Chapter 10
Chapter 10
San Miguel de los Colorados
Betty breathed in the jungle smells. The air was more fragrant than she had imagined, with a wet earthy scent. And no wonder, she mused, as she looked down from her perch atop a pony. Everything she could see was green or brown and shiny. Moisture hung in the air like an invisible fog, coating everything with a fine layer of dampness. The trail they were following was thick with mud. In places the ponies were nearly up to their bellies in the boggy black sludge. Betty’s legs were covered in mud, and she gave up worrying about her hair, which stuck to her forehead and neck. Her once-crisp cotton shirt was saturated and clung to her like a wet sponge.
None of this mattered to Betty, who continually reminded herself that she was actually sitting on a pony and riding through the Ecuadorian jungle on the way to decipher a never-before-written language. In front of her was a guide, and behind, Dorothy and two mules carrying their clothing and translation materials. She was living her dream!
As she rode along, Betty composed a letter home in her head. She would tell her father about the strange birdcalls she heard and give her aunt a description of the purple butterfly with the golden underside that had just fluttered by. Betty only hoped that she could describe it well enough.
After three bumpy hours on the trail, the ponies finally brought Betty and Dorothy to their destination—San Miguel de los Colorados. The place was just as E.T. had described it before they set out that morning—a clearing about four hundred feet across. About eight houses were nestled in the clearing, with two in particular standing out. The house on the left was a large barnlike structure made of split bamboo with a high-pitched thatched roof. E.T. had told Betty that the mission owned the home. In fact, he had built the place and lived in it himself. Next to this building Betty would find Doreen Clifford’s home, a small two-story wood frame house with a neat fence around it.
Betty pulled on the reins and her pony headed toward the house. Before she had reached the house, a slender white woman came running out. She was about thirty years old, had wavy brown hair, and was wearing a floral dress. “Welcome, welcome!” she called out in a strong British accent. “Welcome to San Miguel-on-the-mud!”
Betty grinned. She already liked Doreen Clifford.
“We hoped you’d be here today,” Doreen said. “I’ve delayed lunch just in case you made it today. Come on inside.”
A second Englishwoman appeared. She was heavier set than Doreen, but she also had wavy brown hair and wore a floral patterned cotton dress. “Hi, I’m Barbara,” she said. “I’ll help the guide take care of the ponies.”
Betty and Dorothy climbed down from the ponies. After a minute they regained their balance and then followed Doreen inside. Doreen gave the two new arrivals a quick tour of downstairs. A good part of the first floor was taken up with a medical clinic. The walls were lined with makeshift cupboards filled with bottles of pills, medical supplies, and instruments. A fully equipped dentist chair sat in one corner of the room. The rest of the downstairs was set up as a dormitory for girls attending the school run by the two Englishwomen.
Upstairs consisted of a large room screened on three sides. Handmade chairs and other pieces of furniture were spread about the room, and old kerosene boxes had been put to use as shelves. A long curtain partitioned off Doreen’s bedroom from the rest of the room, and at the back of the room was a kitchen with a scrubbed board for a counter and more kerosene boxes to hold up the counter and serve as cupboard space. The kitchen contained several polished brass gasoline burners and a fogón, or wood-burning stove. Kitchen utensils hung neatly from a row of nails above the counter and stove.
Lunch was laid out on a green and orange plaid tablecloth that covered the dining table in the main room upstairs. Betty hungrily surveyed the food: spinach soup, rice, fried eggs, and tea made with scalded milk. It was a strange assortment of food, but after three hours on horseback on the muddy trail from Santo Domingo, Betty and Dorothy were grateful for it.
As the four women ate, they discussed plans for the future. Doreen took the lead, since she had been living there the longest. Betty soon learned that Doreen and Barbara had very different ideas of what the mission’s work should be, and to a large extent the two women had gone their own ways.
Doreen, who had completed a course in missionary medicine in London, ran the downstairs clinic, while Barbara oversaw a small school for the children of white Ecuadorians and Colombians who lived in and around the area. Barbara told Betty she was interested in reaching out to the Colorado Indians but had not had much success to this point.
