Redemption in the Rain Forest : Ex-Missionary Works to Ease Amazon Indians Into the Present

As a novice missionary 44 years ago, Otto Austel trekked to the maw of the Amazon wilderness to save the soul of a people who danced with the spirits of the jungle.

Now he seeks atonement.

Choking back tears as autumn leaves eddied outside his Simi Valley estate, the 65-year-old physician told of a rent to the soul that bound him to a people and drove him to medicine. It was brought on not by the demons of the forest but by a dying child’s haunting innocence: “Why did God make mosquitoes? Why did God make malaria?”

It was 1959. Martin Austel, born eight years earlier in Brazil, looked up from his sickbed in the one-room hut that his father had erected at the edge of the jungle and muttered, “Dad, I love you,” before taking his final breath.

Not long after settling his firstborn deep into the Brazilian earth, Otto Austel looked back into the eyes of the Indians that he had so feverishly tried to befriend since 1950 and saw that they, too, were slipping away from him, their culture on its deathbed.

One reason was Austel and his bedeviling ways of the West.

“I guess I’m trying to undo a lot of my mistakes,” said Austel, a brisk and still sinewy man who excelled as a high school gymnast. “I had a number of converts, very strong converts, but I think they converted me more. . . . Rather than changing them now, I’m trying to help them retain their culture.”

Five times since 1990, Austel has journeyed back up the Araguaia River, back into the heart of the world’s largest rain forest and into the embrace of the Karaja Indians he left in 1960. Only the stomach-churning sight of his son’s grave near the decaying family home darkened the reunion 35 years after Martin’s death.

“They hadn’t forgotten me,” Austel said quietly, recalling the Karaja who greeted him not far from the grave. “They came and hugged me and cried.”

Although no longer a missionary, Austel has taken on no less of a mission in his fitful twilight years. His message, as urgent and unwavering as any during his youthful calling, is both an indictment and an injunction.

“I think we have to recognize the destructiveness of progress,” Austel said, flanked in his lavish living room by antique furniture, a baby grand piano and a cello he had played as a child in Los Angeles. “We feel might is right. We have the strength and so we conquer.”

Against this free-enterprise energy, this blend of action and noise in which the spoils go to the strong, the Karaja have little chance, Austel said. He said theirs is not a competitive world. It is communal. The family, the group, the village overshadow the individual hunter, the individual child. Everybody shares.

“Much is being said about the destruction of the rain forest,” Austel said. “(But) very little concern is shown for the survival of these cultures that are becoming extinct. To my knowledge, there’s more money spent to save the condor and the spotted owl than to save all the Indians of Brazil.”

So his mission, Austel said, is to help ease the Karaja into the modern world.

Crediting the nonpolitical Rotary International with turning his life around, Austel said he and several other Rotarians have been traveling to Brazil once or twice a year to minister to the Indians’ medical, dental and nutritional needs. He has inspired his fellow Rotarians in Brazil to do the same.

“The Rotary motto is ‘Service above self,’ to look beyond yourself,” said Austel, a man versed in chess and astronomy, bonsai horticulture and downhill skiing. “Those are the principles I accept.”

With him on his latest pilgrimage, which ended June 29, were Simi Valley dentist Ken Kolz and his 20-year-old daughter, Michelle Kolz. She served as dental technician during her father’s examinations of Karaja children, their tiny mouths lit by flashlight.

Vivid even now, Michelle Kolz said, is a nighttime river passage in which she and the others returned from Macuaba, a Karaja village about 325 miles northwest of Brasilia.

“It was just like the jungle boat ride at Disneyland,” she said. “It was amazing. . . . We had to hold up a big light so we could find our way back.”

As the jungle closed in on them, their 14-foot skiff slid through an edgy darkness pierced by the glow of alligator eyes and the cool winking of stars through the canopy of trees. Creatures of the forest--monkeys, insects, frogs--gave out the cry and murmur of another time, she said.

“They’ll never be able to go back (to the past),” Austel said of the Karaja. “That’s the deal with progress. The problem is healing them through this transition.”

