Impact Story Two

As we got ready for our new adventure, we wrote a couple of news letters sharing what we would be doing on the mission field. In one of those letters we communicated a list of injustice issues we were going to be involved with. One of those issues was infanticide. Now if you are like me, when I read this word for the first time, I didn’t have a clue what it meant. It wasn’t until I watched a Youtube video of my leaders, being interviewed, that I found out about the terrible practice of infanticide.

I was taken back when I heard that in the Amazon, many indigenous tribes will kill their children if they think there is something wrong with them. For most tribes it is when they feel as though the child has no soul or they believe they are possessed by an evil spirit. This awful belief makes many children at risk for infanticide. Those born out of wedlock, a child who is born as a twin or triplet, or one with a physical handicap are those who suffer this fate. The horror of their death is being buried alive. They do this to make sure the last breath the child breathes cannot pass the evil spirit onto someone else.

We heard first hand this past week from Susi how she came to know about this issue. It came after she had been given the opportunity to photograph an indigenous tribe that had never before been photographed. A year or two after her return the missionary to this specific tribe came to Hawaii and presented this injustice of infanticide. Susi, with her passion, asked if she could help in some way. The missionary’s response was, come back and photograph the tribe again. What you must know about Susi is that she has dedicated her photography to God and the pictures she took the first time, God asked her to give to the missionaries working with indigenous tribes. So, in giving her photos away, they had been so used, the missionary needed a new set of photos to raise awareness of the work they were doing with the tribes and the issues they faced.
Susi decided to make another trip to the Amazon, with a team of photographers, in order to photograph the tribe again. Shortly there after, Susi found out she was pregnant. With this new development, Susi decided not to go, because she didn’t want to jeopardize this new life. For you have to understand, Susi last pregnancy ended in a miscarriage and she didn’t want that to happen again.