The expedition stayed in the valley for a period of time while the scientists onboard collected specimens and data before continuing its journey across the Pacific Ocean. The author describes how the hidden mountain valley and tribe was first discovered in 1938 by scientific expedition from America. Ultimately, though, it talks about how God's spirit moved amongst the Dani people in their formerly hidden valley and an amazing spiritual awakening occurred. It talks about the positive moments as well as the unpleasant moments experienced by the missionaries it also talks about mistakes made and how they went about rectifying those mistakes. It moves at a good pace, overall, even though it does bounce back-and-forth a bit in each chapter. It describes the history of the interaction between Christian missionaries and the Dani people of Dutch New Guinea. I read this for the first time about twentysome years ago I read it again to use as research for a paper for an online course. It was worth reading, but I don’t know that I’d recommend it to strongly just because it was so chaotic. Though the most prominent part is the detailed descriptions of the struggles the missionaries had on the trails. Then there are long passages describing the aim of the Mission organizations and their interaction. There are snippets of individual interaction with the Danis and personal struggles of the missionaries. If you can get around that, it had some really good parts. It was bad enough that for most of the book I didn’t know what point of the story we were actually in. It switches from first-person narrative, to third person narrative, to direct quotes with very little to no indication of what’s going on. So if this missionary is starting a new station it follows him for a while then jumps over to this missionary who is starting to see, but backs up first to when he started his station. But it doesn’t just tell their stories one at a time it jumps back and forth to follow the action. It follows the stories of dozens of missionaries as they reach out to numerous villages over a twenty-year span. Unfortunately, it was one of the most chaotically organized books I’ve ever read.
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