The following is a sample chapter for my upcoming memoir of my grandparents.

It was only Dave and Sue’s second year in Caño Iguana when two interns from California came to the village. 

To 17-year-olds Rick and Jeff, everything was new. Rick, a skinny boy with straight blond surfer hair, and Jeff, a curly-headed and stocky football player, had bonded as fun-loving troublemakers in their youth group. Both were earnest about following God and made spreading his word a priority. They had spent months saving money for the trip through an amateur landscaping business and convincing their parents it was a good idea to travel deep into the Amazon with no clear idea where they were going, who was picking them up, and what work they would be doing. As they traveled from California to Miami to Caracas to a tiny frontier village, the planes got progressively smaller and the surroundings progressively more bewildering. 

Finally, they boarded a Cessna 185 six-seater plane for the last leg of the journey. Low ridges coated in green foliage rose and fell closely enough that they could distinguish individual trees out the window. The pilot banked on approach to a tiny airstrip wedged between green-wreathed mountains. Wind whistled against the body of the plane. It dropped slowly, nearly touched the tops of the trees, cleared them. The landing bumped the boys around in their seats, ending in a sudden stop before they could crash into a boulder. Joti villagers swarmed the plane as the engine noise died, watching the new arrivals with interest. 

Rick and Jeff had heard stories of a jungle teeming with anacondas, tarantulas, piranhas, jaguars, and all manner of creepy-crawlies. “It was totally exaggerated,” Rick smiled. He’d believed that panthers eating boys or anacondas snatching men out of canoes were daily occurrences instead of rare tragedies. 

The dangers of the jungle had to be put in a realistic frame. Years later, Rick explained it this way: Suppose someone from a rural context was told that thousands of people die in car crashes in the U.S. each year. Cars can come up out of nowhere and tear you open, so you have to be careful. This person may be paralyzed with fear looking at a busy street, because they have no realistic framework by which to understand the true things they have been told.

To California boys, the rainforest was overwhelmingly muggy, humid, and dripping. The boys stayed with Dave and Sue and their two little daughters, Karis and Kristen. The family’s home had been built like many of those in the village—mud walls packed around upright posts of alternating hard and soft wood intertwined with palm lattice to stay strong despite the onslaught of bugs and the shrinking of drying mud. But the missionary houses had the added luxuries of screens in the windows and tin roofs instead of thatch. Karis was only 5 at the time, and she still says there is no better sound than the rain thundering on that tin. 

Rick and Jeff’s pastor, who knew the young family, impressed on the boys that they should not pester the “veteran missionaries.” Dave was 31 and Sue was 30. “To two 17-year-olds, they were old!” Rick laughed. 

Dave “would be so hip now,” Jeff insisted. “I could see him being a total computer guy… And here he is in the middle of the jungle, and he wasn’t so much of an outdoorsman—” He was blond, thin, and wore squared-off glasses with polo shirts. “Here’s this guy who would be great in a cubicle—and God puts him in the middle of the jungle and says: Figure it out! And he does!” 

Dave seemed impenetrably cool under pressure to Rick, who tells an entertaining tale of fetching a loose canoe down the river and “trying to impress the missionary with a valiant composure” in the face of tangled vines and roots, a swift current, and an onslaught of spiders big enough to cover your face.

Sue, a vocal and hospitable woman with long black hair and two small, mischievous children to keep her busy, was still unaccustomed to the many difficulties and indignities of the jungle. But like her husband, she had gained some hard-won knowledge and experience in two years of village life. She cooked up fish or wild pig, tapir (a pig-like mammal with a short trunk) or agouti (a jungle rodent the size of a rabbit), spam or canned tuna or corned beef (which she hated and disguised in any way possible), yucca root or cooking bananas or sweet potato. She stored it all in a tiny freezer and camper stove, both run on gas flown in, and canned in a pressure cooker or cooked up on a small camp stove with salt or dehydrated sauces. She baked her own bread, and learned from Mother Earth magazine that putting vinegar in the dough made it last longer without molding.

