Feast Day: February 16th
It was 9 a.m. on February 7th, 1996, and Sister Felicita Muthonia Nyaga was going about her morning routine in the mission dispensary near the Catrimani river in the Northwestern part of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. She was a Consolata Missionary Sister, herself originally from Kenya, and that day was working the dispensary alone because the other sisters were 350 kilometers away in the City of Boa Vista. Suddenly a man ran in asking for a rifle or pistol, to which Sister Felicita responded that she was a missionary and did not have one. The man ran off, sister following not knowing what was happening. She made her way to the front of their little mission, at the end of the small airstrip that connected them to the outside world. There, surrounded by a handful of other members of the Yanomami tribe, was Sorino Yanomami, lying in a rapidly spreading pool of blood, his skull horribly torn open.
He, a simple, joyful man with a young wife, a hard worker and good woodsman, had been hunting birds when he was attacked from behind by a jaguar. The animal had mauled Sorino, ripping open his skull, and though he managed to hold off the beast until others could arrive and drive it away, now he was prone on the ground, breathing, barely. Sister recounted later:
I saw Sorino on the ground, in a bloodbath, I remained petrified, frozen and trembling, not knowing what to do. I called his mother and asked for water; then I realized that the scalp was protruding and that Sorino was also bleeding a lot; there was a lot of sand, dirt and part of the brain had spilled out. I pushed the brain in and then took the scalp and put it back, but it kept bleeding; he was alive, but did not speak. Since I hadn’t brought anything with me, I took the only thing I had, the t-shirt I was wearing: I took it off and wrapped it around Sorino’s head, to compress and somewhat stop the bleeding.
She nursed him with what they had on hand: an iv into his foot because the veins in his hands had disappeared, and then radioed to Boa Vista to request a plane to carry him to the hospital. Sister Rosa Aurea Longo answered the call but said all the planes were already out for other emergencies and they would have to wait. The hours crept by, Sorino barely hanging on, and now the locals, led by over a dozen shamans, decided that there was no way he would survive his injuries, and were pressing on sister to allow them to perform the rituals that would carry him into the afterlife. She begged them to let him be taken to the hospital but they were adamant: “‘No, he can’t go to the city. It is very serious, we saw his brain out of his head, and the jaguar ate part of it. But a person without a piece of brain cannot live”. … ‘the spirits are coming for him, he has to say his yes to leave his body and go with them. This cannot happen outside the forest’”.
The men grew angry, pointing their bows and arrows at Sister Felicita who only partially understand what they were shouting about and began to cry. Into the din some of the women of the village stepped between their husbands and the distraught sister, protecting her and explaining the shamanic beliefs of the tribe and their anger at the jaguar. Sorino whispered to sister: “Felicita, you are my mom now. They say I have to go with the spirits, but I don’t want to, do some things because I want to live.” And so she stood her ground, trying to hold off the locals from ushering Sorino into the next life while waiting an agonizing additional two hours for the plane to arrive. When it did, she recounts what she did next: “I was a young sister and so, I carried Sorino on my shoulder and took him to the plane which took off to a hospital in Boa Vista.”
The Yonamami dispersed. Sister occupied herself with radioing what she knew to the team waiting at the hospital and comforting the wife and relatives of Sorino. She returned, finally, to the mission, only to find there the shamans and dozens of warriors with them. They remonstrated with her, explaining that if Sorino died outside of their forest he would be left wandering the afterlife forever. Several of the men planted their arrows in front of her house. “Go into your house. We cannot kill you now because Sorino is not dead, but these arrows we leave here … and if he dies, we will kill you with these.”
Such were the words she carried into their empty chapel, beginning a harrowing vigil of prayer for Sorino. It was the first day of the novena to their founder, the Blessed Giuseppe Allamano.
– Fr. Dominic will return to the Amazon rainforest next week (and eventually to Turin, Italy)!