A Life Well-lived

Last week, my wife awoke with a premonition that someone close had passed away. My wife doesn’t have these premonitions often, but this was not the first premonition she had that preceded news of a friend passing away.

Opening her computer, she found Randy Borman’s obituary. Randy Borman is certainly not a household name, but is a genuine saint in my wife’s estimation, and mine as well.

My wife met Randy in the Ecuadorian jungle in the summer of 1968, when she was a college intern with a missionary organization. My wife was nineteen at the time and Randy was thirteen. She worked closely with Randy’s parents and respected them. One of my wife’s fondest memories was accompanying the Bormans to Dureno, the tribal home of the Cofan people.

The Bormans were not the typical missionaries whom my wife met. My wife found some of the other missionaries, especially the support staff, condescending towards and exploitive of tribal people. In contrast, she found the missionaries who lived with and worked directly with the tribes to be sympathetic and respectful.

Fast forward twenty-five years, when my wife read an article in the Chicago Tribune about a major exhibit of Cofan culture at Chicago’s Field Museum. To her surprise, she read that the new chief in the Cofan tribe was Randy Borman.

The story that explains how and why Randy became the chief is a sad one. The larger missionary organization had been kicked out of the country in 1981 by the government for colluding with oil companies. Because of the destruction of their ancestral territory, the Cofan people were dispersed into the forest, isolated and without leadership.

In that moment of crisis, Randy left the Midwestern university he was attending and returned to Ecuador to fight for the people who had raised him. Randy learned about land rights and fought in the nation’s courts to secure the first legal recognition of Cofan lands in 1992. He first achieved recognition of 200,000 acres for the Cofan people. Today, the Cofan people have over a million protected acres. While deforestation has occurred all across Ecuador, Cofan land protects some of the greatest biodiversity on the planet.

Randy married a Cofan woman and raised a family in the tribe. He was frequently threatened, and one son was kidnapped and held for forty days before escaping. Randy along with many Cofan members contracted diseases caused by the oil company’s poisoning of the river and land. He nearly died in his forties of encephalitis and survived multiple bouts of cancer before dying February 17th.

Randy left an enduring legacy. The Cofan are a model for other Amazonian tribes of successful land management, and a son Felipe carries on his father’s work. If you find Randy’s life inspiring, you can learn more about what the Cofan are doing and contribute online to the Cofan Survival Fund (www.cofan.org.).

Several weeks ago, I wrote a column on saints, persons who often go largely unnoticed in their own time but who leave an enduring light in the world. Saints like Randy remind us that it isn’t how long a person lives that is important, but how full of meaning one’s life is. May Randy Borman’s memory be eternal.