Quichua First

“Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”

— Ruth 1:16, KJV

Quito, January 1953

Late in January 1953 Jim Elliot came up from the eastern forest to Quito, and Elisabeth came up from the western forest to meet him there. For five years their friendship had moved by inches. There had been the long letters, the careful silences, the meetings that ended without anything being said, and Jim’s repeated conviction that he must not ask her for anything until he was sure that God was not calling him to stay single. She had learned to live with that uncertainty, and to work hard while she lived with it.

In Quito Jim asked her to marry him, and she said yes. It was the end of a long road for both of them, and those who later read the letters of those years, edited by their daughter, have been struck by how little either of them presumed on it. Neither treated the engagement as God’s reward for having waited. They treated it as a new piece of obedience, with its own costs.

The first of those costs became clear almost at once. Jim did not want them to marry quickly. He was committed to the Quichua people of the eastern forest, the lowland speakers of a language related to the Quechua of the Andes, and he believed that a wife who could not speak to them would be of little use to the work and would be lonely in it. He asked Elisabeth to learn Quichua first. Only when she could speak it would they set a date.

The Condition

Many readers, meeting this condition for the first time, have found it hard. A man who had kept a woman waiting for five years now asked her to wait again, and to spend the waiting learning a language that was not the one she had come to Ecuador to study. It is fair to say that the arrangement suited Jim’s plans more than hers, and that it reflected his strong, sometimes impatient single-mindedness. It is also fair to say that she agreed to it freely, and that she never afterwards described it as a grievance. She was a trained linguist. She knew better than he did how long it takes to learn a language well, and how easily a missionary can live for years among a people while understanding very little of what they say. If she was to share his work, she wanted to share it properly.

Agreeing to Jim’s condition meant leaving San Miguel. The previous chapter has told how her months among the Colorado people ended in loss. It is enough to say here that she went east into a new language and a new people knowing that the same thing could happen again, and that the Colorado work was left to the colleagues who stayed.

A New Language

Lowland Quichua was a different proposition from Colorado. It was not an unwritten language in quite the same sense. Missionaries and Catholic priests had worked with Quechua speakers for centuries, and there were word lists, some grammar and some Scripture in the highland forms of the language. But the forest dialect of the Napo region had its own sounds and words, and much of what had been written did not fit it. A learner had to listen, write down what she heard, test it on the people, and correct herself again and again. Elisabeth had been trained to do exactly that. Early in the summer of 1953 she moved to the mission station at Dos Ríos, in the eastern forest, worked with Quichua helpers there, and set about making the language her own.

The sources do not record every move she made in these months, and this book does not try to supply them. What is clear is that she spent the rest of 1953 in the eastern forest among the Quichua, with other missionaries close by and with Jim sometimes near and often not. He was busy. Shandia, the station he and Pete Fleming had taken over, was largely swept away when the river beside it flooded in the summer of 1953, and the months that followed went into rebuilding and into the school and the preaching that the Shandia believers depended on. Ed McCully and his wife Marilou had also joined the Quichua work, and the small team of young missionaries was stretched thin.

Her letters from these months, published long afterwards, show her doing what she did all her life: working steadily, observing closely, and recording her own failures without self-pity. She learned the language quickly by most standards. That did not make the learning easy. Every new word cost her hours of listening, and she was learning it in heat and damp, often unwell, among people whose ways she was only beginning to understand. She seems also to have been learning something about herself. For years she had been the one waiting for Jim to decide. Now the timing of the marriage depended largely on her own diligence, and she could not afford to coast.

What She Was Choosing

It would be easy to tell the story of 1953 as a romantic interlude, a year of waiting before a wedding. It was more serious than that. In accepting Jim’s condition, Elisabeth was choosing not only a husband but a people and a place, and a way of life that she knew would be hard. She was choosing to put aside, at least for a time, the work she had trained for, the translation of an unwritten language from nothing, and to give herself to work in which others had already broken the ground. She was choosing to live in the forest rather than in the town, among people she had not chosen, in the service of a calling that had first been his.

She did not do so as a woman without convictions of her own. She had come to Ecuador independently. She had worked as a single missionary, and she would remain, all her life, sharply resistant to the idea that a woman’s faith was merely an appendage of her husband’s. But she also believed that God led through ordinary circumstances, including the circumstance of loving a particular man, and that a choice freely made could be a way of obeying him. She did not think the two convictions were in conflict.

The verse at the head of this chapter comes from the book of Ruth. Ruth was a widow from Moab who refused to leave her mother-in-law, and who went with her to a country she did not know. Her words have often been read at weddings, though they were spoken by one woman to another, and spoken in grief. They suit this chapter in both senses. In 1953 Elisabeth Howard was learning to say to a people, as well as to a man, that their people would be hers. She could not know that within three years she would be a widow herself, and that she would have to decide again, alone, whether she meant it.