Mintaka and Mankamu

“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

Dayuma

The way back to the Waorani, when it opened, did not come through any plan of the missionaries. It came through three Waorani women.

The first of them was Dayuma. She had grown up among her people at a time of especially savage feuding, and some years before the events at Palm Beach, after members of her family had been killed, she had fled the forest. She found refuge among the Quichua and eventually came to work, in conditions close to servitude, on a hacienda in the foothills owned by a landowner named Carlos Sevilla. There she learned Quichua and some Spanish, and lived a life cut off from her own people, whom she believed she could never safely rejoin. It was there that Jim had gone to learn his handful of Waorani phrases from her, and there that Rachel Saint, Nate’s sister, a missionary with the Wycliffe Bible Translators and their Summer Institute of Linguistics, had been living for some time, learning the Waorani language from her.

After the deaths of the five men, Rachel’s work with Dayuma took on a new importance in the eyes of evangelicals at home. In 1957 Rachel took Dayuma to the United States. There the two women appeared before very large audiences, including the American television programme This Is Your Life and Billy Graham’s crusade at Madison Square Garden in New York. During these months Dayuma professed faith in Christ. For many American Christians she became the living sign that the story of Palm Beach 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.

Two Women on the Curaray

Elisabeth was not part of any of this. In November 1957 she was at Arajuno, the station on the edge of Waorani country that had been Ed McCully’s, when two Quichua men came in from the Curaray with startling news. Two Waorani women had come out of the forest and were at their house. Elisabeth went at once.

The women were Mankamu and Mintaka. They were older women, by most accounts kin of Dayuma, and they had walked out of their own territory into the Quichua country for reasons of their own, which outsiders never fully understood. Some accounts say they hoped to find out what had become of Dayuma, and that the feuding and grief among their own people had made them willing to risk the world outside. Mintaka was the older woman who had visited the five missionaries on the sandbar on 6 January 1956, less than two years before. She had seen them alive on the last Friday of their lives.

Elisabeth took the two women back with her to Shandia, and for the next ten months they lived with her and Valerie there. It was an extraordinary arrangement, and it was entered into without fuss. She gave them food and shelter and whatever care they needed, and they gave her, without quite intending to, what she most needed if she was ever to reach their people: the language. Day after day she listened to them, wrote down what she heard, and tried to make sense of it.

A Language Like No Other

It was the hardest linguistic task of her life. The Waorani language is unrelated to any other known language. It has nothing in common with Quichua or Spanish, and none of the ordinary aids to learning existed: no grammar, no dictionary, no other speaker to compare notes with except Rachel and Dayuma, who were far away in the United States. Elisabeth had to work out its sounds, its words and its structure from scratch, from two women who had never been asked to explain their language to anyone and who could not read or write. She did so with the methods she had learned at the Summer Institute of Linguistics and practised among the Colorados. Progress was slow, and every misunderstanding was a reminder of how little she knew.

The two women were not specimens or informants to her, nor were they simply converts in waiting. She came to know them as people, with their own humour, sorrows and opinions, and with their own way of seeing the strange world into which they had come. Her later writing about the Waorani is notable for its refusal either to romanticise them as noble innocents or to describe them as monsters. She had learned that refusal, in part, from living with Mintaka and Mankamu at Shandia.

The Three Go Home

In 1958 Rachel Saint and Dayuma returned to Ecuador. Dayuma met the two women from her own people, the first she had seen in more than ten years, and the three of them began to talk of going home together. On 3 September 1958, by the date usually given, Dayuma, Mintaka and Mankamu walked into the forest. Those left behind did not know whether they would see them again, or what reception the women would meet.

They came back about three weeks later, to Arajuno, where Elisabeth was waiting for them. With them came a party of Waorani, men and women, accounts differ on the number. They brought news that Dayuma’s people were alive, that they had heard what the three women had to say about the foreigners outside, and that they were willing to receive visitors. More than that, they brought an invitation. Elisabeth and Rachel were asked to come and live among them.

It was the moment that Jim and his friends had prayed for, and it had come in a way none of them could have planned. Not a plane and a loudspeaker, but a widow who had taken two women into her home, and an exile who had come back with news of her own. Elisabeth did not pretend, then or later, that she understood fully what God was doing. But she could see that a door had opened, and she had spent her life believing that when God opened a door the right response was to walk through it.

The verse at the head of this chapter is from Isaiah. God promises to lead the blind by a way they do not know, along paths they have not travelled, and to make crooked things straight. None of the people in this chapter could see far ahead: not the two Waorani women who walked out of the forest, not the exile on the hacienda, not the widow at Shandia. But the paths converged. In October 1958 Elisabeth Elliot, with her three-year-old daughter, set out to live among the people who had killed her husband.