Among the Waorani

“But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.”

— 2 Corinthians 4:7, KJV

Three Years at Tiwaeno

Elisabeth lived among the Waorani for about three years, from October 1958 until late in 1961. They were among the most demanding years of her life, and among the most important. For most of that time she was at Tiwaeno, sharing the life of the clearing: its food, its weather, its illnesses and its quarrels. She gave medicine to the sick, took photographs, kept notebooks and above all worked at the language. Valerie grew from a toddler into a little girl who ran barefoot with the Waorani children and spoke their language easily.

The language remained the central task. Elisabeth set out to analyse it as she had been trained to do, working out its sounds and grammar systematically and recording what she heard. It was slow, painstaking work, and she knew that any translation of Scripture worth the name would depend on getting it right. Dayuma, meanwhile, went on telling her people what she had learned of God in her own words. Rachel worked closely with Dayuma, and over time the Bible stories that Dayuma told, and the phrases that Rachel and Dayuma worked out together, became the main channel through which the Waorani heard the Christian message.

Something did begin to change. Over the years that followed, several of the people at Tiwaeno, including some of the men who had been on the beach in 1956, came to call themselves followers of God. Dayuma’s influence was crucial. Gikita, the old leader of the attack, and Kimo, Dyuwi and Mincaye were among those who in time professed faith, and some became leaders among the believers. The cycle of revenge spearing that had dominated Waorani life for generations began to slow among those who had settled around the missionaries, though it did not stop all at once, and other Waorani groups who had no contact with the missionaries went on killing and being killed for years. A few years after Elisabeth had left, Kimo and Dyuwi baptised two of Nate Saint’s children, Steve and Kathy, in the Curaray river, near the beach where their father had died.

The Savage My Kinsman

In 1961 Elisabeth published a book of photographs, with a spare accompanying text, about her first year among the Waorani. She called it The Savage My Kinsman. The title was itself a statement. Readers who had absorbed the language of savages and martyrs from the newspapers were confronted with pictures of men, women and children going about their lives, and with a title that insisted they were kin. The text did not claim mass conversions or a finished work. It showed a people, and a missionary among them, at the beginning of a long road.

The book was a sign of something else that was happening in her. Living with the Waorani, she had come to see how much of what she had brought with her was American culture rather than the gospel, and how little she could be sure of about what the people around her actually understood. She did not lose her faith. But she was becoming less certain of many things that the missionary movement at home took for granted, and more aware of how easily missionaries confused their own hopes with God’s work. Those questions would come out more fully in the years after she left Ecuador.

Two Strong Women

The hardest part of Tiwaeno was not the forest or the Waorani. It was Elisabeth’s relationship with Rachel Saint. The two women had come in together, and they shared the same faith and the same desire that the Waorani should know Christ. Each had lost someone on the beach: Rachel her brother, Elisabeth her husband. But they were very different people, and the differences proved impossible to bridge.

Historians who have studied the mission, especially Kathryn Long in God in the Rainforest (2019), describe differences of personality, of theology, of missionary method and of linguistic training. Rachel was older, intensely devoted, and convinced that God had given her a particular calling to the Waorani through Dayuma. She came to treat the work, and to some extent the people, as hers, and she was reluctant to share it with others or to cooperate with other missionaries and organisations. She relied heavily on Dayuma, and she saw the Waorani in the traditional evangelical terms of a people lost in darkness and waiting for the light. Elisabeth, the more highly trained linguist, wanted to work from a careful analysis of the language, and she was increasingly troubled by questions about how much the Waorani could understand of a message delivered largely through a single intermediary in a few years. The two could not agree on how to go about translation, which was meant to be the centre of their work.

Neither woman comes out of the story as simply right. Rachel’s possessiveness made life hard for Elisabeth and, later, for others. But Elisabeth could be cool, critical and quick to see the weaknesses in other people’s thinking, and she was not easy to work with either. Both were under enormous pressure, isolated, often unwell, and watched by an evangelical public that expected a triumphant story. Both were, in Paul’s phrase, earthen vessels. The friction between them is a reminder that God’s work among the Waorani was carried by fallible people, as all his work is.

Leaving

In late 1961 Elisabeth left Tiwaeno. Her reasons were several. The conflict with Rachel had made shared work almost impossible, and it was clear that Rachel, with Dayuma, was going to remain. Valerie was approaching school age. Elisabeth may also have come to believe that the Waorani work did not need two outsiders pulling in different directions. Whatever the balance of reasons, she went without public complaint. Rachel stayed, and she lived among the Waorani for most of the rest of her life.

Elisabeth went back to the Quichua work she had known before, and for about two more years she continued among the Quichua with Valerie. In 1963, when Valerie was eight, the two of them left Ecuador and returned to the United States, settling in Franconia, New Hampshire, where her family had spent so many summers. She had come to Ecuador in 1952 as a single woman of twenty-five. She left eleven years later, aged thirty-six, a widow with a daughter, the author of three books, and a far more questioning and far more seasoned Christian than the young linguist who had arrived.

The verse at the head of this chapter is Paul’s description of the gospel and of those who carry it: a treasure in earthen vessels, so that the power may be seen to be God’s and not ours. Elisabeth’s Ecuador years had been full of loss, failure, misunderstanding and hard-won fruit, and almost none of it had gone the way anyone would have planned. She did not leave with a success story. She left with the conviction, which would shape everything she later wrote, that God does his work through cracked pots, and that he does not need the story to be tidy.