Education: Alphabet for Amueshas

Among the Amuesha Indians, who live near the jungle-bound foothills of the Peruvian Andes, a respected teacher does not get a tribute of apples; she gets worms. Brown-haired, 33-year-old Martha Duff, a Baptist missionary, linguist vacationing at her home in Oral, Tenn. after five years of teaching the Amueshas, recalls: "We were sitting around a fire when several little boys came in. They had found some big fat worms and were about to get into a fight over them. Their mother took over; the worms were put on sticks and left long enough over a fire to get warm, not too hot. The mother rescued one worm and held it over to me, saying, 'You just try this; you haven't had anything yet.' It tasted somewhat like bacon."

Worms notwithstanding, Teacher Duff plans to end her year-long Stateside furlough this month, fly back to continue educating the Amueshas. Her task: to teach the Indians to read, to transcribe literature—including the Bible—into Amuesha. using a phonetic alphabet she helped devise.

Sun Worshipers. Base camp for Teacher Duff's job is the jungle outpost of Yarinacocha. Bush planes fly the Tennessee teacher and her partner, Florida-reared Mary Ruth Wise, to the vicinity of Amuesha villages, land on the rivers. From there the journeys are by foot or raft. For three months each year, the women return to Yarinacocha with likely Indian prospects, help turn the natives into teachers. The Peruvian government pays salaries of Indian teachers and helps finance the base settlement, but Teacher Duff and fellow linguists who work with other tribes are supported by Wycliffe Bible Translators, Inc., a U.S. interdenominational missionary enterprise.

Martha Duff saw her first Amuesha Indians from the window of a float plane. "I wasn't too sure I wanted to step outside," she recalls. "Then as I stepped off the plane, one little girl took me by the hand and talked to me in her Indian language. I could tell she wanted to be friends." The Amueshas, it turned out. were peaceful sun worshipers—their only word for the sun is "our father"—who took to the idea of school enthusiastically. They are perfectly willing, for instance, to catch a particular variety of fish so that it can be photographed, sketched by artists at Yarinacocha, and reproduced in a primer.

Soncor Bird. Indian children, when they are not worm hunting, turn out willingly for school, before long learn to write respectable essays. One of them: "I am the soncor bird. I live in the forest where there are no people. I eat the pasarochllom seed. Wherever I see the pasarochllom seed, that is the thing I will eat a lot of. My coat appears like a cloud. My coat is white dotted like the clouds. My children appear like the sky. I live with my children in the forest. My children are very much crybabies if their mother leaves them. Thus cry my children: 'Cheb, cheb, cheb.' I sleep high in a tree. When it is late in the afternoon I sing thus: 'Snhocroro, schoncro, schoncro.' "

For Martha Duff, a fragment of another essay might be ample justification for a life spent in the jungle: "This is my school . . . Here some time ago I came ... I didn't know a thing then . . . Now, already, I know several things."