Into the Forest

“Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.”

— Romans 12:21, KJV

A Reckless Decision?

Not everyone thought Elisabeth should go. To many of her friends and relatives at home, the idea of a young widow taking a three-year-old child to live among the people who had speared her husband, less than three years before, seemed reckless to the point of folly. The Waorani had killed outsiders for generations. They had killed one another more often still. No one could guarantee that the invitation brought by the three women was meant by everyone in the group, or that it would be honoured if something went wrong. If Elisabeth were killed, Valerie would be an orphan. If Valerie were killed, it was hard to imagine what anyone would say.

Elisabeth weighed all this. She did not dismiss the danger, and she did not claim any special assurance that she would be kept safe. Her reasoning, as she later set it out, was simpler. The Waorani had asked her to come. She was one of the very few outsiders who had begun to learn their language. She believed that God had called her to make Christ known to people who had never heard of him, and these were such people. The risks were real, but they were not greater than the risks Jim had accepted, and she did not think that being a mother released her from obedience. She also did not think that obedience guaranteed a good outcome. She went anyway.

Those who have praised her for this decision have sometimes made it sound like an act of dramatic forgiveness, a widow going in search of her husband’s killers in order to love them. She did not describe it that way. She did not go as a widow on a mission of reconciliation. She went as a missionary to a people, and the fact that some of that people had killed Jim was, in her own telling, part of the situation rather than the point of it. Forgiveness was real and necessary, but it was not a performance. It was simply the condition of going at all.

The Clearing

Early in October 1958 Elisabeth, Valerie and Rachel Saint set out from the edge of the Quichua country with Dayuma and the Waorani who had come out to fetch them. The journey was made on foot through the forest. It was hard going for the adults and harder for a small child, who had to be carried. On 8 October 1958, by the date usually given, they reached the Waorani clearing beside a small river called the Tiwaeno, from which the settlement took its name. It was, as it happened, the day Jim would have turned thirty-one, and the fifth anniversary of their wedding.

The houses were large shelters thatched with palm leaves, with hammocks slung inside. The people grew manioc and plantains in clearings cut from the forest, hunted monkeys and birds with blowguns and spears, and fished in the rivers. They wore almost nothing. Most of them had never seen a foreigner close at hand, let alone a fair-haired child.

Elisabeth and Valerie lived as the Waorani did, in a simple thatched shelter, and Rachel lived close by. The Waorani gave Elisabeth a name: Gikari, which means woodpecker. Valerie began to pick up Waorani from the children she played with.

The bridge between the two worlds was Dayuma. She was home among her own kin after more than a decade away, and she was the only person in the clearing who could move easily between the Waorani and the foreigners. She began, in her own way, to tell her people the Bible stories she had learned, using for God the name Waengongi, the creator of Waorani tradition. Neither Elisabeth nor Rachel could yet speak well enough to do the same. In those first months the two outsiders depended on Dayuma for translation, for explanation of what they saw, and to a large degree for their own safety.

The Men

Among the people of the clearing were men who had been on the beach on 8 January 1956. Elisabeth met them in the first days. Gikita, the older man who had led the attack, was there. So were Kimo and Dyuwi, younger men, and Mincaye, who in later years would become the best known of them to the outside world through his friendship with Nate Saint’s son Steve. Nampa, Dayuma’s brother, had died since. Most of the men who had killed Jim were living within a few yards of his widow and his daughter.

What she felt on meeting them she later described with characteristic restraint. She did not claim to have felt nothing, and she did not claim to have felt only love. What struck her, again and again, was how ordinary they were. They were not monsters. They laughed, joked, quarrelled, cared for their children, mourned their dead, and went hunting. They had killed the five men, as they had killed many others, out of fear and anger and a long habit of violence, and in time they spoke of it plainly, as a thing that had happened. They had believed the foreigners were dangerous. They had been told that the foreigners had attacked their own people. In their world, killing those who threatened you was simply what one did.

She did not excuse what they had done. She did not pretend that it did not matter. But she also did not hate them. She had settled that question before she came. Now she had to live with it, day after day, at close quarters, in their houses and at their fires, while she tried to learn to speak to them.

Overcoming Evil

The verse at the head of this chapter is Paul’s command at the end of the twelfth chapter of Romans: be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good. It is one of the hardest commands in the New Testament. Elisabeth did not claim to have kept it perfectly, and she would have been impatient with anyone who made her into a symbol of it. But the facts are plain. In October 1958 she went to live, with her child, among men who had killed her husband. She did not go to accuse them, to demand an apology, or to extract a dramatic scene of repentance for the benefit of supporters at home. She went to live with them, to learn their language, to give them what medical help she could, and to tell them about God.

Whether that would bear fruit, no one knew. What happened over the next three years was neither as quick nor as simple as the legend later claimed, and the next chapter tries to tell it honestly. But the first fact is the one worth pausing on. She went in. She took the child. She stayed.