CHAPTER III
CHAPTER III
"All Things to All Men"
In Shandia, Jim and Pete became full-fledged missionaries for the first time. They had come to reach the Quichuas with the Word of God, a task for which they were prepared but could accomplish only if they gained the Quichuas' confidence and love. So by living among them, sharing in their lives and thus laying the foundations of mutual trust they hoped to open the minds and hearts of the Indians to the Christian message. And Jim and Pete knew that whatever knowledge they gained from their experiences among the Quichuas would prepare them for work among other tribes further removed from today's civilization.
The two young missionaries learned quickly that the Quichuas hunt a little, farm a little, and work occasionally for a neighboring hacienda owner. They are subject to a variety of diseases and debilitating intestinal parasites. They are caught between two cultures-the disappearing one of the forebears and the rising white man's world of today. They are a gentle people, unlike their neighbors to the south, the headhunting Jivaros, and to the northeast the feared Aucas. Every facet of the lives, health, language, education, birth, and death of the Indians was of immediate interest to Jim and Pete.
Night after night they sat in their little hut, listening to the jungle tuning up its nocturnal orchestra, and recording their experiences in diaries and letters. Moths and flies swarmed against the lantern, dropping to the paper and clogging penpoints. Great beetles zoomed at their faces, which glistened with sweat from the heat of the lamp. Every evening they were surrounded by a circle of dark, laughing faces-schoolboys who came in to watch whatever the missionaries might be doing.
"Don't white people ever get tired of paper?" said one to Dr. Tidmarsh in Quichua. "These two, all they do is look at paper and write on paper. My father says white men smell like paper. He gets mad at me for smelling like paper when I come home from school."
Pete Fleming smiled as Dr. Tidmarsh translated. How was a man to concentrate for five minutes? But then-he loved these Quichua boys. This is what he had bargained for-this is why he had renounced the solitude and silence for study, which had been his pleasure before.
I was by this time in the western jungle of Ecuador, and Jim kept in touch with me as frequently as jungle mail service would permit. Soon after he reached Shandia he wrote: "Days begin at 6 A.M. with the swooshing of the gas stove on which Dr. Tidmarsh heats his shaving water. The box we use for a wash stand sits on the comer of the front porch, and the drain is over the wall, where you aim the basin at a ditch which runs right around the house. Breakfast, usually consisting of a bowl or two of banana soup or ground corn, a fresh banana and a cup of coffee, has so far been interrupted at 7:15 each morning to make radio contact with the other mission stations of the region. At meal-time we speak only in Spanish. Breakfast is followed by a reading of Daniel in Spanish, and morning prayer.
"So far my mornings have been consumed in watching the doctor do medical work, studying, or making some gadget to bring things to a little better state for comfort, and interspersed with visits to the airstrip to see if the men are working. Today, as a herd of wild pigs upriver sent most of them scurrying to the hunt, there were only a dozen or so working. They had arrived at that part of the strip which was planted in patches of plantain [a tropical fruit, 'cooking cousin' of the banana] and they were loath to cut them down. I helped them push over the trees to get them started. It's like destroying food to them, and it hurt me a little, too, but there are other plantains and no other airstrips.
Airstrip at Shell Mera-home base of the Missionary Aviation Fellowship. Lower right: MAF quarters, house occupied by the Saint family, and hangar. Left. the Pastaza River. Top: foothills of the Andes.
OVERLEAF With a playmate, five-year-old Stevie Saint (left) watches his father taxi down the runway in the MAFs bright yellow Piper Cruiser after a flight over the danger-filled jungle.
ABOVE In 1953, long before they were to launch Operation Auca, three of the missionaries made a survey trip down the Bobonaza River. Left to right Ed McCully, Pete Fleming, Jim Elliot. The tame parrot was a gift from friendly Quichuas.
LEFT This picture of Roger Youderian, and similar pictures of the other missionaries, was dropped to the Aucas to familiarize them with the faces of their sky- bome friends. To aid in the identification, Roger holds a feathered headdress, a gift from the Aucas; in addition, a plane was sketched on the edge of the picture.
