After six months of horror in the city, Missione Dictio shifted Brother Speck to a pastorage in a remote province called Umbrio. There, in the cool mountain climate where bananas and coffee grew beside the banks of clear, burbling streams, Speck began to put his mind at peace; tried to forget the woeful conditions of the poor in the cities.
There were very few actual duties required of him; simply that he make a weekly round of five Indian villages and record data concerning births and deaths and pregnancies, inoculate children and young mothers against Polio and Tuberculosis, and, of course, try to lead as many natives to baptism as possible.
The Indians seemed to have no trouble accepting Christianity. They hitherto had practiced an altogether fascinating religion that relied in large part upon the application of aromatic plants and the induction of trance states. Speck was particularly avid in his observations of “Kweji” dance festivals.
But the symbolism that supported the Koijoi religion lent itself to a Christian interpretation and it wasn’t very difficult to substitute the Eucharist for Coca leaves.
Serving with Speck at the Mialma retreat was a team of doctors, a dentician, and a pilot/mechanic. Speck was in the field one time with Marfa Riyun, the dentist, checking preteen girls for cavities and charting them on white cards with big red Xs.
Suddenly, three members of the Buena Salidan National Army burst into the clinic and forced everyone to stop smiling. A sister of one of the soldiers was having her teeth examined and he obviously had come to rescue her.
He grabbed her roughly by the front of the shirt and dragged her from the chair. In the process he dashed to the floor half-a-dozen probes and thin glass tubes.
“Aurigola, you stupid girl,” he spat at her, “You give them your name, you tell them where you live, you let them put their dirty fingers into your mouth. Is this the way you were raised?”
Aurigola rubbed her cheek and whined: “But my teeth hurt, Miguel. you don’t know what it’s like. You can’t sleep; not even for a minute. You can’t concentrate in school, you can’t do anything with all this throbbing. The Doctors say they’ll fix it.”
“They’ll fix it!” the soldier spat, “They’ll fix it so they can find you when they want you. They’ll fix it so you won’t remember your Mother’s Father’s name. They’ll fix it so you can’t ever have a baby!” Then, while his companions held their guns trained on Speck and the others, Miguel dumped all the records they could find into a wastebasket and dropped in an incendiary grenade.
The blast killed everyone in the room except for Speck and Marfa Riyun, who were both protected by the lead X-ray shield. An official investigation took eight years and reached no other conclusion than to withhold high explosives from militiamen who hadn’t had the proper training in their safe and appropriate use.
By the end of his eighth year in Buena Salida, Reinhold Speck had found no ground whatsoever to hope for the Salidans’ future. But it was not long after that that he was approached by a gray and compassionate looking man who claimed to represent an international body of religious pacifists that called itself the Omega Coalition. He said that they needed Speck to join their ranks; that they had a plan. Speck smiled and took the gray gentleman’s hand.
“I’d like to hear your plan, Mister—” he prompted. shaking his hand with restrained enthusiasm, the other warmly replied: “Venango. You will call me Archard Venango.”
Title image courtesy Wikimedia Commons: Andes mountains panoramic view (cropped).jpg, Attribution: Photo by Paolo Costa Baldi. License: GFDL/CC-BY-SA 3.0
Accent image public domain.