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Chapter Four
The house seemed very empty indeed, and I felt more alone than ever before. It was not loneliness, exactly. Nor was it the feeling of alienation I had known since I arrived in the country. It was, rather, the aloneness of responsibility that pressed on me like a weight. Ever since that hot night when I was nineteen I had known that the responsibility lay upon me—I was one of those to whom God had specifically said, “Go ye.” And now the emptiness, the silence and the damp chill of the thick-walled little house assumed almost a physical presence which confronted me and said, “You. It is you, now, who must act. If you do nothing, nothing will be done.”
I went to the window of the living room, where no curtains had yet been hung, and looked across the rooftops of the town to the valley filled with houses. This was the beginning in earnest, and I found in my heart, along with the burden of responsibility, a genuine gratitude to God for the privilege which I saw was mine. He had provided all I needed; He would lead me (“Fear thou not, for I am with thee”—the scriptural words came as confirmation of my own thought); He was responsible, in the end, for the results.
I looked around the bleak little room. No point in trying to bring order out of chaos tonight. Tomorrow I would arrange things. I pulled some food out of Mrs. MacDonald’s box and found enough utensils to fix myself some supper. I could hear the wind whipping around the corners of the house, but there was no other sound. The single light bulb which illuminated the supper table was almost as dim as candlelight. If my friends could see me now! “Oh yes—Margaret Sparhawk. She went to Ecuador, you know—lives all alone way up in the mountains someplace with the Indians. A million Indians, I think she said, up in the Andes.” That’s what they would say, of course, and I would make light of the hardships, tell them how beautiful it was, how I loved the work, how fascinating the Indians were, really, when you got to know them. . . . But I must write to my friends right away. Another prayer letter was long overdue. I had written my first one from Ambato, but had delayed the second, thinking it would be more interesting to wait until I reached my own station. That was what my friends were eager to hear about.
Rummaging in a file box I found the first circular letter—we had called them “prayer letters” at home, where my parents received every week a dozen or so mimeographed reports from missionaries scattered over the globe. My father would read excerpts aloud at family devotions and we would pray for the writers, mentioning the specific needs stated in the letters. It was virtually the only way missionaries had to keep from being forgotten in prayer and—though this was seldom referred to except obliquely—from being financially neglected. I accepted this method without question as one of God’s ways of supplying my needs.
I read over the letter I had written from Ambato.
Dear praying friends:
When He putteth forth His sheep, He goeth before. The Lord has fulfilled His word to me, and at last I find myself in Ecuador, the country to which He called me three years ago. How thankful I am for the privilege of being an ambassador for Christ! And how grateful I am to you dear ones whose prayers and gifts made it possible for me to obey the Great Commission!
Here I am in Ambato, a beautiful city in the inter-Andean plain, about 7,000 feet above sea level There are Spanish colonial buildings, burros and pushcarts and modem cars in the streets, palm trees in gardens and patios. I live with a very nice family, Señor Honorio Torres and his friendly, attractive wife, Señora Aida. He speaks a little English, but she does not know a word, which is an advantage for me because I am forced to speak Spanish. She chatters away very amiably, apparently thinking that I can follow what she says even though I seldom can think how to answer her! The house is very clean and comfortable, and I have a nice little room overlooking the street. Just now as I write I can see a small boy with a huge flat basket of rolls on his head, a shawled woman carrying two live chickens by their legs, a policeman in a khaki uniform with a gleaming white belt who keeps issuing diffident little peeps on a tiny whistle. I wonder why he does this? It seems that if anyone were breaking the law the whistle would give him plenty of warning of the policeman’s approach. Well, there are many things in a foreign country that one doesn’t understand, but it is interesting to learn, and I have learned to say, “How do you say?” and “What is this?” and “Why?”
Every morning I have a Spanish lesson with a charming young señorita named Dolores who wears very high-heeled shoes, long fancy earrings and such well-cut clothes that I feel at times quite frumpy and timid in her presence. She lives in a huge colonial house with a carved front door and a patio in the center, where a fat Indian woman rubs clothes on a block of stone. I have my lesson in an upstairs room which is very dark since it has only one long narrow window. There are immense portraits of bearded gentlemen and solemn ladies—descendants, I suppose, of the conquistadores themselves—on the walls, and they are hung diagonally across the four corners of the room and slanted so that their gaze seems to rest on me as I sit at my lesson. My “desk” is a velvet-covered round table, and my teacher sits opposite me on a brocade throne.
