Chapter 9
Chapter 9
Ecuador
Betty Howard almost had to pinch herself as she looked over the ship’s railing. The ship was sailing up the Guayas River toward Guayaquil, Ecuador. It had set sail from New York ten days before, heading south and then west across the Caribbean and on through the Panama Canal to the Pacific Ocean. It had then followed the west coast of South America and was now approaching its destination.
Guayaquil looked completely different from the huge, bustling city of New York. It had no tall skyscrapers. The city consisted of wooden buildings spread along the western bank of the Guayas River. But while Guayaquil, the largest city in Ecuador, looked completely different from New York, it too was a city of bustle and business. It was the main port for the country, and the Guayas River was studded with all manner of vessels, from ships to small dugout canoes loaded down with bunches of bananas. And on land, people seemed to be milling around everywhere. The city was also hot and humid and reminded Betty of the climate in Orlando, Florida.
“Can you believe it?” Dorothy said. “April 12, 1952, the day we finally begin our missionary work!” She grinned with excitement as their vessel approached the dock.
Once ashore, Betty and Dorothy were met by a Plymouth Brethren couple who helped them get their belongings through customs and then took them to their home. Betty hardly slept that night as she contemplated what lay ahead the next day—a flight over the spine of the spectacular Andes Mountains to Quito. She had never been in an airplane before and didn’t quite know what to expect, and she had read several travel accounts that touted the flight to Quito as spectacular.
Betty was not disappointed by the trip. Despite some apprehension as the plane took off from the airport in Guayaquil, she soon relaxed. Flying, she decided, was indeed the way to travel. As the airplane continued to climb and leave the Pacific coast of Ecuador behind, the Andes came into view. The mountain range was more massive than Betty could have imagined. From the air the mountains seemed to go on forever, as high, barren, rocky peaks, clad in blankets of ice and snow, reached toward the sky. Finally the plane began to circle and descend. Below her, Betty could see Quito, nestled at ninety-three hundred feet above sea level in a large valley surrounded by snowy mountain peaks. The accounts of flying into Quito that Betty had read were right—the vista spread below the airplane was spectacular.
The plane landed and taxied to a standstill on the tarmac at the Quito airport. As Betty and Dorothy deplaned, a group of missionaries met them. The group included Jim Elliot and Pete Fleming. Betty, of course, was delighted to see Jim, and after welcoming her to Quito, Jim explained that he and Pete were staying at the home of a local doctor while they learned and became fluent in Spanish. Betty and Dorothy would be staying in a house across the street from Jim and Pete.
Life in Quito fell into an easy pattern for Betty. As young missionary trainees, Betty and Dorothy, along with Jim and Pete, studied Spanish together each morning and then had their midday meal. Sometimes in the afternoon, Dr. Wilfred Tidmarsh, the senior Plymouth Brethren missionary in Ecuador, gave lectures on relevant topics related to living and working in the country. On their first day together, Dr. Tidmarsh told Betty a little about his background. He explained that he had a PhD in geology and had been a university professor in England. In his spare time he loved to read about strange and remote places, and he was especially drawn to Ecuador. He wondered why the place was among the most backward countries on earth and why the gospel had not taken a stronger hold there.
Eventually, Dr. Tidmarsh told Betty, he came to believe that God was calling him and his wife, Gwen, to work in Ecuador. They had sold their belongings, and he had enrolled in a one-year emergency medical course. When he had completed the course, he was accepted as a missionary in Ecuador to the Quichua Indians. For the past thirteen years the Tidmarshes had been living and working among the Quichua. Like Betty, Dr. Tidmarsh had a flare for languages and had compiled the most complete Quichua dictionary available. But the work had taken its toll. Dr. Tidmarsh was gaunt and pale from bouts of malaria, yet he exuded a cheerfulness that Betty prayed she could match when her time finally came to go and work among one of Ecuador’s indigenous Indian groups.
