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Women Only
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Straight Female / 71
I Went To Bring Change And Wound Up Changed Myself
When I was 19 I went for a year to Colombia on a church outreach missionary assignment, deep in the Amazon basin. First by local flight from Bogota, then by bus for many hours, then be car along a lonely dirt road. The driver, a man in his thirties, worked at the clinic where I would spend the next year. Alone out there on that lonely road that never ended I went in and out of sleep waiting for him to r**e me.
We arrived at the village, a farming and gathering community of a couple of hundred people. The clinic was a one room shack with very little provisions, the driver had no education but he had observed a missionary doctor and guided himself on that. My bed was behind the clinic, a cot on a dirt floor. No running water, the toilet was an old bucket, no shower, you stood outside naked and poured water with the bucket over your head.
Food was what the grew, or caught, or found in the jungle. Any lessons on nutrition was a waste of time, everyone was starving and parasitic. Welcome to the jungle. They didn't speak Spanish, they spoke a dialect, so my driver was my translator. It didn't take but a few days for me to realize I was a burden.
I was confronted with a new reality, women were not respected, treated more like a beast of burden, pregnant every year, malnourished children. What was I doing there?
They ignored what I tried to teach them, they ignored me all around. I had no midwife training, the only real place where I could have helped. I became depressed, frustrated, I gave up. My driver began to r**e me, the jungle had beat me up. The r**e itself was no different from the way the women were taken. I don't suppose that the idea of consent ever entered their mind. Out there, already wracked by parasites my pregnancy progressed, day by day, week by week, until one day I was ripe enough and I delivered my own baby.
I was his woman by then, if I thought there was something to say, I spoke to him in a reserved manner. In the time I was there I had adopted their ways. Nutrition for my baby came from my tit. As long as babies breast fed they stayed relatively parasite free.
When my day came and I returned to civilization I felt a stranger in my world. It took months and months for the various parasites to leave my body. My son grew strong and healthy. I worried about his mental development, his gene pool was shallow at best. I spent my years teaching how to teach those that don't know about learning.
I never married, I remained my drivers woman to the end. My son grew to become a doctor and took his turn with his native tribe. Time and technology have changed who his tribe people are. Few if any remember the white woman who spent a year with them, life isn't that long for them.
Nor did my son ever meet his father, his whereabouts or short life is unknown.
We arrived at the village, a farming and gathering community of a couple of hundred people. The clinic was a one room shack with very little provisions, the driver had no education but he had observed a missionary doctor and guided himself on that. My bed was behind the clinic, a cot on a dirt floor. No running water, the toilet was an old bucket, no shower, you stood outside naked and poured water with the bucket over your head.
Food was what the grew, or caught, or found in the jungle. Any lessons on nutrition was a waste of time, everyone was starving and parasitic. Welcome to the jungle. They didn't speak Spanish, they spoke a dialect, so my driver was my translator. It didn't take but a few days for me to realize I was a burden.
I was confronted with a new reality, women were not respected, treated more like a beast of burden, pregnant every year, malnourished children. What was I doing there?
They ignored what I tried to teach them, they ignored me all around. I had no midwife training, the only real place where I could have helped. I became depressed, frustrated, I gave up. My driver began to r**e me, the jungle had beat me up. The r**e itself was no different from the way the women were taken. I don't suppose that the idea of consent ever entered their mind. Out there, already wracked by parasites my pregnancy progressed, day by day, week by week, until one day I was ripe enough and I delivered my own baby.
I was his woman by then, if I thought there was something to say, I spoke to him in a reserved manner. In the time I was there I had adopted their ways. Nutrition for my baby came from my tit. As long as babies breast fed they stayed relatively parasite free.
When my day came and I returned to civilization I felt a stranger in my world. It took months and months for the various parasites to leave my body. My son grew strong and healthy. I worried about his mental development, his gene pool was shallow at best. I spent my years teaching how to teach those that don't know about learning.
I never married, I remained my drivers woman to the end. My son grew to become a doctor and took his turn with his native tribe. Time and technology have changed who his tribe people are. Few if any remember the white woman who spent a year with them, life isn't that long for them.
Nor did my son ever meet his father, his whereabouts or short life is unknown.
