Wycliffe missionaries Gene and Marie Scott gave nearly 40 years of their lives translating the New Testament for a small tribe in the jungles of Peru. Was it worth it?
Squeezed into the rear of the six-seater Helio Courier float plane, I gazed
out the small window at the shimmering surface of Lake Yarinacocha—our
"runway"—in the Amazon jungle near Pucallpa, Peru. My husband, Bob, and
I had been invited to attend the dedication ceremony of the Sharanahua
(pronounced Sha-dah-nah-wah ) New Testament recently completed by
Wycliffe Bible translators Gene ("Scotty") and Marie Scott. Ours was the
last of four small planes taking off from Wycliffe's translation center,
also called Yarinacocha, bound for the village of Gasta Bala.
With engines roaring, our pilot, Pete, skimmed the lake, and after the windows
cleared of the spray, I saw the saltbox shanties of Pucallpa become a distant
shadow.
A thick carpet of rain forest soon subsumed all evidences of civilization.
There were no roads, no houses, no power lines. Only the snaking brown Ucayali
River offered any contrast to the sea of green below.
Gasta Bala is home to about 150 of the 450 members of the Sharanahua tribe.
The only way to get there is to fly two and a half hours into the heart of
the jungle. (One tour book offered little information about this part of
Peru, citing "inaccessibility.")
Gene and Marie Scott first entered this jungle as newlyweds in 1958. Forty
years later—and four children, raised alternatively between the jungle and
Yarinacocha; a fire that consumed all their work; a flood that washed away
their village; and Scotty's five-year bout with chronic fatigue syndrome—Scotty,
now 69, was hand-carrying the only copy of the leather-bound Sharanahua New
Testament that he could secure. The other 499 copies were stalled in customs
at the airport in Lima. He kept the New Testament in a Ziploc bag to protect
it ...
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