CHAPTER V
CHAPTER V
"Expendable for God"
A vioneta uyarimun! The little plane is coming into hearing!"
These words, shouted by the Indians, announced to Jim, Ed, Pete, and other missionaries in the Oriente that the bright yellow Piper of the Missionary Aviation Fellowship was about to land on the station airstrip. The most welcome sound in the jungle was the approaching hum of its engine. The missionary would interrupt his business for the morning-treating a baby for impetigo, selling a bottle of worm medicine, teaching a Bible class, or sawing boards for a building. There would be a grand scramble to clear the strip, the missionary would pace it for a final check of the surface, and then, when dogs and children were at a safe distance, the plane would glide onto the grass. As the prop stopped spinning, the door would swing open, and a sunburned, sandy-haired man with a wide grin and frank, blue eyes would hop out-Nate Saint, the man whose vision had changed missionary life in the jungle.
Nate would dig out the cargo listed for that station, checking aloud the list which his wife, Marj, had made out for him beforehand:
"Let's see-a sack of flour, fifteen gallons of diesel oil, meat, vegetables, two brooms, and the mail. Your penicillin is in the mail sack. Guess that's it. How's it going, Ed?"
As the two men talked beside the plane, Indians would eagerly gather round. One would stand rubbing one leg down the back of the other continually, to keep off the flies. A baby would cry, or a dog would escape from the captivity of a child-nothing would distract the Indians from looking at the plane, no matter how many times they had seen it.
And then, without warning, a tiny alarm would sound-Nate's watch! A methodical man, he had figured out exactly how much time he could spend in that station and still make his deadline home before sundown, or, if he had another flight scheduled, he would know precisely when he must take off for that. After piling and lashing down the empty diesel oil cans in the back of his plane for refilling at his headquarters in Shell Mera, and rechecking his list, he would jump in, fasten safety belt and shoulder harness, wave goodbye, and take off. It was a bright spot in the week for the isolated missionary.
"Man, there's nobody like old Nate," Ed would say to Marilou, as they walked back to the house.
Truly the coming of Nate Saint with the Piper had marked the beginning of a new way of life on the isolated mission stations of this jungle area. Heretofore the missionary and his family would be completely cut off from the outside world long months at a time-four, six, eight days of heartbreaking struggle on dangerous jungle trail separated him from medical and other help. Then, one by one, airstrips were hacked from the jungle. Radio transmitters and receivers were installed, and the airplane, when it came, covered in five minutes the distance of a long hard day on the trail. Housing was vastly improved-from vermin-ridden bamboo and short-lived thatch to boards cut and planed by machinery brought in by air. Nate worked out a special frame underneath his plane for hauling sheets of aluminum. These provided a durable and easily-constructed roof. Electric light plants and fuel to run them, kerosene refrigerators, filing cabi nets, stoves, power saws, and cement-all helped to make life in the jungle safer, healthier, and more efficient.
Nate and his wife, Marj, arrived in the Oriente in September, 1948. His first job there was to set up some kind of living quarters for himself and Marj in Shell Mera. A tent sufficed during the weeks he was building a small frame house, which soon became "warehousedormitory-toolshed." But the job of serving the missionaries was not allowed to wait until the Saints were comfortably settled. Nate had come down as a pilot of the Missionary Aviation Fellowship, an interdenominational organization founded by two ex-Navy pilots whose aim it was to transport evangelical missionaries, their supplies, their sick, to and from remote outposts. Thus, by lightening the physical burden which the missionary carries because of the primitive nature of his surroundings, the MAF could give him more time and energy for his spiritual ministry.
Almost at once Nate started ferrying missionaries in his plane, transporting their cargo, making courtesy flights, and handling all the maintenance on the plane himself. Marj began entertaining all the missionaries and their visitors who came through Shell Mera. These were numerous and she was the only available hostess for miles around. She never knew whether supper should be cooked for two or twelve. "And they eat like harvest hands!" she said. "I cook what I think ordinary people would eat, and then double it."
For the stringent requirements of their unique job, Nate and Marj were eminently suited. Nate's appreciation of Marj's role was once expressed in a letter: "How glad I am to have you working at my side always. I have felt that I had sufficient `snort' and drive for the sprints, but God knew I would need a flywheel to steady me for the long haul."
Nate's first concern in flying was that it should be safe, efficient, and economical: "Missionaries who used to travel the old trails made sure they weren't carrying anything that wasn't necessary. Today, in the airplane, we, too, make sure we don't carry anything that isn't necessary. When our mission bought the plane, it had nice, soft seats in it. But we found that these seats weighed almost eight pounds each. So we decided to use harder seats that weighed only one pound, and take seven pounds of extra food and cargo."
Every ounce counted in a plane of this type. When Nate found that the streamlined wheel covers were collecting mud, he took them off. Characteristically, Nate turned this to spiritual illustration: "When life's flight is over, and we unload our cargo at the other end, the fellow who got rid of unnecessary weight will have the most valuable cargo to present to the Lord."
Nate had always regarded himself as "expendable" for the cause of Christ. In a short sermon delivered over the missionary radio station HCJB-The Voice of the Andes in Quito-he shared his belief with others:
"During the last war we were taught to recognize that, in order to obtain our objective, we had to be willing to be expendable.... This very afternoon thousands of soldiers are known by their serial numbers as men who are expendable.... We know there is only one answer to our country's demand that we share in the price of freedom. Yet, when the Lord Jesus asks us to pay the price for world evangelization, we often answer without a word. We cannot go. We say it costs too much.
