. We helped, in a financial way, a small company replace their hijacked airplane and they are currently providing us with air service for which we are grateful but they can only fly as far as the small gov town of Las Esmeralda and we go down by boat to meet them there. As I said, we are grateful for this service, but we continue to ask the LORD to allow us to set up our own flight service.
Thanks so much for your continued prayers for us. Oh, by the way, voting for Christian Small Publisher Asociation's book of the year continues through March. Please go to the site listed below and vote for my book called "Growing up Yanomamö." http://www.christianpublishers.net/10votes/
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