Rick and Jeff’s hosts were gracious, and Sue fed them well, but jungle food still has none of the high calorie content of American burgers, and there was much manual labor to be done. 

Rick and Jeff had come to renovate a new missionary’s house: another family’s home, inherited from a previous couple who had left the field. They cut lumber to make the top floor, mixed and poured cement on the ground level, and patched mud walls. It was hot, hard work. 

In an attempt to be more help than hassle, they tried to do their own laundry. Rick had seen a movie in which women cleaned clothes by hitting them with a rock, so they went down to the stream, dunked their clothes, and smashed them with rocks. When they came back to the house with armfuls of holey clothes, Sue sighed and helped them out. She had a Maytag washer that had been flown in with its own motor on that same tiny plane—one of their scattered conveniences of the outside world.

 Near the end of the interns’ time in the village, Rick caught malaria. To those coming from the Global North, the word “malaria” may terrify—but to those parts of the world where malaria is common, it is similar to the flu. Potentially deadly if you’re already weak or don’t have access to the correct medication, miserable to deal with, but manageable.

Still, Rick was sick and exhausted. When a stranger came to Caño Iguana asking for help to come to a village over the mountain, Rick had to stay behind. 

The man had come for Jaime, the village shaman and healer. He was “a nice fellow to be around,” Dave remembers, quiet, kind, and stately, a good father and a good husband to his wife Jacinta. Jaime was a leader in the village, and the stranger wanted his help for a child who had been bitten by a snake. Dave and Jeff decided to go along—with antibiotics, antivenom, and penicillin to help with the healing. 

Dave, the only foreigner in the group who knew a remotely useful amount of the Joti language, understood that the child was about a three-hour trip away. They could be there and back by nightfall, when it became too dangerous to hike through the jungle. Dave, Jeff, and Paul, the missionary whose home they were renovating, were mixing concrete when the stranger arrived. The work was abandoned. Dave packed a backpack with medical supplies and a few snacks—an avocado, an ear of corn, canned tuna and rice, some oatmeal—and they set out. Three outsiders and the healer followed the stranger into the jungle. 

Jeff’s football practices in dry, sunny California didn’t translate to hiking through the thick foliage. The trail wasn’t much of a trail. He could barely see the slightly beaten path; leaves and branches overshadowed it. Tall branches and leaves that the short Joti hadn’t bothered to cut hit the outsiders in the face unless they ducked or crawled beneath.

Dave hiked ahead of Jeff, sweating and laboring with the backpack. Jeff tapped him on the shoulder. “Do you want to take turns?” he asked. 

“That would be great,” Dave responded thankfully, passing it over. 

Often, the group had to climb straight up mountain slopes at a nearly 60-degree angle, grabbing at vines and thin trunks to keep from sliding back. They crossed logs or pole bridges over gulleys of rushing water. Jeff and Dave sat on their rears and scooted across, trying not to look down. With heavy boots instead of bare feet, gripping the narrow crossings was difficult. Dave fell in several streams and had to clamber back up the banks.

Presently, darkness came. Mountaintops and the tree canopy blocked the setting sun; the light fled quickly. They kept going. Three hours had come and gone without any sign of the other village. 

Finally, the group stopped for the night in an abandoned thatch-roofed dwelling by the trail. One of the nomadic tribes in the area had left the hut behind for the walls to crumble and the roof to cave in. The hikers smoked an ear of corn over the fire and split it between the four of them as smoke drifted out the gaps in the roof. 

Sleep was restless and stiff. Each Joti hammock requires a lot of work and resources, so they were woven too narrow for Jeff and too short for Dave, with only a few cross-woven strips to connect the longer strands. So the group struggled to sleep, slapping at mosquitoes, trying not to fall in the fire, keeping their shotguns and machetes close. 

It took hours the next day to reach the other village, where they found that the sick child’s wound had gone necrotic. The snake had bitten the child near his big toe—a dangerous location. If not cared for, snake bites to the feet can become infected and rot to the bone. Dave administered long-lasting penicillin, and there was nothing else to do. 

