Dear and good friends,
Greetings from the Amazon basin. It’s still 81 degrees and 80% humidity at 10:00 at night. I’m hoping it will rain later to cool things down, and it might. I heard thunder earlier today.
Thanksgiving is coming up, which starts the holidays in my book. I will start listening to streaming Christmas carols, and I might string some green and red streamers or something from my yellow and tan walls. Actually, we get lots of color from the local vegetation. There are all kinds of tropical plants and orchids (actually bromeliads) around that you pay big bucks for at home, but here they just shoot up by themselves. I’m staying in a small house just a few hundred feet from an oxbow lake on the Ucayali River, the main tributary to the Amazon, which is born about 400 miles downstream from my perch. Small fishing boats drift along and others, powered by small peque-peque engines putter by at all hours of the day and night.
The night sounds are magnificent and worth staying awake for, which is nice, since they are hard to sleep through. The area is home to dozens of small eagles that look a lot like bald eagles, but only half the size. They spend most of the day squawking. A sloth lives in a nearby tree─at least some of the time. There are bugs and lizards galore. The lizards are welcome, since they keep the bug population manageable. I’ve seen a small tree with dozens of 4-6 inch long caterpillars spinning cocoons. During my afternoon jogs I have to step over six different columns of leaf-cutter ants--some columns are two feet wide. I read that leaf-cutter ants trim the leaves off of almost four hundred million trees in the Amazon basin ever year. I don’t know who possibly could come up with such a figure, but I am not making it up (nor am I vouching for it, but it sure sounds impressive).
I’m here without Nancy for the time being. She’ll join me before too long, and I actually plan a quick trip to Atlanta for Thanksgiving with her, our three precious kids and our three precious grandkids. We have much to be thankful for.
I’m presently staying just outside of Pucallpa, a town of about 320,000 people. It is a main river town in eastern Peru, an hour’s direct flight from Lima. We’re 4,000 kilometers from the Atlantic Ocean, and ocean-going boats can chug up here if their skippers take the notion. I’m here with 17 students, and 7 teachers, all but one of whom have been students of mine before. It’s like a family reunion.
We’re in the middle of a language development program which is going quite well. The students speak ten different languages plus Spanish, (which is what we all communicate in). The class will finish their first 8-week block of classes on December 17. Some are writing things for the very first time in their languages and uploading them to the web. We’re all very excited, particularly the first-time authors.
A number of our students are here for the academic part of what we do as opposed to the Christian aspects of the training in Bible translation and literacy. We’re fine with that. Pray that our Christian students would be a strong influence on their colleagues, and that the Lord would be honored in all of our lives and work.
The Indians and Latinos that we are working with are wonderful people. What we do is impossible without your interest and prayers and support. So thanks much for your partnership.
God’s best to each one and have a great Christmas season.
Wes and Nancy Collins