That left several openings for Betty and Dorothy to fill. Barbara desperately needed help with the school, and Dorothy was eager to be involved there. Betty asked about language studies. Had anyone tried learning the language of the Colorados? The answer was no. More disappointing news followed. Doreen informed Betty that there were no Colorados living in San Miguel. In fact, Colorados did not live in settlements at all but were scattered throughout the jungle, isolated from each other and the world in general.
The good news was that the Colorados did know the mission existed, because it was en route to Santo Domingo, where they bought a few supplies. They would seek out the missionaries for help with difficult births, serious illnesses, and accidents. Other than that, Doreen told Betty, the Colorados were an independent lot who did not show much interest in the white man’s ways. They were not afraid of or violent toward white people. For the most part, they just simply ignored them. Doreen told Betty she believed this was because they had lived in proximity to Europeans since the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in Ecuador in 1531 and had decided long ago to stick to their own way of doing things. It made sense to Betty, who hoped to bring the gospel to these people but was faced with the stark challenge of how to do it without making them think it was a “white man’s” message.
After lunch, Doreen took Betty and Dorothy on a tour of San Miguel. There wasn’t really much to see, and the tour was over in a few minutes. The tour ended at Barbara Edwards’ house, which was made of split bamboo and had a thatched roof. But the house was only a single story and sat precariously off the ground on bamboo poles. The women climbed the ladderlike staircase that led into the house. Immediately Betty noticed the contrast between Barbara’s and Doreen’s houses. Barbara had a bed and a bench for sitting, and the only other furniture was the fogón in the small kitchen area. It appeared to Betty, judging by the interior of the house, that comfort was not particularly important to Barbara.
“And of course, that’s where you two will live,” Doreen announced, gesturing toward one of the big barnlike structures that Betty and Doreen had first seen upon their arrival.
Soon Betty and Dorothy were settled in, as much as a person with two saddlebags and a few boxes filled with belongings could be. The school occupied the first floor, while upstairs a large room ran the length of the building, with a kitchen at the back. Three bedrooms opened off the large room. Dorothy occupied the front bedroom; Marta, a nineteen-year-old Ecuadorian woman who taught in the school, occupied the middle bedroom; and Betty was in the back bedroom. Her bedroom was surprisingly large—too big to be made cozy with the few personal items she had brought with her.
As she arranged the small, red fireman’s lantern she had brought from the United States and hung a plastic clothes bag to serve as a makeshift closet, Betty thought about what lay ahead for her. Her first task was to find an informant, someone who knew the Colorados’ language well and was willing to sit with her and help her untangle its meaning.
Such a job was a labor of love for most informants. From her time attending the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Oklahoma, Betty knew that the task was tedious. The informant would say a word over and over again while she would attempt to discern the particular sounds that made up the word and would then write them down. Sometimes she would have to sit for a long time and watch the informant’s mouth and lips as he or she formed and repeated the word several times. This would give her some understanding of how the word should be said and a clearer understanding of its sound. The process could be long and torturous, but it was the first stage in getting a Bible in the language of the Colorados into their hands. First the language had to be understood and reduced to writing. Then the translation of the various books of the Bible into that language could begin. And just as important, the Colorados would have to be encouraged to learn to read their own language so that they could make use of the translated Bible.
Betty had a long and arduous task ahead of her. Often it took a team of people—like links in a chain—to accomplish the task. One person would begin the process, find a reliable informant, and begin writing the language down. A second person would then review and refine what the first person had accomplished, and so on, until a Bible had been translated and finally printed in the language.
Although she knew that she would be the first link in the chain, Betty did not know how long she was going to be stationed at San Miguel de los Colorados. She secretly hoped that Jim would propose to her and the two of them would marry and begin working together, though she had no idea whether or not this would happen. As she folded her clothes and stacked them in the kerosene box shelves in her bedroom, Betty resolved to leave that matter to God. For now she had a big enough challenge ahead of her.