RIGHT Nate Saint, the pilot among the five men, whose development of a bucketdrop system from his plane made possible the interchange of gifts between the missionaries and the Aucas.
TOPLE17 Roger Youderian, using a language chart developed by the missionaries, teaches Jivaro Indians to read in their own language.
LOWER FAR LEFT In Puyupungu, Pete Fleming translates the Bible into Quichua for Atanasio, the local chief.
LOWERLEFT Nate Saint pauses during a welding job at Shell Mera. ABOVE Jim Elliot baptizes an Indian woman.
Mission station at Arajuno, with Ed McCully, Marilou, and their son Stevie. Aluminum sheets for the roof were flown in by Nate Saint, while boards for the walls were salvaged from the abandoned Shell Oil community. Gasoline barrels at the right catch rain water.
"Our room is exceedingly pleasant; a huge window looks out on a beautiful view. Door is monk's cloth curtain, between our room and the living room. Two throw rugs and the two aluminum chairs make the place look very civilized and the Indian, Venancio, sweeps it daily to clean out the mud and dead cockroaches."
Old Venancio, a typical Quichua, was Dr. Tidmarsh's righthand man. He dresses as the white man does, in ordinary pants and shirt, his parents having years ago left the old costume of the Quichuas, the kushma. Travel on jungle trails, sometimes in kneedeep mud, makes shoes an absurdity for him, though a few others wear them on special occasions as a sign of prestige. A safety pin adorns a conspicuous spot on the front of his unironed shirt, handy for removing chonta palm thorns from his feet. As he travels the trails, he carries a well-worn machete, which he swings aimlessly at trees. If he comes to a steep or slippery bank, he can cut steps for his toes as he ascends. If a vine hangs in his way, one swipe removes it. His wife Susanna trudges behind him, carrying her baby in a cloth on her side, and a great basket containing cooking pot, chickens, blanket, and plantains. This basket is strapped with a jungle "rope," a strip of bark or a long, fibrous leaf, which is passed around the basket and up over Susanna's forehead. She, too, carries her machete, with which to dig and peel the manioc which is their main diet, trim her fingernails, or discourage the weeds around their front door. The machete is their most valued implement-indeed, often the only implement. It makes an excellent hoe, shovel, ax, knife, scissors, or what have you. Jim and Pete soon learned that it is indispensable in the jungle, and wondered how they had ever done without one in the States.
Venancio spends much of his time making small baskets for storing eggs, trumpet-shaped traps and nets for scooping fish, woven sieves, and monkey-skin drums. His wife does all of the heavy work, such as clearing the land of trees and other jungle growth, planting, carrying water and firewood, washing of clothes on the rocks by the river, hauling of heads of plantains, which may weigh up to one hundred pounds each.
Venancio's bed is made of a few slabs of split bamboo laid across a few poles. For chairs he has chunks of wood, five or six inches in height, on which he squats by the fire. A soup plate and spoon make up his eating utensils, and he uses half-gourds for drinking, along with the clay bowls. The staple food of Venancio and his fellow tribesmen is a drink known as chicha. This is made from manioc, a starchy tuber dug daily by the womenfolk, peeled with deft whacks of the machete, and steamed in a clay pot. When it is cooked, the women pound the manioc with a wooden pestle to the consistency of mashed potato, but coarser and heavier. Taking mouthfuls of this, they chew it and spit it into a tray, thus beginning the fermentation which continues as the mass is put back into the great clay urns. It is left for a day or two, or even a week if strong chicha is desired. The Quichuas literally live on this stuff for most of their lives, supplementing it when they can with wild meat or fish, perhaps a little jungle fruit, and eggs.
Day by day in their observation of the Indians as individuals and in a group, Jim and Pete learned to fit themselves into this new fabric of living. One night as the two men, with their senior worker Dr. Tidmarsh, sat with the schoolboys in their little bamboo house, running steps were heard outside.
"Doctor! Doctor! Tiangichu? Are you there?"
"Ikui. Ikui. Come in."
"My sister-in-law is dying!"
