San Miguel de los Colorados

“And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?”

— Acts 2:8, KJV

Quito

Quito in 1952 was a city of perhaps two hundred thousand people, built in a long valley more than nine thousand feet up in the Andes, ringed by volcanoes and some fifteen miles south of the equator. Its old centre was a maze of steep cobbled streets, whitewashed walls and colonial churches heavy with gold. The air was thin and the sun was fierce, and newcomers from sea level were short of breath for weeks. For a missionary arriving in Ecuador it was the natural place to begin. The government offices were there, the mission headquarters were there, and above all the language schools and teachers were there.

Elisabeth Howard spent her first months in Ecuador in Quito, learning Spanish. It was not the language of the people she had come to serve, but it was the language of the country, of its officials and landowners and traders, and of most of the people she would meet on the edges of the forest. Without it she could not do anything. She worked at it with her usual thoroughness, and her training in languages made the work easier than it was for many. Jim Elliot and Pete Fleming were in the city at the same time, doing the same thing, and the small missionary community of Quito saw a good deal of the three young Americans. Then, after some months, she left the capital and went west; by the autumn of 1952 she was writing home from the western forest.

The Western Forest

The Andes divide Ecuador into three worlds. In the middle are the high mountain valleys where most of the people then lived. To the east the land falls away into the vast rainforest of the Amazon basin, where Jim was going. To the west it falls, just as steeply, towards the Pacific coast, and on that western slope, below the clouds, there was in those years a belt of dense, wet, tropical forest, cut by rivers and only beginning to be cleared for farms and plantations. A rough road wound down from the mountains into it. At the bottom, many hours’ hard travel from Quito, was the small frontier town of Santo Domingo de los Colorados, and not far from it a scattering of clearings and houses called San Miguel de los Colorados.

The names come from the people who lived there. The Spanish called them the Colorados, the red ones, because the men dyed their hair a brilliant red with the paste of the achiote seed and moulded it into a stiff, close cap on their heads. They painted their bodies with black stripes and wore striped cloths about their waists. They call themselves the Tsáchila, and their language is now known as Tsafiki. In 1952 they were a small people, living in houses scattered through the forest rather than in villages, farming their clearings, fishing and hunting. They had been in contact with outsiders for a long time. Their land was being encroached on by settlers from the highlands, and they were wary of strangers. Their language had never been written down.

That was why Elisabeth had come. Three other single women missionaries were working from San Miguel, and she joined them as the linguist of the team. Her task, as she understood it, was to learn the Colorado language from the beginning, to work out its sounds and devise an alphabet, to analyse its grammar, and to lay the foundations for a translation of the Scriptures into it. It was exactly the work for which she had spent eight years preparing, and she went to it with high hopes.

Learning from Nothing

There was no grammar to study, no dictionary to consult and no teacher to explain. The method she had been taught was to begin with the simplest things: to point to an object and write down, as exactly as she could, what was said; to listen to the same word over and over until she could hear its sounds; to record everything in a phonetic script, on slips and cards that could be sorted and resorted; and slowly to build from words to phrases, from phrases to sentences, and from sentences to the patterns underneath. It was meticulous, repetitive and exhausting work. Every guess had to be tested. Every rule had exceptions. Progress was measured in days and weeks, not in hours, and a single misheard sound could lead a whole set of notes astray.

The conditions did not help. It rained a great deal, and the heat and the damp got into everything. There were insects, snakes and mud. The missionaries lived simply in a plain house, and the life was hard on the body and harder on the spirit. The Colorados were courteous but mostly uninterested in what the foreign women had come to say. Relations between Protestant and Roman Catholic missionaries in Ecuador at that time were often tense, and that tension, too, was part of the life of the frontier.

What she needed above all was an informant: a person who spoke the language natively, who could also speak Spanish well enough to explain what the words meant, and who had the patience to sit with a foreigner for hours on end repeating things. Without such a person the work could not go forward. Finding one was not easy. The Colorados who knew Spanish well were few, and those who did had their own work and little reason to spend it with a missionary.

A Death in the Forest

During her months at San Miguel, Elisabeth met the first of the losses that would mark her year there. By her later account, a Colorado woman went into a hard labour, and Elisabeth was there. She was not a nurse, and no doctor was within reach. What help could be given was given, and it was not enough. The woman died.

Elisabeth was shaken to the roots. She had come to Ecuador believing that God had sent her, and that he would bless the work she did in obedience to him. Now she had done her best, in obedience, and a young woman was dead. She did not know what to say to the woman’s family, or to God. More than twenty years later, when she came to write about that first year, she did not pretend that she had understood it at the time, or that she understood it fully even then.

The verse at the head of this chapter is the astonished question of the crowd on the day of Pentecost, when they heard the apostles speak the wonderful works of God, every man in his own language. It is the vision behind all Bible translation: that God means to be heard by every people in the tongue in which they were born. Elisabeth went to San Miguel to serve that vision. She had no idea how much it would cost her, or how little, in the end, she would have to show for it.