On this episode, Missionary/author, Michael Dawson shares about his adventure growing up and serving God in the Amazon jungle.
Michael Dawson’s website Website: mpaviation.org
Michael Dawson is a missionary to the Yanomamö Indians in the Amazonas region of Venezuela. Michael was born in the middle of the Amazon jungle at TamaTama, a small mission base hacked out of the rainforest on the banks of the Orinoco river. He is the 5th of 10 children born to Joe and Millie Dawson who were among the first missionaries to the Yanomamo tribe. His first language was Yanomamö and he learned English when he was 7 years old.
After graduating high school he worked for two years on the upper Orinoco river system taking portions of the New Testament to remote villages. The Yanomamö language contains many dialects and his purpose was to determine in what regions of the Yanomamo region that the current translation was understandable dialectally. He returned to the US for Bible School training in 1976 and finished missionary training in 79. He then spent a year in flight training. He married Renée Pintor in September, 1980 and they left for Venezuela in January of 1981. They worked disciplining new Yanomamö believers, traveling with them to different villages showing them how to evangelize their own people. They have three boys, Joshua, Ryan and Stephen. In June of 1992 Renée went to be with the Lord after an attack of cerebral malaria. Michael was also stricken at the same time. They were both evacuated to Caracas, but Renée did not recover. She is buried in the base village of Coshilowäteli. On her headstone are the words “She lives in our hearts as a penetrating reminder that not only is Christ worth living for, He is worth dying for.”
Mike continued working with the Yanomamö. In Oct of 1994 he married Keila and they now have two daughters. Mikeila and Mia. In 1998 they began working on an experimental airplane to be used as a part of an integrated outreach plan to reach the entire Yanomamo people. Travel is difficult and, many times dangerous in the jungle. While distances are not that great, it can take days to get from one village to the next. The airplane was put in service in January of 2002 and has been a tremendous blessing to the outreach ministry, allowing contact with remote villages that would never have been reached any other way. The experimental airplane, while demonstrating the critical value of flight in the outreach program, has been shut down as the government closed all jungle airstrips in Febuary of 2006. On the 12th of Janury, 2006, Mikeila Reneé, Mike and Keila’s five year old daughter went to be with the Lord. She became ill at about 1:00 AM and went unconscious at 9 AM. She passed away at about 2 PM. Michael had left on the 10th for the annual mission board meeting in the USA and was not in the village at that time. They currently have no air support since the 12th of February 2006 and are scrambling to fill this void. They are making both short and long term plans to meet this need. Continue to work towards getting permission to start flying their Zenair CH 801 again. However, since airstips in most Indian villages have been shut down since 2006, most of them have gone back to jungle. The government refuses to aprove reopening jungle airstrips.
They have purchased, as a mission, a Cessna 206 and their son Ryan has trained to be the mission pilot. Due to the fact Venezuela refuses to allow the mission to import the airplane, Ryan and family have gone on loan to SAMAIR, a missionary organization flying in Peru and Bolivia. He is on loan for a term while waiting for a change in Venezuela. Michael continues working in the outreach ministry and in the seminars for believers from far flung villages. In their outreach program they use the Jesus Movie, Passion Of the Christ and God’s Story, from Creation to Eternity, all three translated into Yanomamö by Mike and Yanomamö believers. They have also started using an audio Bible called a Torch which we get from RENEW Outreach. These are very handy in villages where there are no readers as they can listen to the New Testament in their own language along with other lessons in Yanomamö. While being a wife and mother in the jungle, which, honestly, is a full time job, Keila is the director of the school for Yanomamö children and also teaches in the pre-school.