Shandia

“How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?”

— Romans 10:14, KJV

A Station in the Forest

Shandia lay in the forest of the upper Napo, on the eastern side of the Andes, among the Quichua people whose language Elisabeth had spent 1953 learning. It had been begun some years earlier by an older British missionary, Dr Wilfred Tidmarsh, and Jim and Pete Fleming had come to it in 1952 to carry the work on. In the summer of 1953 disaster struck, when the river rose and carried away much of the station. By the time the Elliots settled there as a married couple in 1954, the buildings had been put back on higher ground, and Jim had built a house for his wife.

Life at Shandia was simple by American standards and comfortable by the standards of the forest. There was a house with a roof that kept out the rain, a kitchen, a short-wave radio for the daily contact with the other stations, and, not far off, the small plane flown by the missionary pilot Nate Saint from his base at Shell Mera on the edge of the mountains, which was the station’s quickest link with the outside world. Supplies came by air or on the backs of carriers. The nearest town was a long walk away. The forest pressed close on every side, and the river was both the road and the danger.

The heart of the station was the school. Jim had inherited from Tidmarsh a school for Quichua boys, and he gave a great deal of himself to it. He taught reading and the Bible, and spent hours simply talking with the boys and their fathers. Out of the school came the first members of a small Quichua church. Jim preached in Quichua on Sundays and at other times through the week, and by the time of his death there was a group of young believers at Shandia who met together, prayed and read what Scripture they had in their own language. Some of them would carry on the work after he was gone.

Her Share of the Work

Elisabeth’s share of the work was less visible and, in the long run, perhaps as important. She ran the household, and in the forest that alone was a heavy task. She gave simple medical care to the people who came to the house with fevers, wounds, snakebites and infections, and she learned, as every missionary wife in such places learned, to act as nurse and sometimes as midwife with very little training. She taught women and girls. Above all she worked on the language. As a linguist she was better equipped than anyone else on the team to analyse Quichua, to prepare reading materials, and to work on the translation of portions of the New Testament. How much of it lasted is hard to say; like most first efforts of its kind, it was the sort of work that later translators build on, revise and sometimes replace.

It was not glamorous work, and she did not pretend it was. Her later books are full of plain descriptions of the routine of missionary life: the endless small tasks, the repetitions, the times when nothing seemed to be happening at all. She had come to the mission field with a picture of what it would be like, and the reality was more tedious and more ordinary than the picture. She learned at Shandia a lesson she would teach for the rest of her life, that faithfulness is mostly made up of the unremarkable duty that lies to hand, done well and offered to God, whether or not anyone notices.

Valerie

On 27 February 1955 the Elliots’ only child was born, a daughter, whom they named Valerie. Jim was delighted with her, and the letters and photographs of that year show a proud and affectionate father. For Elisabeth, motherhood in the forest added a new layer of work and a new kind of anxiety. There were few doctors and no hospitals near at hand, and the illnesses that came and went among the Quichua children could be deadly. She and Jim did what other missionary parents did. They took sensible precautions, prayed, and accepted that they could not control everything.

Valerie was ten months old when her father was killed. She was far too young to remember him, and she came to know him through her mother’s memories, through his journals and letters, and through the people who had known him. In her later years she edited and published her parents’ letters, which has given readers a much fuller picture of the marriage than the earlier books allowed.

The People Beyond the River

From his first months in Ecuador, Jim had heard about another people. To the south and east of the Quichua country, between the Napo and the Curaray rivers, lived a small and isolated group whom the Quichua feared. They had no contact with the outside world except through violence. Over the previous decades they had killed outsiders who came into their territory, including rubber workers, settlers and, in the 1940s, men working for the Shell oil company. They had killed Quichua as well. They also killed one another: later research suggests that a large share of the deaths among them were the result of spearings in long-running feuds. Outsiders called them by a Quichua word meaning savages. Their own name for themselves was Waorani, which means simply the people.

Jim was drawn to them almost from the beginning. He had long believed that his calling was to go where no one had gone with the gospel, and here was a people who had never heard it. Ed McCully, who had moved with Marilou to an old oil company base at Arajuno, on the edge of Waorani country, shared his interest, and so did Nate Saint. The verse at the head of this chapter is Paul’s question to the church at Rome: how shall they hear without a preacher? It was a question these young men took personally.

Elisabeth knew how Jim felt, and she knew what the risks were. In her own account she does not pretend that she was indifferent to them or that she found them easy to accept. But she did not try to dissuade him. She believed, as he did, that the Waorani needed to hear of Christ, and she had married a man whose readiness to go was part of what she loved in him. She had also learned at San Miguel that God did not promise success or safety to those who served him. In September 1955, when Nate Saint and Ed McCully, flying over the forest, finally spotted a cluster of Waorani houses, the decision that would change her life had, in a sense, already been made.