Don’t Spill the Blood

The following is a read aloud story for April 2005. This is one of a series of stories especially written for Awana Clubs, home-schoolers, Sunday school classes, VBS, mission conferences, or just the fun of reading about children in a wild land called: “The Amazon Rain Forest”. Print them out. Collect them. E-mail them to others who have children and would like to get these stories. Use them for the glory of God! The Asheninca people, one of the many great Amazon Rain Forest tribes, have lived for centuries in a world of superstition and fear. The following months of stories, as I catch up, will be based around the actual observations I made while living in Ridge Village, on the Breu River, with the Asheninca people. Mo-SEE-ro, is an actual 10-year-old girl whom I watched and she has become the main character in this series of stories.

The old story teller, Douemi (Dough-way-MEE)
(Missionary/cultural observer with the Amazon tribes for many years)
Serving with New Tribes Mission, Sanford, Florida

Black eyes searched the forest and looked for fruit. Mosiro brushed back her black hair and scratched automatically at the bites and itches she felt on her scalp. She had never known a time that she hadn’t had lice in her hair and like all of her people it had just become a way of life to endure the little bites. There were, of course, those times when someone would have her sit just so they could search her hair for the lice and their eggs and then catch one and crack its back in their teeth. She hadn’t anyone right now to “crack lice”, so she just scratched and went on looking for fruit.
“Eenspockie! Eenspockie!” someone called from another part of the forest and everyone crashed through the brush to get there. EenSPAqui is a wonderful fruit that hangs down from trees in long pods and quite often the pods are so fat that they burst. Inside are seeds encased in a sweet white cottony fruit…in fact some call Eenspaqui “God’s cotton candy”. The delicious white fruit seemed to melt in Mosiro’s mouth and it was so good. She forgot her head lice for a few enjoyable minutes!
Back the happy wanderers went to their village on the crest of a ridge. They had made leaf baskets to carry the eenspaqui back home. As they approached the village they could hear old Ahoni (Ah-HOE-knee) shouting angrily! Oh dear, what had happened? Others were also shouting and as the little group of fruit-gatherers entered the village they saw everyone standing around the old mother pig. Ahoni had his bow and arrows in his hand, but the pig had already felt the arrow plunged through its heart.
Ahoni was truly upset and shouting out great curses on the pig. It became clear soon that the mother pig had taken her family of seven or eight little pigs on a trail that lead to the Asheninca gardens. Mother pig, like the Asheninca children, had been just foraging for food, and when she got in that potato garden she put her nose down and plowed up piles of potatoes for her family! But it is OK for children to go looking for fruit in the forest and it is definitely not acceptable for pigs to be pigs!!! Ahoni caught her in her crime and soon passed the death sentence on her!!! Now she would be pork in the pot!
Mosiro stood near the dead pig and watched with wide eyes as Ahoni drew a knife and was preparing to slit the pig’s throat. “Mosiro! Get a dish for the blood! Go quickly!” Off she raced to the nearest house and came back with bowl-like dish. In went the knife and the blood spurted out and into her bowl. “Mosiro! Don’t spill the blood! Walk carefully with it! Don’t spill the blood!”
There she stood. The bowl was full of pig blood to it’s rim and she was hanging on with both hands and trying to walk as carefully as possible to the house. And the lice were biting! Oh dear, how they were making her head itch. But she couldn’t raise her hand or she would spill the blood! She couldn’t hurry either or she would stumble and then Ahoni would be as mad at her as he was with mother pig. How her head itched! She slowly walked across the yard and never spilled a drop of that blood. Then she sat and scratched and scratched and scratched at those nasty lice who never let her alone.
Blood! What were the Asheninca people going to do with that bowl of blood? They use about everything imaginable in their meals, so the blood would undoubtedly be a savory dish of some kind. Blood pudding? The Bible talks a lot about blood too. But the most precious passages speak of the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ that was shed on the Cross for our sins! And we love to sing that old hymn, “There is Power in the blood!” The writer of the book of Hebrews in the Bible tells us in chapter 9 verses 13 and 14 that the blood of bulls, and goats…and definitely pigs…cannot save us. But he says that the blood of Christ can transform our lives and make us children of God! Mosiro has NEVER heard that the blood of Jesus was “spilled” on the Cross for her sins. No one has told her that yet in her language. Pray for this little girl of the jungles that she might grow up to to know about the blood of Jesus, her redeemer.