This, in Quichua, may mean anything from a headache to a snakebite. If one is in excellent health, he is "living." Otherwise, he is "dying."
"What is the matter with your sister-in-law?"
"She is causing a child to be born. Will you come?"
Unless there is some complication, the missionary is not usually called to attend a delivery, but Dr. Tidmarsh knew that in this case the woman had lost five babies. He was a doctor of philosophy, not a medical doctor, although he had studied homeopathy. So he collected the simple equipment he had for such emergencies, and with Pete, started down the river. Venancio, serving as guide, plunged ahead in the darkness, while they swung their flashlights to try to augment the little circle of light they threw on the muddy trail. The Talac River, a shallow stream perhaps fifty feet wide, had to be crossed two or three times, and finally the house was reached, a rectangular building constructed of split bamboo and palm-leaf roof, woven beautifully and evenly. As they entered the narrow doorway, stepping over a low sill designed to discourage pigs and chickens, they could see several fires glowing dimly through the smoke that always fills the house and incidentally acts as a preservative for the roof leaf, coating it with tars that resist insects. In one corner sat a man, weaving a string fishing net. Another sawed away on a homemade violin.
"The woman was lying on a bamboo board," Pete wrote later in his diary, "partly shielded from public view by two loosely hung blankets, and was attended by the 'midwife.' Gradually all became dark, the smoldering fires died to embers, and the families went to their boards for the night, the little children with their parents, older boys together in one corner, girls in another. They gave Tidmarsh and me a bed and we lay down as there was no sign of the baby's arrival, labor pains still seven minutes apart. As the bamboo had none of the usually-associated attributes of flexibility which it has in the minds of many, and as our shoes and pants were still wet from walking in the river, we soon chilled, and later rose and sat on small log seats around a smoky fire which refused to stay alight. In company of two mangy skeleton-ribbed dogs we sat listening to the whine of the crickets, the strange goose-like honking of the tree toads, the occasional waking cry of a child, the creaking of the bamboo as someone rolled over, and the periodic moans of the woman which rose shrilly to a short scream.
"Gradually as the pains increased and intensified the girl rose to her knees and reached for the vine-rope which hung from the ceiling above, intertwining her hands in the rope and lifting her body when the pains came. For me, those small brown hands held high over the head, and the arms, lined with taut tendons, communicated something of the simplicity and yet binding custom of their means of giving birth. After she had passed the water, the pains waned and finally the baby began to descend. The midwife gave a word, everybody woke up and moved sleepily to the corner and stood peering over the curtains. Privacy is a word and concept unknown. They prepared a drink for the mother by scraping the claw of a sloth and mixing the powder with water. I think this is suppose to hasten the arrival of the baby.
"Venancio, our cook, then stepped inside, grasped the girl by the shoulders and began shaking her violently which he continued to do until the baby arrived, dropping half onto the banana leaves, half on the earthen floor, a tiny white frail thing attached to an intestine-like cord, motionless in the flickering kerosene light. It burped a couple of times, sputtered and cried, then adopted normal breathing. Tidmarsh stepped in to tie off the cord, and the midwife cut it with the sharp edge of a bamboo stick. The midwife then took the baby, took a mouthful of water from an iron pot, and spat it out over the baby, thus washing it. Then wrapping it in an old dirty cloth and tying it with a woman's embroidered belt, she handed it to a small naked child who tottered across the floor with it. A woman took it, laid it on a bamboo plant, where it was apparently forgotten. Meanwhile the mother continued in her martyr-like position, wincing and writhing under the continuing contractions. Tidmarsh committed the baby to the Lord in prayer."
Slowly the men became more familiar with the language. They were never without their little black notebooks and pencils. Since the language was not a written one, they had only to write down what they heard, try to find out by one means or another what it meant, and then memorize.
