Chapter 17
Chapter 17
Visitors
Betty and Valerie Elliot returned to their home at Shandia. Everything about the place reminded Betty of Jim: the split-bamboo bed he had made for Valerie just before leaving on Operation Auca, his journal left open on the table, his clothes—some in the laundry hamper still needing to be washed. Each day brought back painful memories, but Betty determined to carry on. There was the regular work of the mission to accomplish. She oversaw the maintenance of the airstrip and the school buildings, taught at the girls’ school, and continued where Jim had left off translating the Gospel of Luke into Quichua.
Sometimes Betty wondered whether Jim had had a premonition that he would die. He had worked so hard before Operation Auca to hand over leadership to the local Christian men. And now the locals took on much of the responsibility for the local fellowship and boys’ school.
News of the five missionaries who had died at Palm Beach while trying to make contact with the Aucas quickly spread around the world. The deaths were reported in Time magazine, and a lengthy article accompanied by photos by Cornell Capa of the rescue mission appeared in Life magazine. With all this publicity, letters began arriving at Shandia from around the world, many from people Betty did not know. Most of the letters were comforting, but some of them offered all sorts of suggestions and ideas as to what Betty should do next.
One woman enclosed sixty dollars with her letter so that Betty could buy Bibles for the Aucas. The woman appeared to have no idea that the Aucas could not read any language or that the Auca language had never been written down. Another person wrote to say that he felt that all would be well if Betty would just write out the Ten Commandments and drop them from an airplane over Auca territory. Surely then these Indians would understand that the Word of God said, “Thou shalt not kill.”
The most opinionated letters Betty received were about what should happen to Valerie now that her father was dead. Some people felt that Valerie should be returned immediately to the United States, as she was in harm’s way in Ecuador. As Valerie’s mother, Betty took these warnings seriously, but in the end she decided to trust God in the situation.
Rather than make her bitter or angry, Jim’s death had made Betty feel more compassion than ever for the Aucas. She often found herself telling those who asked how she felt toward the Aucas, “The fact that Jesus Christ died for all makes me interested in the salvation of all, but the fact that Jim loved and died for the Aucas intensifies my love for them.”
As time went on, Betty began to wonder what this love for the Aucas would eventually translate into. Somewhere in the back of her mind she had the idea that one day she and Valerie might be able to go and live with them, but for now that seemed impossible.
Meanwhile, the other widows of Operation Auca were getting on with their lives. Olive Fleming, the youngest of the widows, returned to the United States to live. Barbara Youderian and her two children stayed on at Macuma. Marj Saint stayed put at Shell Mera until MAF could send another pilot to Ecuador to replace Nate. After that she planned to move with her children to Quito to run the World Radio Missionary Fellowship missionary guesthouse. And Marilou McCully immediately flew home to Pontiac, Michigan, where she gave birth to a son two weeks later.
February 27, 1956, was a bittersweet day for Betty when Valerie turned one year old. Betty was delighted with the lovely little girl that Valerie was becoming, but she wished that Jim could be there to see their daughter grow up. She knew it would be the first of many milestones in Valerie’s life where her father’s absence would leave a gaping hole.
A month later Betty’s mother and Mrs. DuBose from the Hampden DuBose Academy came to visit Betty and Valerie at Shandia. Katherine Howard told her daughter that she had come to see how Betty was coping with Jim’s death. Betty was thrilled to see both her mother and Mrs. DuBose. The two women had meant much to her and had taught her much over the years. Their words and helping hands encouraged her to continue her missionary work, even though she desperately missed having Jim at her side.
Soon after the killings at Palm Beach, the five widows designated Betty to write an official account of the tragedy. Betty set to work on the project. Drawing heavily on both Jim and Nate’s private diaries, she traced the events that led up to the men traveling to Palm Beach, and then she tried to piece together the events at Palm Beach and the killing of the men. Some of the photographs from Nate’s waterlogged camera were salvaged, and journal entries from the camp helped fill in the missing pieces. The account came together quickly, and Betty was soon sending off the finished manuscript to the publisher. In August 1956 the book titled Through Gates of Splendor was published.