“Rapido, rapido, rapido!” she shrills at me, snapping her fingers in rhythm with the words, and I struggle to conjugate a verb without faltering, “Yo hago, tu haces, él hace.” It is not easy to get them all straight, and I am having an especially difficult time learning the subjunctive, and trying to imitate the intonation pattern, which Señorita Dolores says is very important. My high school Spanish did not get me very far, I am afraid! So please pray for progress in the language study, so that I may soon move out to the Indian villages where I will begin the work to which God has specifically called me.
Pray, too, that I may be a faithful witness for Christ here in this home, and in the city. I am not sure whether the Torres family are true believers, though they are quite willing to discuss the Bible and my reasons for being here in Ecuador. I had a thrilling experience the other day, however, and I trust you will pray very especially for the Lord’s blessing in this matter. I went on a picnic with the Torres family—by bus, over the hills to a lovely swimming place in a green valley—and there I got into conversation with a thin, dark-haired girl named Gladys who said that she had some reservations about the Catholic faith and many questions she wanted to ask me about my own. When I said I would love to come to her house (she lived not far from me in Ambato) and read the Bible with her she jumped at the chance. Consequently I have been visiting her almost every day since, and it seems clear that the Lord is working in her heart. I believe He led me to the encounter, and has been directing me in our talks together. Pray that He will bring her to a definite decision. Perhaps He will give me this seal of approval on my coming, even before I reach the people of the mountains!
I have had correspondence with the MacDonalds, senior missionaries who work up in the mountains, and they have located a good spot for me to work in a Quichua area. I can hardly wait until my time here is up and I can reach at last that needy place. Pray that they may be able to find a suitable house for me when the time comes. Remember to pray, too, for the Gardners, that they may soon receive medical clearance and join me in the work.
Yours in Christ,
Margaret Sparhawk
Five months had passed now, and it was time to write another letter. How to begin? “Dear praying friends” was a standard beginning, and had seemed all right in Ambato. Something had happened since then, something which seemed to call for a simpler form of address—was it a cooler, calmer view of things which I now took? I was not certain, and although “Dear friends” sounded a trifle distant I could think of no better beginning.
The time spent in Ambato has come to a close, and I want to thank each one of you for your prayers. The study of Spanish was very profitable and my teacher was pleased with my examinations. . . .
Here I am, at last, in Indi Urcu (the i’s are pronounced like e’s, the u’s are long), a little village much higher up in the Andes than Ambato was, in the center of a large Indian area. I am hoping to start the study of Quichua as soon as I can find an informant, and would ask you to pray that the Lord will guide me to the right one. As you know, my ultimate goal is the translation of the Bible into mountain Quichua.
Some of you, perhaps, are wondering about Gladys.
Here I paused, not knowing what to write about a thing which had caused me no end of anxiety and self-criticism. Things had worked beautifully in the beginning, I believed God had led me to her, she seemed as needy as any jungle savage, she was open to all I had to say. I had prayed, friends had prayed, but one week the maid said she was not at home and the next week she said she was sick. The following week she was at home, but told me she did not really want to read the Bible and was having difficulty finding time to study the English verb lists I had given her. In the end, she did not see me anymore, and I wondered if after all I was never to qualify as a missionary. What could I tell those who had prayed?
She never came to any definite commitment of herself to Christ, so far as I know, although I believe that the Lord is able to bring fruit out of seed that has been planted. Keep on praying for her.
I paused again. Here, in Indi Urcu, things were bound to happen. Perhaps God was only testing my faith in the Gladys experience. After all, someone has to plant. Often another reaps.
Remember the words of Scripture, “When we believe not, yet He abideth faithful.”
Yours for the salvation of Ecuador’s Indians,
Margaret Sparhawk
I rolled the paper out of the machine and started to read it over but realized that my feet were cold. The little house was drafty and the thick adobe walls held the cold. I got up and went to the bedroom to see if I could find my slippers in the jumble of boxes. A window was open and I discovered that the latch did not fit, so I wedged a piece of paper under it. Dust had blown over everything and felt gritty to my fingers as I opened the suitcases. Oh dear, I thought, where am I to hang all these things? There wasn’t a closet in the house. But how petty! I scolded myself. Other missionaries had trekked over mountains, across deserts, through raging seas.
They met the tyrant’s brandished steel,
The lion’s gory mane,
They bowed their necks the death to feel—
Who follows in their train?
If I were to answer with my own name I had better stop worrying about cold feet, broken latches, dust and lack of closet space.