By Don Nevels – BBFI Missionary to Argentina
Editor’s note: Last summer, I met Don Nevels face to face when he came to the church I attend. During his presentation he mentioned coming to the States from Argentina via land… specifically, he traveled by bus. I asked him to write about his trip — the motivation, the surprises, the dangers, the people, and the learning. He produced several thousands of words about the trip, and the Tribune will print excerpts from his travel journal. Don and his wife, Lucy, graduated from Baptist Bible College in 1964 and they were approved as BBFI missionaries in 1967.
Last year I took a short furlough traveling from Argentina, South America, to the United States by bus, stopping to visit numerous missionaries in South and Central America as well as Mexico, finishing the bus trip in Lawrence, Kansas, where my daughter and her family live. The trip took five and one half weeks including brief stopovers in each of the Central American countries and Mexico. The distance was 11, 250 miles with 245 hours and 30 minutes sitting on buses on the three continents.
While visiting supporting churches, invariably people would ask me what prompted me to take a bus trip of this nature. I responded with two of the three main reasons. The first reason was that a Peruvian man in our church in Argentina asked me to stop by his town in Peru to try to win his married sister, Beatrice, to Christ. I did make the visit, and the Lord gloriously saved Beatrice. The second reason was that I wanted to visit missionaries in the Central American countries, and I wanted to share our work with them. Several of them mentioned this was their first time to have someone from Argentina visit. In every case, it was a blessed time with people of different lands and customs as well as a time to meet the missionaries and their families.
The third reason was actually my principal reason for traveling to the States by bus in the first place. I wanted to see if it could be done, and if it could be done, then to survey some little-known and all-but-forgotten territories for missions, territories where we have never planted a gospel light.
Looking at the top of South America, eastward, way over by the Atlantic Ocean you will notice three small countries situated between Venezuela and Brazil formerly referred to as the three Guyanas (or Guianas), namely British Guyana, Dutch Guyana and French Guyana. Today, only French Guiana uses its historic name.
Guyana (formerly British Guyana) gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1966. Guyana has its own national flag and monetary system called the Guyana dollar. The capitol city is Georgetown. Surinam, (formerly Dutch Guyana), gained independence from the Netherlands in 1975. Surinam has its own national flag and monetary system called the SRD, the Surinam dollar. Surinam’s capitol city is Paramaribo.
French Guiana is not an independent territory. This is made very clear as one descends from his motorboat after crossing the Maroni River that serves as the Surinam/French Guiana border. The large green and white sign that greets you has only one word on it, “FRANCE,” and you can’t miss it when you descend from your motorboat. In spite of the fact that French Guiana (as well as Guyana and Surinam) is situated in the Amazon jungle with its anacondas, tarantulas, toucans, and monkeys, the nation very proudly flies the French national flag just as you would see in downtown Paris.
Each of the three Guyanas speak a different national language plus Creole and other indigenous languages respectively. I am told that the Surinamers look down on the people from Guyana. A taxi driver mentioned to me that he was a “Surinamer” and not from Guyana, though it appeared to me he could be from either place. So a Surinamer is a person from Surinam. Apparently there is that age-old feeling of superiority with feelings of disregard for those of neighboring countries.
There are basically three principal religious influences in Guyana: Hindu, Muslim, and Christian (of all denominations). I saw dozens of Muslim and Hindu places of worship. Of course the Muslim buildings are those with the towers and crescent and star on top of the towers. The Hindu followers have a custom of purchasing a flag of their favorite god and placing that flag on a tall bamboo pole. Usually the family will have five to ten such poles with flags of their favorite gods all planted in one corner of their house property out by the street for passersby to notice. I picked up no signs of intolerance among the different religious groups in any of the three Guyanas.
Everyone seems to dwell in the land accepting the right of the others to exist as well. Probably the most astonishing and unusual sight on earth for me was to see a Muslim mosque and a Jewish synagogue on the same block right next door to one another in downtown Paramaribo, Surinam. This tells me there is not only religious acceptance, but is perhaps the most encouraging sign that independent Baptists as ourselves have a door open to these three small nations that have heretofore, for some reason, not been evangelized by the Fellowship.
More to come…