Eventually another missionary couple came to Ecuador to help with the work at Shandia. With their arrival, Betty began to feel that it was time to move on from Shandia. But where? Then one day in May 1957, Johnny Keenan flew supplies into Shandia, stopping to chat with Betty. Their conversation quickly turned to the Aucas.
“Would you like to come with me on a bucket drop to the Aucas?” Johnny asked.
Betty was aware that even after the death of the men at Palm Beach, the MAF pilots had continued to fly over the Auca settlements and use the spiral-line technique that Nate had developed to send down gifts to the Aucas. She jumped at the opportunity to fly with Johnny on one of these drops. She quickly arranged for one of her Quichua friends to babysit Valerie and climbed into the plane beside Johnny. Soon they were airborne and headed toward Auca territory. They flew over two Auca settlements but saw no one on the ground. At the third settlement they flew over, they saw a young man standing in the clearing by a thatched house. Immediately Johnny banked the plane into a tight circle and instructed Betty to feed out the line attached to the bucket. In the bucket was a hamburger, and when the bucket reached the ground, the Auca man took the hamburger from it and began to eat. He waved up to the plane between bites to acknowledge the gift.
As Betty and Johnny headed back to Shandia, Betty’s heart soared higher than the airplane. Now, sixteen months after the killing of the men at Palm Beach, perhaps the Aucas were ready for another visit, or even to have missionaries come and live with them. It was hard to tell, but Betty hoped so. Her hopes were quickly dashed a few months later when a hut that Dr. Tidmarsh had built on the Curaray River was sacked. The door to the hut was ripped off, everything inside was stolen, and two lances were left at the scene as a warning to anyone who came near the location again.
After the killings at Palm Beach, Dr. Tidmarsh and his wife had moved to Arajuno. During the weekends Dr. Tidmarsh stayed with his wife in the McCullys’ old house, and during the week he went to the hut he had built on the Curaray. The hut was built right at the edge of Auca territory, where Dr. Tidmarsh hoped to continue the work of making contact with the Aucas. Of course, the sacking of the hut by the Aucas was a setback to his work.
A month after the attack on the hut, Betty and Valerie visited the Tidmarshes at Arajuno. During their visit, some astonishing news unfolded. Three Auca women had walked out of the jungle at a Quichua village on the Curaray River a few miles from Arajuno. The messenger who brought the news to Arajuno did not know what the women wanted, but he did not think that they had violence on their minds. He asked Dr. Tidmarsh what the Quichua villagers should do.
Dr. Tidmarsh turned to Betty, whose heart raced as she realized this was what she had been waiting for, preparing for, since Jim’s death twenty-two months before. After a brief conversation with the Tidmarshes, it was agreed that Betty should go to the village with the messenger to find out more. Mrs. Tidmarsh would watch Valerie, since there was no way Betty could carry a child that distance.
Within an hour Betty had filled a bag with everything she thought she might need: notebooks, pencils, insect repellent, soap, a snakebite kit, a change of clothes, a light blanket, and her camera. She did not take any food or a cooking pot with her, trusting that the Quichuas would share what they had with her.
The trail was arduous. Betty and the messenger scrambled up and down ravines to cross rivers and streams and jumped from boulder to boulder along the river’s edge. Eventually they reached the small Quichua outpost at the edge of the Curaray River. When they arrived, two of the Auca women were still there; the third had returned to the jungle.
The Quichuas of the village kept a careful eye on the Auca newcomers. Two old Quichua grandmothers held the women’s hands and tried to reassure them that they were safe, that no one wanted to harm them, and they need not be afraid. Of course, the two Auca women could not understand a word the Quichua women were saying, but Betty could see that holding their hands was reassuring to the women.
When the two Auca women saw Betty, they gasped in terror. Betty stepped back a little, realizing that they had probably never seen a white woman before. She wanted to give the Auca women a chance to observe that she was not armed and was friendly. It also gave her a chance to observe them. By now the two women were dressed in Quichua clothes, the usual straight navy blue skirt and a checkered blouse. But they wore their hair in the fringed Auca hairstyle and had the distinctive holes in their earlobes from balsa wood plugs.
