Two Women from the Forest

“And I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not; I will lead them in paths that they have not known: I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight. These things will I do unto them, and not forsake them.” — Isaiah 42:16 (KJV)

When the way to the Waorani finally opened, it didn't come through any missionary plan. It came through three Waorani women.

The first was Dayuma. Years before Palm Beach, after members of her family were killed in the feuding, she had fled the forest. She ended up working on a farm in the foothills in conditions close to slavery, cut off from her people and sure she could never safely go back. Nate Saint's sister Rachel, a missionary with Wycliffe Bible Translators, had been living there, learning the Waorani language from her. In 1957 Rachel took Dayuma to the United States, where they appeared on national television and at Billy Graham's huge meeting in New York. Dayuma professed faith in Christ. For many American Christians she became living proof that the story would have a happy ending. The attention was intense, and some who knew both women later wondered whether it had been good for either of them.

Elisabeth had nothing to do with any of that. In November 1957 she was at Arajuno when two Quichua men arrived with startling news: two Waorani women had walked out of the forest and were at their house. She went at once.

Their names were Mankamu and Mintaka. They were older women, by most accounts relatives of Dayuma, and nobody outside ever fully understood why they came. Some said they wanted to know what had happened to Dayuma, and that the killing among their own people had made them willing to risk the outside world. And Mintaka was the older woman who had stood on the sandbar on 6 January 1956 with the five men, on the last Friday of their lives.

Elisabeth took them home to Shandia. For about ten months the two women lived with her and Valerie. She gave them food, shelter and care. Without quite meaning to, they gave her what she needed most: their language. It was the hardest language task of her life. Waorani is unrelated to any other known language. There was no grammar, no dictionary, and the two women had never been asked to explain their language to anyone. Day after day she listened, wrote and guessed, and was reminded how little she knew.

To her they weren't specimens to study or converts waiting to happen. They were people, with their own humour, sorrows and opinions. Later, her writing about the Waorani refused both to make them noble innocents and to make them monsters. She had learned that partly by living with Mintaka and Mankamu.

In 1958 Rachel and Dayuma came back to Ecuador, and Dayuma met the first people from her own tribe she had seen in more than ten years. On 3 September 1958, by the date usually given, Dayuma, Mintaka and Mankamu walked into the forest together. Nobody knew if they would come back. About three weeks later they did, with a party of Waorani men and women. Dayuma's people were alive. They had listened. And they had sent an invitation: Elisabeth and Rachel could come and live with them.

What Jim and his friends had prayed for came in a way none of them could have planned: not a plane and a loudspeaker, but a widow who opened her home and an exile who went home with news. Isaiah says God leads people “by a way that they knew not.” No one in this chapter could see far ahead. But their paths met.

Sometimes God's biggest doors open through the most ordinary kindness: a meal, a spare room, patience with someone who doesn't speak your language. The stranger at your door might be part of the story God is writing.

One thing to do this week: find someone who is new or on the outside, at school, at church or in your neighbourhood. Learn to say their name properly and spend real time with them, not as a project but as a person.