Like this Christian missionary John Allen Chau. Who could oppose the idea of bringing religion to North Sentinel, which is the very definition of a forbidden island? Sitting out there in the Andaman Sea, near the eastern Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal, it's a island where outsiders are not only not welcome but also actively attacked for trying to set foot on that land.
There's a very good reason for this long history of repelling outsiders. The Sentinelese have had no contact with the outside world and their aim is to keep things that way - free of our diseases and our modern technology. North Sentinel is about the size of Manhattan, but the Indian government says no outsiders know the language or the customs of the people there.
Here comes the other side of the coin. Mr Chau would not accept their desire to remain isolated, because it was his desire to bring Christianity to their world. Admirable, sure, on the surface, I suppose, but in practical terms, the Sentinelese saw this as a deadly intrusion, and put him to death. And why did they feel so? Because it would have been deadly for him to enter their space and bring his Space Age American germs and cooties into their pristine world! They don't study anatomy and physiology and all the other things our advanced medical culture has brought us, but they seem to know innately that their immune systems are no match for modern microbes.
It's important to the Indian government that these people live unmolested, so much so that they maintain regular marine patrols to keep the curious and the otherwise motivated at bay. But apparently, Chau was able to hire some local boaters to ferry him onto North Sentinel.
It seems that the locals set upon him with bows, arrows, and spears, and used the same weapons to keep away police who approached the island to find and return Chau's body.
“The Sentinelese were watchful,” Dependra Pathak, the area’s police chief, told the New York Times. “They were patrolling the beach, at the same spot John was killed, with weapons.”
“Had we approached,” he said, “they would have attacked.”
Again with the two sides of everything: Indian law says the North Sentinel culture should be left totally alone and no outsiders are allowed there, but it also calls for murderers to be punished.
So Chau martyred himself for the cause he lived (and died) for, and who knows what kind of good work he might have done in the future among people who were more receptive to the message he sought to bring?
Chau must have realized he was in over his head. He left behind a 13-page letter, saying in part, “I don’t want to die. Who will take my place if I do?”
Exactly.
And yet, in that last letter, Chau left definite instructions: “Don’t retrieve my body,” he wrote, underlining it. “This is not a pointless thing — the eternal lives of this tribe is at hand.”
If only he had realized that earlier.
No comments:
Post a Comment