Fear and faith: Inside the last days of an American missionary killed by remote Indian Ocean tribe

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The Washington Post
By Joanna Slater and Annie Gowen
November 22 at 1:39 PM

NEW DELHI — The night before John Chau returned for the last time to India’s remote North Sentinel Island, he struggled with a sense of fear that his death might be imminent.

“I‘m scared,” wrote the 26-year-old American from Washington state, who had traveled to the island on a clandestine mission to convert its inhabitants to Christianity. “Watching the sunset and it’s beautiful — crying a bit . . . wondering if it will be the last sunset I see.”

His initial contacts with the Sentinelese, a tiny tribe of hunter-gatherers who reject contact with the outside world, had not gone well. One teenager shot an arrow at him, which pierced his waterproof Bible.

Yet Chau decided to return to the island and try again, galvanized by the feeling that he was God’s instrument.



In this October 2018 photo, American adventurer John Allen Chau, right, stands for a photograph with Founder of Ubuntu Football Academy Casey Prince, 39, in Cape Town, South Africa. (Sarah Prince/AP)

“Lord, is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have heard or even had the chance to hear your name?” he wrote in a diary of his last days provided to The Washington Post by his mother.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/11/22/fear-faith-inside-last-days-an-american-missionary-killed-by-remote-indian-ocean-tribe/?utm_term=.32ed958ecfa0

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The guy had some kind of obsession with this tribe for a reason nobody knows. If he was truly worried about 'Satan's Stronghold', then why not go to L.A. or San Francisco? Why travel thousands of miles into the middle of nowhere to harass a group of primitive aborigines who aren't hurting anybody? Why business is it of his how these people live or what they believe?

It was a real obsession. And it cost him his life. I believe he was not doing it for God or Jesus or for the people of the tribe. He was doing it for himself. He wanted the fame and notoriety that would come to him if he was successful. Likely he already had a book deal in mind.

No doubt he thought of these people as stupid primitives that he could easily manipulate. He chose poorly.