Brad and Gina Shaw were used to rugged country. The couple, former park rangers in Denali National Park, also worked and lived in Colorado and Montana throughout the years. But none of the wilderness they had seen prepared them for the remoteness of Peru’s Cotahuasi Canyon.
“There’s a 20,000 foot mountain next to the canyon. At one place we can see a 15,000 foot vertical drop,” Brad said.
The region is dry and despeartely poor.
“When we first moved there, it was a challenge finding a place to live with electricity and hot and cold running water,” Gina said. “A lot of people have dirt floors, they cook over a fire and have a community spigot” providing water for an entire village, she said.
“The people there ... are forgotten,” Brad said.
The Shaws moved to Cotahuasi aboout 10 years ago. Their path began in Alaska.
The couples’ work in Denali was seasonal. During the off-season, Gina studied biology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
There, the couple learned of a campus ministry that visited native Alaskans during Thanksgiving break. Intrigued, they joined the group.
“We went on this gospel trip and flew north of the arctic circle,” Brad said. “This group of Athabaskan Indians took us 70 miles up the frozen Kobuk River.”
Brad was stunned by their reception.
“People were really receptive and humble. They were receiving from us and we were receiving from them and God was blessing this beautiful thing.”
So struck were the Shaws that “we began to look into opportunities to get training in ministry,” Brad said.
After further work with Alaskan indigenous tribes, the Shaws decided to pursue training to travel outside of the United States.
They also began a family.
Daughter Janelle, now 21, was just four months old when they accepted a missionary position in the Phillipines.
“Then we felt we should look into ... Northern Mexico,” Brad said. There, the Shaws worked with the Tarahumara Indians, “for two winters. Then we’d come back and I’d work for the Colorado State Forest Service” spring through fall.
“That worked pretty well until our budget started to get tighter with children,” Brad said.
With the birth of Cassandra, now 18, Gina became a full-time mom, and the onus was on Brad to find a more dependable source of income.
“Part of our training in the Philippines and Mexico was in healthcare and community health,” Brad said. “We felt health care would be the best way we could minister and explain salvation” — and earn a living.
The family moved to Tennessee so Brad could enroll in a physician’s assistant program.
During Brad’s “clinical rotations, we moved around a lot,” Gina said. “It was during his clinical training that we found out about Service In Missions,” Gina said.
SIM needed healthcare providers in Peru, Brad said. In October of 1999, “We decided to take everyone down there and see what work they were doing.” The girls were 11 and 8 at the time.
The people of Cotahuasi are Quechua, Gina said. They are erroneously referred to as “Inca,” she said, but “Inca just means leader.” Their language has more than 30 dialects.
THE COUPLE arrived in Peru shortly after the ousting of the Shining Path communinist movement.
“They had at one time control over 1/2 the geographic area of the country,” Brad said. “They didn’t control any population areas but they would ... terrorize people” in rural areas, Brad said.
If people could affrod to, they moed to the cities, Brad said. In areas such as Cotahuasi, only the very poor stayed behind.
After such oppression, “we were prepared for (closed minds), but the people were very generous and very interested in the Gospel,” Brad said.
“Historically, Peru has not been an easy place to minister to, and historically the Quechua have been resistant to new ideas,” Brad said.
He noted that the Quechua belief system is akin to animism.
“Their relating to the spiritual realm is trying to appease the spirits so calamities won’t come upon them. Their concept of sin is anything that causes disharmony with the spirits.”
In Eden, “we did have perfect harmony with God,” Gina said. “When sin came, God said you’ll have to fight against the stickers and thistles.” The Quechua can relate to that, she said. The story rings true, “but they had never heard it.”
Brad concurred. “They really, more than our culture, are in tune with this notion of disharmony and sin. It’s a lot easier for them to understand the Gospel. It’s a lot easier for us to confuse things.”
Though American society is drifting from them, Brad said, it has Christian roots.
“Most of the people in the world don’t have the opportunities we have to see and hear the Gospel,” Brad said.
And few native cultures have teachers who can who can interpret Biblical passages in context to native peoples, he added.
In order to spread the Word, the Shaws have changed the focus of their ministry.
“I’m doing less and less medical care and more and more teaching and training of indigenous ministers of the gospel,” Brad said.
“We’ve really focused on preparing a few Quechua men and women who really love God and discern the Gospel ... (and can) take His Word out to the communities,” Gina added.
There are 45 communities, each with 100-500 people in the Cotahuasi Canyon, Gina said. About 2,000 people live in the town of Cotahuasi, where the Shaws reside.
“The villages are all spread out,” Gina said. The rugged terrain makes travel between them arduous and slow.
The newly trained Quechua ministers “can be more in touch with people on a daily basis,” Gina said.
“We’re planting churches, that’s the goal,” said Brad. “Right now the window of opportunity is open in Peru.”
“Just two years ago we had the blessing of getting a Christian radio station started,” Gina said. “The project was assited by HCJB radio in Quito, Ecuador, which has a ministry to get FM radio stations going.”
Because radios are scarce in their area, the Shaws will return to Peru with a number of small, solar powered FM receivers.
“They’re small so they can carry them with them in the fields,” Gina said.
Radio ministry broadcasts are in Quechua and Spanish, Brad said. “Most of our broadcasting is prerecorded by other ministries. The Quechua programming we have to produce ourselves.” The family uses their computer to produce it.
“We’re the only legal radio in the city where we live — even the municipalities have pirate radio,” Gina said. It is important for the ministry to do things legally, Gina said, as a display of Biblical obediance.
Once returned to Peru, a South African couple will join them in expanding their ministry, they said.
The Shaws’ progress can be tracked at www.shawfamilyminsitry.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment