The Matsès

By Jack Krayenhoff

The Matsès are a tribe of Indians in Peru, and just like the country they are in, their name is pronounced with emphasis on the last syllable. The habit was in Latin America to call them Indians; that did not have the negative effect that the word has here. It was 1983.

My job was to tell if there was syphilis among them, which was possible because they had the habit of raiding surrounding tribes, killing the males and taking the females back with them where there was known to be syphilis among the other tribes. But to take blood tests for syphilis was not diagnostic like it is here, because in the Peruvian jungle a skin disease, called pinta, will also test positive for syphilis. Therefore, a spinal tap has to be done in order to obtain spinal fluid: pinta does not penetrate the spinal canal.

I was in Peru for a year with my wife (the children had grown up) with the Wycliffe Bible Translators, to be their doctor and to help the missionaries with their work by solving medical problems that they had. Harriet, the missionary to the Matsès, asked me to come to her tribe because a girl was ill, undiagnosed. Could it be syphilis? I said I would come.

On the day we were to go, Harriet was already waiting for us at the plane. She was a woman of considerable faith and courage, who, together with another woman, had first made contact with the Matsès. The contact with those Indians was formerly established by males, for it was the most dangerous phase of the job. The missionaries would be dropped off on a sandbank and stay there, dropping presents, such as machetes, on the river bank. The following day, if it was gone, proving that they were being observed, they dropped another present. They would continue the process until the Indians felt safe enough to show themselves, at which time they would be persuaded to let the missionaries live among them.  This was the theory, anyway. One time the Indians showed themselves, but when the missionaries came across, they were suddenly killed. The reason for that, it turned out later, was they did not trust males. Had they been females, they would not have felt threatened. From then on the initial contact was left to female missionaries. That is how Harriet got the job.

The pilot of the plane had been a bush pilot for five years, and should know his job. In addition to his training as a pilot he was an aircraft mechanic, so if there was something the matter with his machine, he could fix it. That inspired confidence. All the same, how did he know where the Matsès lived? After all, there were no maps of the jungle. The only markings were rivers, and most of them were only wide enough to be seen if you flew right over them. The pilot said he had been to the Matsès before, and he knew the latitude and longitude of their village. I did not know how helpful these coordinates were to him, but in the end I decided I could trust him to want to return safely to his home. His passengers were thus included.

It is important to understand that, unlike present flights which go over 30,000 feet altitude where one flies above the clouds, this flight did not go over 1,000 feet, right at cloud level. So ten minutes into our trip we saw a local rain cloud ahead. The pilot wanted to avoid this, so he moved the direction of the plane to the left, avoiding the shower. I asked him how he knew now the exact direction of the Matsès, since it was obviously changed. Oh well, he knew, somehow.

About fifteen minutes later, he saw a rain cloud ahead. “That rain cloud, it’s in there, I think. Let’s take a look.” He made the plane dive into the cloud, and by golly there was the landing strip. Unfortunately he could not land, because the droplets on the windscreen made it unsafe. “We’ll circle a bit, hoping the rain will stop. We have about ten minutes’ worth of gas in our tank, then we have just enough left for the way back.” So we circled, and after eight minutes he tried again. It was dry.