Brazilian Missionary Treks to Remote Pygmy Village

Marcelo Satiro is a missionary with the São Paulo-based Assembly of God church. (photo: EthnicNEWz.org, E. A. de Oliveira)

Marcelo Satiro, a missionary from Brazil, was laughed at by 530 religious leaders during a recent trip to Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Satiro had told his Congolese peers that he wanted to visit a remote village of Pygmies.  

As Satiro tells the story, one of the religious leaders then said disdainfully, "Did you know Pygmies don’t have souls?”

But Satiro, who is with the São Paulo-based Assembly of the God church, was still determined to visit the Pygmies, a hunter-gatherer people who live partially on the wild products of their environment.  Between 250,000 and 600,000 Pygmies live in the Congo rainforest, according to estimates of the United Nations.

The day after meeting the 530 religious leaders, Satiro says he and five others embarked on a journey through the jungle, hiking and camping for two days.

Upon arrival at the Pygmies' village, the hiker missionaries found a tribe of people who lived on top of trees branches and bathed only on rainy days.

“For the Pygmies, if God wished them to bathe more frequently he would send more rain to the village,” said Satiro, while seeping a Burundian type of coffee at a Starbucks in Framingham, Mass.  

Continuing his story, he says a messenger of the Pygmies approached him and his fellow missionaries once the group entered the village.   The leader of about 300 Pygmies refused to meet them himself, claiming they seemed to be no more than curious strangers.

But Satiro insisted, and the group camped on the outskirts of the village. Two days later, the village chief invited only Satiro for lunch, he claims.  He then met with the chief and 30 supervisors.  (For every 10 villagers, there was a supervisor, explained Satiro.)

While a servant was bringing what seemed to be the appetizer, Satiro reminded himself that in the African tradition, a host can only start eating after the guest has enjoyed three pieces of the meal.

A plate with fried monkey was served first, Satiro says.

“I joke around that my stomach is like a zoo. I’ve eaten cat, dog, zebra, elephant, rhinos, snakes, alligators, but monkey, never,” he said.

The missionary tasted a slice of the monkey's arm. Suddenly, the chief started mumbling complaints in Choka, the local dialect. Before a Portuguese translator could finish speaking, the chief offered Satiro an entire monkey arm.

The Brazilian pastor ate it ferociously, even licking the animal’s fingers. All the supervisors laughed.

Next, the villagers brought a sizable smoked bat, seasoned with local herbs. This time, says Satiro, the chief didn’t need to tell him what to do. He grabbed one the hairy mammal’s wings and started teething through it.  No recognizable taste, he recalls.

An explosion of laughter erupted, with supervisors and chief tapping each other in contentment.

“You camped for three days, ate our food without hesitation, even tasted plates that we don’t eat.  You must have a really good reason to be here,” the chief told the missionary, interrupting a collective laughter.

Like many of the Portuguese Catholics who embarked to Brazil in the 1500s, Satiro’s mission was to evangelize the villagers.  

With permission from the leader of the Pygmies, he spoke to all 300 of them while standing on a chunk of wood.

He had planned to preach about the negative implications of prejudging an entire group of people. But something unexpected occurred.

As Satiro tells the story, the seasoning of the bat dish was made of hallucinogenic weeds, leaving him dizzy and seeing things as if he was high.

The villagers laughed once again. As he stepped toward some of them, they pulled him from arm to arm.

Still under the influence, Satiro spoke of a Bible passage in the book of John: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

Back in Framingham, Satiro told EthnicNEWz.org, “Of the 300 villagers, 163 agreed to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ.”

He said he helped improve the villagers' health, too.  They made three basic changes after he visited them:  bathing once a week, using a local fixed bathroom, and treating water to make it potable.

And at the local health center, where aspirin was prescribed to relieve everything from headache to malaria to AIDS, the Pygmies were ever more rarely seen.

“The Ministry of Health called us to Kinshasa to inquire about what have we done to reach results that even they weren’t able to reach,” claims Satiro.

In 10 years of missions in Africa and Europe, Satiro said he has seen the most shocking rituals – such as “parents burying their own children alive during dark magic sessions.” These kind of rituals don’t shock him anymore.

“I’ve developed a filter to see absurd facts and that doesn’t affect me,” the missionary says.

Today, Satiro does not need a visa to enter the Democratic Republic of Congo and six other African nations. Every week, about 200 Pygmies congregate at a newly-created church. On that much-anticipated day, the Pygmies happily engage in a collective bath in a local lake.

The Congolese government has approved the use of  certain medicine to treat the village’s kids. Satiro is looking for volunteer nurses and doctors to visit the village. A housing construction plan is in progress to move villagers out of the tree branches, and to build a school for the Pygmies.

Because some African governments don't allow church groups to visit communities with a solely religious purpose, Satiro founded the nonprofit Amigos da Africa, www.amigosdaafrica.org

source:  EthnicNEWz.org

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Pygmy villagers in the Democratic Republic of Congo welcomed missionary Marcelo Satiro (standing to the right of the Brazilian flag, wearing a business-style jacket). (Courtesy photo: Marcelo Satiro for EthnicNEWz.org)