With each buzz of the chain saw and each plume of smoke, the Karaja are finding themselves in an ever-shrinking and ever-baffling environment, he said. They have new diets, new ways of eking out a living, new problems.

No longer can they move from campsite to campsite, so they must dig latrines and drill for water, Austel said. No longer can they harvest enough fish with arrows, so they often resort to gill nets.

No longer can they work just three hours a day for survival needs, so they invest less time in reaffirming the ties of family and friendship that had long bound them against the outside world.

“They just enjoyed life,” Austel said.

Intoxicated now by consumer goods--clothes, toiletries, radios--the Karaja are being corrupted, too, by 20th-Century temptations that are beyond their reach because they lack the skills to get a paying job.

“We’ve taken away all these lands and the chances of all these (Indian) nations of living a life of their choice,” Austel said. “They’re literally being forced to accept civilization or else live a life of poverty or extinction.”

During his latest two-month visit, Austel and his fellow volunteers offered their services to nine Indian villages. They treated illnesses. They cleaned teeth. They helped build outhouses. They helped plant fruit trees--papaya, avocado, citrus--to fortify the diet of the Karaja.

They also gave the Indians an X-ray machine, equipment for eyeglasses, 1,500 toothbrushes and irrigation pumps for farming, which Austel helped introduce to the Karaja four decades ago.

More importantly, Austel said, the volunteers taught the Indians how to better care for themselves medically. They showed them how to diagnose ailments, suture wounds and screen for malaria. It was a complication of malaria--black-water fever--that claimed Martin Austel three decades ago.

It is also what got Austel into medicine.

An intensely driven missionary from Los Angeles, Austel had focused first on saving souls. But he did not fully grasp the flesh-and-blood Indians, he said, until his son’s passing gave him the vision to see that they, too, had their own children whose deaths would leave them no less devastated.

Remarkably, for a man who had baptized their young in the muddy river and helped bury their dead by its banks, “this was a revelation,” Austel said.

Another revelation was the fact that the Indians, so deathly vulnerable to such Western illnesses as chicken pox and measles, had no doctor within 1 million square miles of rain forest in 1959.

Unable to lure a physician to serve the Karaja, Austel finally resolved to become a doctor himself. He could not help his son, but maybe he could help the sons and daughters of the Karaja.

“My son was so important to me,” Austel said in a broken voice, “so very, very important.”

In April, 1950, when Austel had first penetrated the interior with his wife, Dreda, all he had were Bibles and the burning certitude that he must wrest the savages from the darkness and bathe them in the light of a Western god. A trained linguist, he was also charged with capturing their native tongue on paper.

“The idea was that if (we) taught them to read and write, (the Indians) could read the Bible and that would save their souls,” Austel said.

Chastened four decades later, he added, “but what good is learning how to read and write, when this is a people who must learn about the land, the animals, the trees? That’s their world. That’s what they know.”

After his second five-year missionary tour ended in 1960, Austel brought his wife and their two sons back to Southern California. He worked as an insurance agent while attending Cal State Los Angeles for his undergraduate degree and what is now UC Irvine for his medical degree in 1967.

But the Brazilian army, adhering to a shift in political winds since Austel’s missionary years, blocked access to the interior in the 1960s.

Settling instead on a career at home, Austel moved his family, now including another son, to Simi Valley in 1969 and founded the Family Health Care Medical Group, which has about 30 physicians and 40,000 patients. He and Dreda divorced in 1973.

“His intention was always to go back to Brazil,” said his second wife, Sharon Austel, 48, who accompanied Austel on his first return to the Karaja in 1990.

But the Indians’ world had radically changed.

“Now they have to go into the jungles and slash and burn and plant,” Otto Austel said. “It’s a tremendous amount of hard work . . . and they’re getting minimal results.”

When the Karaja look up at the sky during sunset, they are, in effect, looking at their past world, at the ash and smoke remnants of vanished trees.

“The sunsets are much prettier than they were before,” Austel said. “But it’s at a high cost.”