Most girls dream of becoming royalty, but few have the opportunity to realize that dream. For Naomi and Hannah Jansen, teenage daughters of Southern Baptist missionaries among an unreached tribe in South America, it wasn’t quite like the fairy tale of wearing bedazzled ball gowns and living in spacious castles.
Their skin and hair were what was decorated when they were inducted by the tribe to be ceremonial queens of the village, tribal peacemakers who hold positions of honor and reflect a high level of respect given to their parents.
The most notable sign a girl has been deemed a village queen is that locals are not supposed to argue in her presence or it brings shame upon the families. Naomi and Hannah haven’t been called into service yet, but they know their role is to silence an argument should one erupt among villagers.
“The main reason they wanted me and my sister to do this was because they respected my father,” Naomi said. “For someone’s daughters to be queens, it’s a huge honor for the parents.”
Adopted into a family
Besides Naomi and Hannah’s honorary status, each member of the missionary family has been adopted into a family within the tribe, including their father, Jacob.
“When someone comes into this village, they like to adopt you to accept you as one of them … so they’ll know who you are, where you fit in,” Naomi explained.
As part of being introduced into this familial society, villagers ask: Who is your family here? Who is your mother here?
Jacob said, “Until they know who your mother is, they really don’t know where you fit in. We were each adopted so that we would have a mother and a family that we fit into, and then everyone knows their relationship with us. They know whether to treat us as an uncle, nephew or brother.”
The International Mission Board missionaries thought they knew a little about rural living. But there’s rural and then there’s remote — the family is about four hours away from any kind of supplies.
Cooperative effort
Despite their honorary titles as village queens, Naomi and Hannah help their mother with cooking and other chores — no princess complexes allowed here. The couple’s son, youngest daughter and Jacob similarly pitch in with household duties. As with the villagers, most everything is a cooperative effort.
The people group the family works with is unreached with less than 2 percent of its population being evangelical Christian. The ethnic religion is deeply rooted in the people’s identity and conversion to Christianity can equate to feeling separated from one’s culture.
Language learning is a hurdle for the Jansens, since villagers speak a tribal language different from the region’s primary language.
When Jacob tells Bible stories in the village, a member of his adopted family translates the stories into the tribal language. Jacob tells stories chronologically from Old Testament to New Testament to give the people a fuller understanding of God’s Word, since most don’t read.
“The only way they can really have their hearts opened in a good way is to hear the stories of God in their own language,” Jacob said. “So we are motivated, we are driven, not by our desire to learn another language but by our desire to communicate clearly the gospel.”
So far six believers in the village have been baptized and meet together weekly.
EDITOR’S NOTE — Names changed for security reasons. (BP)
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