After a while, the two Auca women began to relax and even allowed Betty to approach them. Betty was shocked to recognize one of the women—she was the older woman who had been on Palm Beach before Jim and the others were killed. She knew the woman’s face from the photos developed from the film in Nate’s camera; the images were now burned into Betty’s mind.
Betty tried not to tremble as she reached out to touch hands with the Auca women. This was a strange and special moment for her.
Soon the two Auca women appeared to be completely comfortable with Betty’s presence. They listened to the ticking of her watch and were delighted when she turned on her flashlight. They even “sang” a monotone chant for her, and Betty could decipher only one sound—a long, drawn-out vowel sound.
The Auca chant went on and on, and many of the Quichuas became restless.
“Maybe they are calling the men to war,” one Quichua man suggested.
“Or they are casting a spell on us,” another chimed in.
When night fell, all eyes were on the Auca women. Betty expected the women to leave the village, but they indicated that they wanted to spend the night. They were shown to a small room in one of the older women’s houses, where they lay down to sleep.
The Quichuas of the village became very nervous as darkness enveloped the settlement, and Betty couldn’t blame them. No one really knew why the women had come. The villagers wondered whether they had been sent as a distraction so that the Aucas could unexpectedly attack the village. The Quichua men slept with their guns and lances beside them and leapt to their feet at the slightest sound. “Aucas!” they would yell, before realizing that what they had heard was a dog barking or a monkey disturbing a branch above.
Betty slept on and off through the night, praying that God would show her how to proceed with this strange circumstance that had presented itself. She knew that one wrong move on her part could scare the Auca women away for good.
As the next day dragged on, a sense of foreboding hung over the settlement. Many villagers still questioned why the Auca women were there. Fortunately, in the afternoon, Dr. Tidmarsh arrived at the village with a tape recorder. Betty was happy to fill him in on the details of what had gone on thus far.
Like Betty, Dr. Tidmarsh had a keen interest in the Auca language. He demonstrated for the two Auca women how the tape recorder worked, and the older of the two appeared to understand immediately. She picked up the microphone and began talking into it. No one had any idea what she was saying, but she did not appear to care. She talked on and on, waving her hands, pointing with her chin, laughing, and flinging her head back as she spoke. It was quite a show, one that Betty wished she could have understood.
Days went by, and Betty and Dr. Tidmarsh continued to collect data on the language. The Auca women showed no signs of wanting to leave, and eventually Betty had to decide what to do next. Her work at Shandia had come to a natural end, and the two Auca women had settled in with the Quichua and appeared ready to continue speaking in their language to her so that she could write down as much of it as possible.
Betty’s choice about what to do seemed obvious. She returned to Shandia, packed a few items, and commissioned a group of Quichua men to carry her things back to the settlement by the Curaray River. She had a special wooden chair made for Valerie for the journey, a chair that could be strapped to the back of one of the porters. And so Betty and Valerie joined the Auca women at the Quichua village deep in the jungle. They had been there only one day and were bathing in the river when a cry came from the village. “Aucas!”
Betty grabbed Valerie and listened.
“They’ve already killed! Honorio is dead. Get out of the river, señora, quickly. The Aucas are coming!”
The men of the village were off hunting at the time—all except Dario. Betty watched as Dario came thundering through the undergrowth, heading west toward the hunting party. One of the Auca women raced after him while the other sat motionless on a rock by the river.
As Betty hurriedly dressed herself and Valerie, she felt sure that the two women understood what was going on. If it was an Auca attack, there was nowhere to hide. Betty decided that it would be safer for her and Valerie in the open rather than in the jungle and stayed put where she was. No more commotion followed, and after about half an hour she carried Valerie back to the cluster of thatched huts that made up the village.
Just as night began to fall, the hunting party returned, carrying with them Honorio’s body, which was riddled with eighteen spears. Some of the spears were decorated, one with some pages from a New Testament and another with the cloth cover of a scrapbook that Mrs. Tidmarsh had made for a bucket drop.
