The excerpt sheds light on the circumstances of Christian evangelization among the Bru through the recollections of a Bru man who was not Christian himself but was in contact with the key protagonists of the events, the missionaries and the evangelized Bru people. The interview reveals on how the evangelized and non-evangelized viewed the evangelists.
What were the ways of promoting evangelization? Were the Bru impressed by the world of the evangelizers? How did the Bru conceive of the evangelizers? How convincing did they find their arguments?
Beside its immanent value, this intercultural encounter has a significance beyond itself insofar as it is situated in and reflective of the icy political and ideological milieu of the Vietnam War in the sβs, the impacts of which were still lingering when the recording was made. In the following, I present a short excerpt from an hour-long Bru life history I recorded in in the Central Vietnamese Highlands. The excerpt sheds light on the circumstances of Christian evangelization and the spread of Christianity among the Bru through the recollections of a Bru man who himself was not Christian but was in contact with the key protagonists of the events: the missionaries and the evangelized Bru people.
For the sake of easier comprehension, a few things should be clarified first. The time is the ss, the hottest phase of the civil war in Vietnam.
Air Force dropped some 60β75, tons of bombs on the town and its surroundings. Their oral history is full of stories about one brother fighting on the northern, the other on the southern side, shooting at each other in the jungle and recognizing each other only after delivering the lethal wound.
