The Man Who Quit Money by Mark Sundeen Page A

when I need reassurance, no matter what time of year it is or where I am: I saw a rainbow. Yes, a rainbow right there above the clouds. God’s promise of reassurance to mankind. God’s sign of peace, and His Covenant between Heaven & Earth.
    What’s absent from Suelo’s letters is the tone that would become emblematic of his generation: irony. His reports range from the aw-shucks delight of a rube (“The bananas are delicious here!”) to the wide-eyed bedazzlement of an innocent abroad (“The churches are especially beautiful, intricately carved on the outside, towering in spires toward the sky, and full of paintings and gold-plated sculptures”) to the stirrings of conscience of a son of empire: “It is hard to tell how much of the coldness is due to the communist propaganda against ‘Yankees.’ It is also true that there are many foreign corporations & oil companies totally exploiting the people here.”
    Suelo had none of the jaded worldliness of his peers. His fellow Peace Corps volunteer Corinne Pochitaloff says, “He was a devout and spiritual young man, more contemplative of a person than the rest of us. He was moved and distressed by the state of affairs of the Amazon and I remember feeling that he would take action in the future. He was a force of good.”
    What I find most powerful is his earnest wrestling with faith. He wrote to his parents: “We have talked about how the Indians from North America to South America have beenpushed around and massacred through the centuries and how these facts are conveniently left out of our history books in public schools both in the USA and here in Latin America. We must pray that the Love of Christ covers the multitudes of sins on our hands so that people will no longer notice our evil but our good.”
    The next blow to his religious convictions came when he and Corinne went to visit a missionary who knew Daniel’s family. Envisioning some swashbuckler in a jungle hut surrounded by natives in loincloths, Suelo was alarmed by what he discovered.
    “He was in this huge suburban house surrounded by barbed wire to keep people out,” Suelo remembers. “He talked about what he was doing with the indigenous people in the jungle, mostly the Huaorani and the Quechua.” The missionary, with the blessing of the Ecuadoran government, had gone into the cattle business, shipping a herd from North America. He had brokered a deal with his converts: if they raised and fed his cattle, the government would grant them a plot of jungle, and the converts would be entitled to keep every other generation of calves. The alternating generation would be added to the American’s herd.
    “Before we came here the Indians had the whole family sleeping in one bed, and they didn’t have radios or TVs,” boasted the missionary. “Now the Christian Indians are the richest in the jungle.”
    “This is why governments all over the world love missionaries—they civilize people and get them into the money system,” Suelo observes now, but at the time he was flabbergasted. What of Jesus’s teaching his followers to give up possessions? “And suddenly it dawned on me: if you were going to call something Antichrist, this would be it. The people who were promoting this so-called Christianity are really Antichrist.”
    What’s more, with each acre of land doled out to ranching, more jungle was clear-cut. And after just a few years of grazing, the land was unusable, turned into desert.
    “What about the jungle?” Daniel asked.
    “It’s infinite,” said the missionary. “If you’re up in a plane, look at the Amazon. It goes on for miles.”
    Daniel took a scenic flight over the Amazon. “It looked like Paul Bunyan had taken a razor blade to it.”
    On the way back to Quito, Suelo juggled the contradictions. On the one hand, the missionary was doing some tangible good work for the Indians—fighting for their legal rights, promoting their education. On the other hand, introducing them to