More bad news followed. Honorio’s young wife had been with her husband at the time of the attack, but now she was nowhere to be found. The Quichuas were certain that the Aucas would have taken her away. Betty had no reason to doubt them.
That night Betty did some soul-searching. She felt that she and Valerie were safe—not in the sense that they could not be hurt, kidnapped, or killed but safe in the hands of God, knowing that whatever happened to them was their destiny. Still, by morning it was apparent that no one wanted the two Auca women to stay a day longer in the village. Using the few Auca words she had learned, and with lots of gestures, Betty explained to the two women that she wanted to take them back to Arajuno and then on to Shandia. The two agreed to go with her. By now they had told Betty their names: Mintaka and Maengamo.
Some Quichua Christians at Shandia offered to house the two Auca women as well as Betty and Valerie. The first few days there were hectic. Both Quichuas and white people who wanted to finally see a real, live Auca for themselves came to visit Mintaka and Maengamo.
When things settled down a little, Betty was able to get back to studying the Auca language. The work was painfully slow. Many English words had absolutely no Auca equivalent. Betty wondered what to do about abstract words like love and commitment, and concrete ones like sheep and temple. Worst of all, though, was the women’s insistence that Betty could already understand Auca words and all she needed to do was listen.
Betty realized that this belief stemmed from the fact that the two women had never before encountered anyone who did not speak and understand their language and they assumed that it was spoken, or at least understood, all over the world.
The two women gave Betty an Auca name, Gikari, which means “woodpecker.” Betty could never get to the bottom of why they called her this, but she liked the name anyway. It reminded her of her father’s love of birds.
As the months rolled by, tape recordings of Mintaka and Maengamo talking were sent off to the United States. At the time, Rachel Saint was in the United States with Dayuma, her Auca language informant. Betty wanted Dayuma to listen to the tapes and translate them for her so that she could get a better understanding of the language.
Betty was as amazed as Rachel had been when she learned that the two Auca women talking on the tape were actually Dayuma’s aunts. Soon tape-recorded conversations were flowing back and forth between Dayuma and her aunts.
Then in July 1958, Betty received some welcome news. Rachel and Dayuma were back in the Oriente and staying at Limoncocha, situated in the jungle thirty miles north of the Rio Napo and close to Auca territory. Wycliffe Bible Translators’ new operational headquarters for Ecuador was located there, and once she had settled in, Rachel invited Betty to bring Mintaka and Maengamo to stay at Limoncocha with them.
As soon as the airplane pulled to a halt at the end of the airstrip at Limoncocha, Mintaka and Maengamo burst out to greet Dayuma. Betty could scarcely believe the speed at which the Auca women spoke. Their speech was rapid-fire, as if the words were being shot from a machine gun.
The three Auca women had a lot to talk about. They sat under a kapok tree and talked late into the night, reliving old times and catching each other up on what they had done since leaving the tribe. They were up again at first light, back under the kapok tree talking some more.
For their part, Betty and Rachel were able to compare language notes and solve some of the problems they each were having untangling the Auca language and reducing it to writing.
In the end, the five women all spent two months together at Limoncocha. Then one day Mintaka, Maengamo, and Dayuma came and spoke with Betty and Rachel.
“I promised my people I would come back when the kapok is ripe. It is ripe now,” Maengamo said. “I am leaving. I am going home.”
“What will you do when you get there?” Betty asked.
“I will say to my brother, ‘Don’t be afraid. I have lived with Gikari; she is good. She does not kill. Do not kill her. I will bring her to live with us. She will show us God’s carvings.’ I will tell them to clear the land for a woodbee [airplane], build Gikari a house. And not to be afraid. Do not lie, do not kill, do not be afraid.”
The next day the three Auca women were still adamant that they were leaving, and Betty and Rachel helped them plan. It was agreed that Betty and Valerie would fly with them to Arajuno and send them on their way home from there.
It was a hard parting for Betty as she watched the three Auca women who had become her friends walk off the edge of the Arajuno airstrip and into the jungle. She prayed fervently that they would soon come back for her.