Special effort has also been made to witness to people who live along the rivers. Often, their only physical contact with the rest of the world is by boat. So by 1992 the Society had built a boat with room for a crew of four. They began a systematic campaign to look for sheeplike people along the banks of the rivers. Appropriately the boat is named The Pioneer.

“Traversing the Paraguay River,” writes the brother in charge of the group, “we arrived at Puerto Fonciere, 300 miles [483 km] from Asunción, and began preaching from house to house. In the course of a conversation with an elderly woman, we mentioned that God had said he would destroy all wickedness, and as Jehovah’s Witnesses, we were informing the people that God would do this through his Kingdom. Interrupting the conversation, the woman turned to her granddaughter and told her to call her grandfather and tell him that ‘his people’ had arrived. Shortly the grandfather, a man in his 70’s, came. He was perspiring, since he had been working on his farm. He greeted us warmly, and with tear-filled eyes, he thanked God that we had finally arrived. He said that he had been waiting for our visit for some time. Somewhat puzzled, we asked for an explanation. He replied that a certain military captain from the island Peña Hermosa had given him a Bible and the book ‘Things in Which It Is Impossible for God to Lie.’ The captain had marked several Bible texts, such as Psalm 37:10, 11 and Psalm 83:18, and had told him that some day Jehovah’s Witnesses would arrive at his home to tell him more of Jehovah’s purposes. A Bible study was started immediately.”

To date the boat has covered, at least twice, all the territory along the banks of the Paraguay River from the Bolivian border on the north to the Argentine border on the south, a total distance of some 785 miles [1,260 km].

The boat “El Pionero” on the Paraguay River