What do traders and NGO’S do for these cultures?

Traders and NGO’s do what any outside third party is going to do to a culture such as the Sawi. In the words of The Scorpions, traders and NGO’s are going to “rock you like a hurricane…” which is about the best explanation that I can come up for the significance that the introduction of traders and NGO’s are going to have on a culture. Think of the results of Cortez on the Native Americans. A pandemic swept across the whole of the societies killing and disrupting the ‘ecosystem’ of the Native Americans. The results are very much the same looking at this situation with Cortez representing the traders or the NGO’s and the Native Americans as exactly what they were, cultures that were isolated from other interaction until some beast upon a horse came riding into their community. However this is looking at the effects of the traders and NGO’s in a very pessimistic way. From the book, relying again on an excerpt from Chapter 8 in which the positives are highlighted and the evidence for why traders and NGO’s are going to exist and why it is necessary for missionaries such as Don and Carol to continue to do their work in these cultures.

Chapter 8, page 102.

“ If I had not been there that day to trigger that salute as an emissary of Christ, someone else’s emissary would have trigger it later, possibly with quite different motives and results. Thos who advocate the world’s remaining tribal groups should be left to themselves do not realize how naïve their notion is! The world just isn’t big enough anymore for anyone to be left alone! It is a foregone conclusion that even if missionaries do not go in to give, lumbermen, crocodile hunters, prospectors, or farmers will still go in to take! The issue is not then should anyone go in, because obviously someone will! The issue is rather, will the most sympathetic person get there first?
As the one who go there first to live among the Sawi, it was my aim to combine faithfulness to God and the Scriptures with respect for the Sawi and their culture. The crucial question was, would the Sawi culture and the Scriptures prove so opposite in their basic premises as to render this two-way loyalty impossible? I intended to find out.
But first I had to build my home.”