"Missionaries know an Asia seldom seen by journalists," said Bangkok Bureau Chief David DeVoss after this week's cover story on Christian workers overseas had taken him into isolated areas of Borneo and northern Thailand. He witnessed a baptism in a water-buffalo wallow and followed a troupe of Thai students who perform the Nativity for peasants. Eugene Morse and his brother Robert, both missionaries, led DeVoss to a mountain village for a Thanksgiving feast of pork-fried cabbage. And on one cold evening DeVoss accompanied a missionary into a thatch-roofed house and heard him address a dozen squatting men until early morning. Only when DeVoss was leaving did he discover that he had been sitting beneath a fetish shelf of bat wings and chicken feathers in the home of the village's demon priest. Indeed, the story threw many TIME correspondents into unsettling situations. After spending five weeks in Central and South America, sidestepping bushmasters, vampire bats, tarantulas and poisonous caterpillars, New York Correspondent James Wilde began to absorb some of a missionary's faith. Ten times his plane braved door-mat-size jungle airstrips, and ten times Wilde paled while local Christians prayed. Says he: "The missionaries' good luck, like their sense of fulfillment, is contagious. I have never met a group I liked more."

In Indonesia, Hong Kong Bureau Chief Sandra Burton watched a Mennonite missionary weigh bleating goats hung by their hoofs from a hook scale. And in the village of Mulia, in the untramped interior of Irian Jaya, the Indonesian half of New Guinea, she met Missionary Leon Dillinger, photographed for the cover by Roland Neveu.

Suffering from a mild spot of dysentery and a major dose of skepticism, New Delhi Bureau Chief Dean Brelis went to a fetid garbage collectors' dumping ground near Cairo to meet a saintly missionary, Sister Emmanuelle. "A reporter from TIME?" she asked. "What kind of joke is this?" Then she spotted the sloppily bandaged cut hand of Brelis' driver.

She instantly fetched her first-aid kit, cleaned the wound and applied a fresh bandage. Says Brelis: "Somehow, in her company, one thinks less of one's discomforts and more of other people's needs. The garbage collectors' world seemed a little less imperfect for her presence, and that, I think, is a miracle for this day and age."

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