And what a challenge finding an informant turned out to be. It was three days before Betty even saw her first Colorado Indian. She was hanging her bedsheets to dry on the clothesline at the back of the house when a Colorado man emerged from the jungle, riding a pony. The first thing she noticed about him was the tight red helmet he wore on his head. As the man rode closer, Betty could see that his body was painted a vivid red with black horizontal stripes beginning at his forehead and going all the way to his feet. The man also wore a black and white shirt that stopped just below his hips and was adorned with a brilliant yellow and turquoise scarf. The Colorado man rode over to Doreen’s house, dismounted, and tied his pony to the fence. Betty quickly followed. When she got there, Doreen was talking to the man in Spanish. The man replied to her questions in halting Spanish. Betty surmised that he had come to get medicine from Doreen.
Betty studied the Indian up close as Doreen introduced her to him. She smiled, and he smiled back. His teeth, tongue, and lips were stained a bluish-black color. Betty’s heart beat fast. Could this be the informant she had been praying for? She asked Doreen to offer him the job in Spanish, and Betty understood his reply. It was yes! Although he had to go home just then, he said he would surely return and help Betty next week.
As the Colorado mounted his pony and rode off back into the jungle, Betty asked Doreen about the man’s helmet. “Why on earth does an Indian need to wear a helmet in the jungle?”
A bemused smile settled across Doreen’s face. “A helmet?” she said. “Why, that’s his hair!”
Betty felt her cheeks blush.
“Colorado men plaster their hair down with a mixture of Vaseline and achiote—a red dye they get from the seed pods of a certain tree. It may look like a helmet to the untrained eye, but I can assure you, it really is his hair,” Doreen explained with a giggle.
The Indian man never returned to help Betty as he said he would. Betty soon learned that Doreen had been right when she said that the Colorados were indifferent to white people. Every Colorado Indian that Doreen or Barbara asked about being an informant for Betty agreed to come back and help out, but not one of them ever did. Even offering them money for their time did not make a bit of difference.
Betty had other frustrations as well. She had read countless books on missionaries and had met a number of missionaries over the course of her life. Still she was astonished at how much time and energy was taken up as a missionary just doing what was necessary to stay alive. The house had no running water, and water had to be carried in buckets from a river three hundred yards away. Then the water that was to be used for drinking needed to be boiled, as did the milk they drank. All of this took time and energy. As Betty soon learned, milk had to be watched constantly while it was being heated or it would boil over and make a mess.
Lighting the fire and keeping it lit in the stove was also a continual source of stress. Piles of wood had to be gathered and then laid out to dry—not an easy task in the rainy season. And although a thirteen-year-old girl came and did their laundry, scrubbing the clothes clean on a washboard in a tub of water perched over a fire, they still had lots of food preparation to take care of. Every meal they ate had to be made from scratch from what was locally available and cooked over the fogón. And then there was bread to make, which also needed constant watching while it cooked. Betty found it all quite exhausting.
At night the women had limited light to read and write by. The house was lighted by two kerosene lanterns and whatever candles they lit. The trouble was, the light also attracted bugs—lots of them—and the bugs swarmed around the lanterns and candles and whoever happened to be sitting nearby trying to read or write a letter home. All in all, the daily routine of missionary life was a far bigger challenge than Betty had imagined it would be. Sometimes at night she had vivid dreams about visiting a five-and-dime store back home. What a thrill it was to see all those useful items for sale and purchase them in her sleep!
All the while, Betty continued to pray for a Colorado informant to help her in the process of writing down the language. Her prayer was finally answered, but not quite in the way Betty had imagined it might be. She did not find a Colorado Indian to help her. Instead she found a man who spoke the Colorado language fluently and was willing to help as her informant.
Don Macario was a middle-aged Ecuadorian man whom Betty had seen a number of times at the worship service on Sunday mornings. He told Betty that he had been raised on a hacienda (a large plantation) right alongside Colorado children. He had played with them, and in the process he had learned to speak and understand their language fluently. A devout Christian, he was presently unemployed, and he explained that he would be happy to serve as Betty’s informant.
Betty was ecstatic when she learned this. God had answered her prayers and sent her possibly the only person in the world who was fluent in both the language of the Colorados and Spanish, which she could speak and understand, making the whole process of communication so much easier for her. She could hardly wait to get to work on the project.