From the Jungle to the Screen: The Wild Brothers' Unconventional Missionary Childhood

The Wild brothers didn't grow up in suburban America with video games and organized sports. Asher and Martin Wild spent their formative years in the remote highlands of Papua, Indonesia, among the Wano people—a tribe of about 2,000 people living at 7,000 feet altitude with no roads, no electricity, no written language, and no outside contact until their family arrived. Their father, a former beach bum and boat captain from Destin, Florida, had heard about unreached people groups at church and decided that instead of sailing around the world for pleasure, he would take his family to the hardest-to-reach place he could find. "The reason why the unreached are still unreached is because nobody wants to do it," Martin explains. "It's the hardest places."

Building a Life from Nothing

The family didn't fly in for short-term mission trips with matching t-shirts and hotel accommodations. They moved in permanently. The Wano territory was so inaccessible that helicopters had to land on a tiny carved-out spot on a mountain top. The family built their house from jungle materials—bark floors, carved wooden boards, thatched roofs. There were no stores, no hardware supplies, no outside labor to hire. "What else would you do? There's nothing else out there," Asher says matter-of-factly.