Davey Jank

For a bit of the history of the Maco work. I should mention that I am a child of missionaries, my parents having worked with a tribe of Indians called Yanomami. The Yanomami live even further into the junnle than the Maco people do, and I quite distinctly remember how, as a child, whenever I would be flying out of the jungle to town, we would fly over a large river called the Ventuari. On its tributaries I could see little garden clearings and the occasional thatch roof and I would wonder who it was who lived down there along the river. As it has turned out, now, twenty years later, I'm living among those very people. When I was a child the Maco people were still quite afraid of the outside world. They didn't live in villages but rather, they lived scattered throughout the jungle in small family units. When strangers would pass by in boats, they would run off into the jungle and hide - they were quite certain all outsiders were cannibals, particularly the white people.

But with time, they began to see and understand the benefits the outside world provided, such as medicine, schools, and tools for gardening, hunting, and fishing. Now the majority of the Maco people live in villages that are located right on the Ventuari River. Many of the men have learned to speak a very limited amount of Spanish that allows them to trade with river merchants and interact on a simple level with outsiders.

In the past there has been some missionary outreach among the Maco, but it has never been in their own language. The end result has been that the Maco have never understood the gospel message. Their understanding is that to be a Christian means to not drink alcohol, to not listen to any music except Christian choruses, to not dance, to not smoke, and the list goes on and on. They don't understand the concept of faith in God because they have never been taught in their own language.

So that is the situation that our missionary team came into. We started this work in 1992, and our first goal was to learn the Maco language. No outsider had ever learned the Maco language, so we had to start from scratch. There were no dictionaries. There were no books that showed how the grammar structure was put together. There were no language helps whatsoever. In fact, the Maco language didn't even have an alphabet. It fell then to our team to do an in-depth study of every sound the Maco language employs. Then we had to determine which sounds should have their own letter of the alphabet. And finally, we had to determine what letter should be used to represent each of the sounds. This in itself was a long process. Several of us had received training in the science of phonemic analysis, however, so we were prepared to take on the responsibility.

There were several reasons why we felt it was important to develop an alphabet for the Maco language. Having a written form of the language would help preserve it for generations to come. It would allow the Maco to learn how to read and write in their own language and would allow a Bible translation project to be done in the Maco language. It would help educate the Maco people about the art of reading and writing. And it would help us as outsiders better understand the sound system used by the Maco language.

Language learning has been a slow process for us. It has been quite difficult to pin down some of the more complicated aspects of the Maco language. Even now, eight years since we started, there is much that is still a mystery to us. It has been a process of trial and error, and through it all the Maco have been very helpful and very patient and understanding. There are two of us on the team now who speak fairly well, and we are hoping to begin teaching the Word of God to the Maco people sometime in the beginning of 2002.

The reason why our missionary team is living here among the Maco in the first place is because the Maco people asked for missionaries to come teach them God's Word. In fact, for many years the Maco had been asking again and again for missionaries, but until 1992 there had been nobody available to commit to that ministry. So the Maco are very happy that missionaries have finally come to live among them and learn their language and teach them what God's Word says.