No one gave them anything to eat, and what food they had brought was crumbs. Dave speculates that the other village was offended by a misunderstanding over a machete. When a man from the other village asked to see Dave’s machete, he handed it over. When the man buried it in the wall of a hut, Dave clarified that he still needed the machete. In Joti culture, anyone who asks for a thing must be given it, but Dave didn’t know this at the time. Whatever the reason for the cold reception, the village had only expected to host one man: Jaime. Four men arrived, and the hunters of the village had returned with insufficient meat to feed everyone.

A hungry night passed in a crowded home in the other village. The following morning, the group set off for home with weak limbs and empty stomachs. The jungle buzzed around them as they stumbled down the trail. Well—Dave and Jeff stumbled. Jaime and Paul were more used to the exertion and humidity. 

Midway through the journey home, the group came across an encampment of Panarei people making yaputa—a fermented corn mush popular with that tribe. Bits of husk still floated in the pounded multicolored corn alcohol. In desperation for anything to put in his stomach, Dave accepted some and drank it with gusto. Jeff followed suit. 

The yaputa did not agree with Jeff. “He got dog sick,” Dave said. “He was crawling and vomiting along the trail.” 

“I think Dave had the hardest time of it,” Jeff shared. “It was arduous. I mean, I remember thinking along the way, I just can’t go on.” But they had to. No one would come to bring them food; no helicopter would come to rescue the hikers. 

Rain began to fall. Dave scooted across a slick log and slipped six feet into the rushing water below. He took hold of roots and branches to clamber out bruised, wet, and coated in a layer of topsoil. The trail turned to mud, and they slid through the muck down the same steep slopes they had climbed a day before. Intern and missionary stumbled down that trail together, supporting each other. Paul and Jaime were in better shape, so they went on ahead. 

By the time the pair emerged from the jungle, neither of them could speak. Down a steep hill from the house, past the generator, ran a bone-cold creek stopped up with stones to make a child-sized swimming hole. Dave and Jeff sat on a large rock and put their feet in the creek for a while, letting the cool water wash away some of the mud and grime. They stared at the running water wordlessly. Bright reflections made them blink.

When the pair entered the village, children saw them and ran on ahead, shouting “Here they come!” Karis and Kristen watched them slump through the door of their home, utterly exhausted and worn. To Sue, “They looked like drowned rats!” Jeff lost so much weight on that trip that he had to tie his belt loops together and use twine to hold up his Levis. 

“We were pretty pooped,” Dave says, with characteristic understatement. “Just trying to stay upright, I guess. And then the next day we had to mix cement, so…” 

 While they were gone, the floodwaters that washed the hikers down steep slopes had also sunk Dave and Sue’s canoe—motor still attached. Jacinta and another friend pulled it out of the river with a chain and carried it to the house, where set the detached motor over a basin of water. Rick kept yanking on the starter cord and swaying as Sue hovered nearby, scared that the sick boy was going to faint on her. 

Over forty years later, neither intern has forgotten those few months in the mountains of the Amazon. “I appreciate the people that slog it out,” Jeff said. 

 “Before I was twenty,” Rick added, “I got to meet a lot of missionaries. Unfortunately, the word ‘missionary’ means absolutely nothing, and at the same time it can mean absolutely everything. There’s all kinds of crazy, damaging, destructive missions stuff that’s been done in the world, and the minority of the real, true missionaries are those who have a focus on discipleship. Two of those individuals are Dave and Sue.” 

They didn’t go out to be recognized, to build some big building in the middle of the jungle and start handing out stuff to the people and have tons of pictures to send back to the churches in North America about this great movement of the Holy Spirit… They didn’t do any of that crap. What they did is they went and they served."

To Dave and Sue, the story is unremarkable. “There are no heroes in the day-to-day stuff,” Dave said. Retrieving canoes swept downriver, smashing scorpions and spiders the size of a hand, trekking through the jungle to deliver medicine—all of it became the stuff of the daily grind in Caño Iguana. 

“New missionaries—We thought we could do anything,” Dave laughed. But they learned their lesson: Clarify the length of the journey, and bring more supplies than you think you’ll need. On future medical-delivery journeys, this hard-won knowledge proved useful.