Every day was a wonderful new adventure for Betty, and the time was made all the more magical by having Jim at her side. Betty and Jim often planned adventures together. They liked to take the bus sixteen miles north to La Mitad del Mundo, where the equator ran right through the middle of town. They would stroll through the Mercado de Santa Clara, stopping to smell the huge bunches of freshly cut flowers for sale at the market and admire the Indian weaving and baskets. One day Betty and Jim and a group of other trainee missionaries climbed Mount Pichincha. And on Ecuador’s Labor Day holiday, Jim took Betty to a bullfight. It was the first bullfight either of them had been to, and Betty did not know quite what to expect.
The bullring was packed to capacity with excited people who stood and cheered when the matador entered the ring. The matador was dressed in an elaborately decorated suit, with long white stockings to just below his knees and shiny black shoes. He acknowledged the cheers of the crowd and then took his place in the center of the ring. Moments later a large black bull raced into the ring and headed straight for the matador, who held out his cape. At the last moment the matador stepped sideways and turned as the charging bull raced by him only inches away.
Back and forth the bull and the matador went, and Jim told Betty that the matador’s movements were almost like ballet. Betty had to agree. There was a certain graceful, dancelike fluidness to the way the matador moved to avoid being gored by the bull. But as the bull began to tire, the illusion of ballet quickly came to an end as Betty watched the matador thrust a sword through the majestic animal. Betty turned away as the crowd stood to their feet cheering and clapping. Although bullfighting was not something Betty cared to see again, she had to admit that it had been an interesting cross-cultural experience.
Jim and Pete were two months ahead of Betty and Dorothy in their Spanish language studies. By late spring Dr. Tidmarsh was preparing the two young men for the next stage of their mission—moving into a jungle station in the Oriente, as the eastern Amazon Basin of Ecuador was called. As planned, the place they were going to was Shandia, the mission station Dr. Tidmarsh had established and manned for five years before reluctantly relinquishing the post because of his wife’s ill health and moving to Quito.
Jim explained to Betty that Shandia was located in the jungle alongside the Atun Yaku River. While living there, Dr. Tidmarsh had built a large hut on piles. The hut had a thatched roof, and Dr. Tidmarsh thought they would have to do a lot of repair work to make it habitable again. The house had been empty since he and his wife left Shandia, and everything deteriorated quickly in the jungle.
Betty could see how excited Jim was to be moving into the jungle after six months in Quito. Jim was eager to learn the Quichua language and start his evangelistic work.
During this time, Jim told Betty about another group of Indians who lived in the jungle of the Oriente not too far from Shandia. These Indians were called the Aucas and were a Stone Age tribe that spoke their own language and kept themselves isolated from other tribes and outsiders. They had a reputation for being the most violent tribe in the Oriente. People said that they would kill a man or woman with their spears for no apparent reason. Jim told Betty this was probably true. The Aucas had speared to death a number of men working in the jungle for the Shell Oil Company. Jim told Betty that although he could not explain it, he felt strangely drawn to the challenge of one day sharing the gospel with this unreached tribe of Indians. Because of this, he had made it a point to gather information on them, though there was not much to be had. Few people who met the Aucas lived to tell about it.
Before long it was time for Jim and Pete to begin their new venture in Shandia. Betty noticed that Jim put off saying goodbye as long as he could. But the reality that the two of them were going their separate ways set in. When they finally said their farewells, Jim apologized because although he professed his love for Betty, he did not feel God leading him to marry. He said that there was simply too much work for a single man to do in Ecuador. Of course, Betty was disappointed at his explanation, yet she had to admit she was still struggling with whether she also should be married or remain a single missionary. Because there was a lot of work for a single woman missionary to do in Ecuador, she turned her focus to her future in the country.
Dr. Tidmarsh urged Betty and Dorothy to pray about where they should go. He told them about two young English women, Doreen Clifford and Barbara Edwards, who were struggling to hold down the fort, as he put it, running a tiny school and mission outpost among the Colorado Indians in San Miguel de los Colorados. This was forty-five miles west of Quito on the broad, jungle-covered coastal plain between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. He suggested that the two of them consider going there for a period of time to help the two English missionary women with their work among the Colorado Indians. The Colorados, Dr. Tidmarsh explained, were one of nine indigenous tribes in Ecuador, and their language had never been written down. As a result, no Bibles or other gospel materials existed in their language.
