MISSIONARIES IN PERU ACCUSTOMED TO NATURAL DANGERS - NOT MAN-MADE ONES

They are deeply religious people from small-town America, called by
their faith to jungle villages along the Amazon river tributaries that
thread through northeastern Peru.

American missionaries have been working here since the 1930s - but
with last week's deadly shooting attack by the Peruvian military on a
missionary plane, their isolated lifestyle has been shaken.

The remote region where they have chosen to spread the gospel is a
transit route for small planes ferrying unrefined cocaine to
neighboring Colombia from coca-growing regions hundreds of miles to
the southwest.

The air force plane's crew mistook the small Cessna for a
drug-smuggling plane on April 20, shooting it down and killing
missionary Roni Bowers and her seven-month-old daughter, Charity.

The pilot, missionary Kevin Donaldson, was seriously wounded in his
legs, but was able to land the pontoon plane on the Amazon. Bowers'
husband Jim and their 6-year-old son Cory survived unhurt.

"When I first heard about it, it made my heart sink because I was
thinking it could have been anybody. I knew them all well," said John
Mortimer, 36, an Evangelical missionary from Wisconsin who has spent
the last 14 years in Peru.

Mortimer spoke in the river hamlet of Bella Vista before saying
prayers in the village church, a simple wooden structure with a
thatched roof and packed-dirt floor.

Under a bare electric light bulb powered by a portable gasoline
generator, he asked several dozen worshippers to pray for peace for
the victims' family.

"We don't know why these things happened to the Bowers," Mortimer said
during his sermon. "But we know that God is in control and has a
reason for everything."

Mortimer used a 20-foot launch to reach Bella Vista - a village cut
out of the jungle along the Tahuayo river, half an hour upstream from
where his houseboat was anchored. His wife and three children, his
father and several members of another American missionary family
accompanied him to the prayer session Tuesday evening.

Like the Bowers family, the Mortimers are river missionaries, spending
most of their time visiting isolated villages on the Amazon and its
tributaries. There are few roads in the tropical rain forests that
spread out from the city of Iquitos, 625 miles northeast of Lima.

For the two dozen or so U.S. missionaries who work in the area, it's a
life of risks. They shrug off encounters with venomous snakes and
anacondas so powerful they can capsize a small boat, as well as
poisonous ants and caterpillars - and even 17-foot catfish big enough
to swallow a man's body.

Perhaps the greatest danger is posed by the terrifying storms that can
strike without warning on the 2-mile wide Amazon, sinking vessels
within minutes.

The risks are worth the rewards, say the missionaries, who bring an
evangelizing message but also try to improve the lives of the people
they seek to win over to their faith.

"Our first responsibility is the Gospel, the salvation message of
repentance in Jesus Christ," said Baptist missionary Larry Hultquist.
"But we need to treat the whole man and in treating the whole man we
need to help them learn new values, help them to become better citizens."

Hultquist, 54, lived with his wife Carolyn in a Yagua Indian village
four hours downriver from Iquitos for eight years before moving back
to town in 1999.

Over the years, missionaries have promoted literacy and hygiene,
provided family counseling and dental and medical care, donated school
supplies and worked to reduce alcoholic abuse. Mortimer has stressed
conservation in his work with villagers along the Amazon.

"We hunt with the brothers. We fish with the brothers. We try to teach
the people to hunt just what they're going to eat, not to sell what
they hunt, to fish what they're going to eat and to be careful to
preserve their natural resources," he said.

This week Mortimer, his father Fred, 58, and Jerry Adams, 45, from
Oklahoma City, spent several days drilling a well for drinking water
in the village of Nueva Esperanza, a tough 45-minute trek into the
jungle from the Tahuayo river.

Their wives remained on the families' two houseboats, anchored
downriver off the village of Esperanza. Connie Adams, 45, and Cindy
Mortimer, 35, kept busy overseeing their children's studies and baking
coconut cream pies as a treat for the men when they returned.

The Adamses have four children, the Mortimers three.

The boys hunt and fish with their fathers and swim every day wherever
the houseboats are tied up. The three teen-age girls in the two
families spend time painting their nails and looking at pictures of
good-looking guys in photo albums.

The teen-agers take obvious pride in their parents' work as
missionaries. Kristen Adams, 19, said she has witnessed "God's
miracles" often along the tributaries of the Amazon. During religious
crusades in the river villages, she said, hundreds of people have come
forth to be healed through prayer and the laying on of hands.

"There are people with tumors the size of basketballs and you watch
them go down in size," she said. "My mom prayed for a little boy who
couldn't hear and had never said a word and he started talking and his
mom just stood there in tears. My mom whispered in his ear in Spanish,
'Glory to God,' and he screamed it back.

"It's awesome to see everything God can do," she said.

Her mother, Connie Adams, was Roni Bowers' best friend.

"My life has changed drastically now, because Roni won't be there when
I go back to port," she said, tears welling up in her eyes. "But I was
in the Oklahoma City bombing. I was across the street in a building
that caved in and God got me through that. I know that either God is
going to protect me, or I'm going to go be with him, and either way
it's OK."