"1 find the language fascinating," Jim wrote home. "The freshness of discovering a language from the speaker's mouth, without the aid of a textbook, is most stimulating. And an especially interesting feature to me now is the onomatopoeic value of certain words. For example, I heard it said of a free-swinging broken wrist, It goes whi- lang, whi-lang.' The word has no dictionary meaning, so far as we can discover. Or a lamp flickering goes Ii -ping, li-ping, tiung, tiung, and dies.' The word `tukluk, tukluk' describes rapid swallowing and gulping. And there are myriads more."
As Pete and Jim's knowledge of the language grew, so grew the Indians' confidence in them, and they began to invite the missionaries to greater participation in their life and customs. "You speak Quichua better than we do," said Wakcha, a proud young Indian who always wore a pith helmet, a sign of great prestige among his people. "You hear us too well. We are talking away, saying to ourselves, 'They do not hear,' and then you answer us!"
Dr. Tidmarsh eventually left the forest to return to his family in the mountains, but before he went he gave Jim and Pete a few simple instructions about caring for the sick. On their own, they would have to give what medical aid they could with the help of medical books and prayer. Sick calls had to be answered. One night in January a distraught father came to them on behalf of his baby who was ill.
"Will you not stick it with medicine?" he pleaded. It had not taken the Indians long to learn the healing power of antibiotics for their frequent tropical infections, and they soon began to feel that unless they were injected, the missionary had really done nothing at all. It was useless for the missionary to try to explain that if a man had a bad case of worms, penicillin would not cure him. "Drinkingmedicine" was not nearly so effective, in the Indian mind, as "sticking-medicine." This time, however, the baby's case seemed to be pneumonia, so Jim gave penicillin. The parents were satisfied that he had done what he could-but the baby did not show immediate signs of recovery. They fell back, then, on the greatest power they knew, the witch doctor. Jim asked if he might stay to watch the ceremony. "A bed was pointed out to me," he recalled later. "I was told they were going to drink ayak waska and that I was to stay on the cane bed and not turn on my flashlight.
"All lamps were extinguished by 8:30, and the three Indians who were to drink the herb, ayak waska, could be heard speaking across the room occasionally. I feigned sleep and drowsed but woke when one of the watchers sleeping on the floor beside me was roused to be alert to listen as the drinking passed and the 'swoon speech' expected. I heard the quick, steady, swish beat of what sounded like a bunch of dry leaves being shaken, and from somewhere, I cannot say if it was from the same source, the rather melodious whistle of the three-tone pattern so usual among them. This was interspersed with a spitting, retching sound, and the curious pop of the smoke blowing on the patient's head, as I had seen done earlier. (I had offered another injection of penicillin and been refused at supper time. The witch doctor insisted that we wait till morning.) The swishing and blowing and whistling were joined by an occasional heavy snore and I dropped off to sleep.
"At eleven I was awakened by an Indian playing a violin. We chatted. I checked the baby at midnight and was told that the witch ing had not amounted to much as the drinkers had not taken enough to do much talking. Fever seemed a little higher, breathing and general condition had not changed. Around one I fell asleep again. The mother and an old woman were awake, making applications of leaves and tobacco. Lamps and kerosene lanterns made things somewhat less eerie than earlier. I slept until the death wail awakened me at three. No struggle; just quit breathing. Made our third small coffin this morning."
These happenings gave insight into the life of these people. Superstition and fear bound them tightly. Would the New Testament answer the longing of the Quichua for freedom from fear, peace of heart, deliverance from evil spirits? The missionaries prayed and discussed these problems, but still they felt themselves foreigners-felt that they would always be foreigners. The Indian himself must be the answer-he must learn the Scriptures, be taught, and in turn teach his own people. To this end Pete and Jim reopened the missionary school at Shandia that Dr. Tidmarsh had been forced to close. Here in a one-room schoolhouse the youngsters of the community were taught to read and write so that ultimately they could read the Scriptures for themselves.
But there were others, Indians who had as yet never had one chance to hear the story which these boys listened to daily. Would God send Jim and Pete to take the message to the Aucas?
"The thought scares me at times," wrote Pete, "but I am ready. We have believed God for miracles, and this may include the Aucas. It has got to be by miracles in response to faith. No lesser expedient is a short-cut. 0 God, guide!"