Betty’s heart soared as she contemplated joining Doreen and Barbara in San Miguel. Because neither of these two missionaries was a linguist, the job of learning the language of the Colorados and reducing it to a written vocabulary would fall to Betty and Dorothy. Betty was particularly excited about the opportunity to be the first to record the Colorados’ language and then, she hoped, work to translate the Bible into their language for them.
In early September 1952, the day arrived for Betty and Dorothy to leave for San Miguel de los Colorados. Betty packed file boxes and cards, spare pens and bottles of ink, dictionaries and Bibles—tools that she would need to help in the work of reducing the Colorados’ language to written form. Very early one morning an old pickup truck pulled up outside the house where they were staying in Quito. The man driving the pickup was an American missionary, whom everyone simply called E.T. He and his wife and children lived and worked among the Colorados at Santo Domingo, which was on the way to San Miguel. The pickup truck was loaded high with supplies, leaving the tailgate as the only place for Betty and Dorothy to sit. The women took their positions, their hands gripping the side of the truck.
First the pickup climbed up and out of the valley in which Quito was nestled and headed for the village of San Juan, located at an altitude of eleven thousand feet. San Juan marked the start of the road that would take them down the western slope of the Andes onto the coastal plain. However, this road was so narrow and winding that vehicles could travel on it only in one direction at a time. A chain was stretched across the road and was dropped only at nine in the morning and two in the afternoon for vehicles headed west. Unfortunately, despite their early start, they managed to miss the nine o’clock dropping of the chain and were forced to wait until two o’clock that afternoon. The wait was not at all comfortable, as a misty rain settled over the area. Betty passed the time eating ears of freshly boiled sweet corn and fried potatoes, which she bought at the small makeshift store beside the road.
Finally the two o’clock chain was dropped, and off they went. E.T. explained that a man would count the number of vehicles headed down the road before putting the chain back up. He would then radio that number to a man at the chain at the other end of the road. When that number of vehicles had passed through the chain at the other end, vehicles would be allowed to start traveling the road in the opposite direction.
The road down the Andes was more narrow, winding, precarious, and bumpy than Betty could have imagined. Betty and Dorothy balanced on the tailgate, often staring over the edge of the road and straight down hundreds or even thousands of feet to the bottom of a ravine. Along the way were many rivers and streams to cross. Some had rickety bridges over them, but many didn’t, causing E.T. to ford them, splashing water on Betty and Dorothy.
It was nearly midnight when E.T. finally pulled the pickup truck to a halt. “We’re home,” he called out as he cut the engine.
After fifteen hours of sitting and holding the side of the pickup so tightly that her knuckles were white and her bottom was numb, Betty slid off the tailgate and gingerly stood up. Every bone in her body ached as she stumbled into the tiny, blackened shanty.
After all she had been through, Betty would have loved a strong cup of coffee in clean, comfortable surroundings, but it was not to be. She was not sure which hit her first, the putrid stench of the field beside the house that seemed to serve as a public latrine or the damp smell of the house’s moldy walls. And it wasn’t just the smell. The entire house had a depressing air about it. The room was filled with smoke, the few sticks of furniture in the room were old and rickety, and the curtains that partitioned off the room were filthy.
Even though it was midnight, four small children roamed the house, unable to sleep until their father returned. Their dirty, oversized clothes hung off them, and their skin was ingrained with dirt. Betty smiled and said hello, but none of them responded. She couldn’t help but think of the training in manners the missionary children at the Hampden DuBose Academy received. What a contrast these four bedraggled urchins in front of her were to her fellow students at the academy.
Betty and Dorothy spent the weekend with E.T. and his wife, Vera. Betty counted every passing hour. She was appalled at the way E.T. and his family lived and was confused by her own reaction to the situation. Surely this family had given up everything, every semblance of civilization, to be missionaries. Wasn’t that what she had been taught to do? Yet Betty wondered whether there was a place for beauty and light and cleanliness on the mission field. Was living in squalor part of taking up the cross to follow Christ? Betty sincerely hoped not, and it was with a mixture of relief and dread of what might lie ahead that she left Santo Domingo for San Miguel.