"God Himself laid down the law when He built the universe. He knew when He made it what the price was going to be. God didn't hold back His only Son, but gave Him up to pay the price for our failure and sin.
"Missionaries constantly face expendability. Jesus said, `There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, orsisters, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands for my sake and the Gospel's but shall receive a hundred fold now in this time and in the world to come eternal life.'"
However, Nate's convictions about expendability did not lessen that sense of caution which is ingrained in the fiber of any first-rate flier. On the contrary, his brain teemed with ideas for improving the safety of his plane. "I am trying to steer clear of gimmicking for the sake of gimmicking," he wrote. "Nevertheless, I can't help the gad gets that run through my head, but I do try to sort out stuff that might have some value."
One of the devices of real value which he put into operation was an alternate fuel system. He often tried out his ideas on his older brother Sam, an airline pilot with long experience in the field of aeronautics.
"As I sit about the jungle listening for the symptoms of trouble that I never want to hear," Nate wrote to Sam, "I have in the back of my mind little things like the fuel line that fell off in my hand in Mexico a few years back. The flare had broken off one end of the tubing, but natural spring tension had kept it in place. I also think of the quick work of mud wasps when they decide to plug up a fuel vent. To be sure, I am also impressed by the dire consequence to my passengers, not to mention my own bones, if I should come out on the short end somewhere over these tall trees."
While turning over in his mind methods of eliminating a breakdown in the fuel system, Nate was working one day at the hangar at Shell Mera when he noticed a truck en route to Ambato, high in the Andes. Trucks in that region were not common and this one had an additional attention-catcher. A small boy was clinging to the roof of the cab holding a five-gallon can of gas and a syphon, while an older boy sat on the front fender holding the lower end of the syphon, pointed in the direction of the carburetor under the partially opened hood. Whatever had caused the failure of the regular fuel system, here was a truck preparing for an ascent of six thousand feet, most of the way in second or third gear with a great deal of shifting, while a boy metered gas to the engine through a rubber hose!
Nate's lively imagination immediately transferred this method of feeding gas to his own need. He lifted the cowl of his plane, removed the temperature-gauge fitting from the intake manifold, and squirted in gasoline. Each squeeze on the gas-loaded tube produced a burst of power. Encouraged by his experimentation, he went into the kitchen and borrowed one of Marj's cooking-oil tins to use as an auxiliary three-gallon tank. To provide a streamlined fairing for the tank he sent an Indian boy for a piece of balsa wood, which the lad obtained by chopping down an eight-foot balsa tree. The tank and fairing were then strapped to the struts under the left wing. Salvaged fittings, strainers, and a screw-type valve finished the rig. Nate mounted the valve on the fire wall and extended a control rod to the instrumental panel. So far so good, but darkness forced him to wait until morning to test his homemade safety device.
He put in a sleepless night, thinking of various reasons why his idea was totally impracticable-but still there was that truck racing along in second gear without its normal fuel source. Then, too, from his long experience as a mechanic he knew that the complexity of a modern carburetor arises from the need to accelerate smoothly from slow speeds to higher speeds. And a dead engine in the air, he told himself, will windmill fast enough to stay out of those critical lower speeds.
The next morning, first tests proved that the alternate fuel system could work without a hitch on the ground. The moment had come to test it in the air. He described the experience:
Two thousand feet above the landing strip I pulled the mixture control to idle-cut-off. It was quite a novel experience for a fellow who had listened so long, hoping never to hear it happen. But a turn of the new little T-handle on the instrument panel brought with it a wonderful feeling as the engine wound back up to smooth fullpower. For the next twenty minutes the normal fuel source was shut off tight. Even though the carburetor was by-passed completely the engine never missed. It picked up from the windmilling condition without a cough.
"I put the plane into every imaginable attitude at various power settings. It never faltered. 'Feeling' for the best mixture setting with the emergency T-handle was no more difficult than 'leaning' the engine with the regular mixture control. Same thing.
"The whole rig, tank and all, weighs only four pounds. The only thing it has in common with the ship's fuel system is the engine. It takes care of all the common troubles such as clogged vents and bro ken lines. With the simplicity and low cost of a deal like this, why do we fly along with our only source of fuel supply in jeopardy at several points between tank and engine, and no alternative? We are all sold on dual ignition: why not an alternate fuel system for emergencies?"
With government permission, every MAF plane now goes out to the jungle a safer machine because it is equipped with Nate's alternate fuel system.
Another ingenious invention of Nate's has astonished many in the aviation world. He developed a method of lowering a canvas bucket from an airplane in full flight into the hands of a person on the ground. This "spiraling-line technique," as he called it, later made possible the first direct contact with the Aucas. A canvas bucket is let out behind the airplane on a line about fifteen hundred feet long. As the airplane goes into a tight turn, the bucket moves toward the center of the circle-the drag of the cord across the circle overcoming the centrifugal force tending to throw the bucket outward. As the bucket moves toward the center it falls until it eventually hangs almost motionless at the bottom or vortex of an inverted cone. Not only could the person on the ground receive mail, medicine, and small parcels, but, more important, could send messages or other things back to the airplane as the bucket is pulled up again. Sometimes Nate substituted a telephone wire for the cord, with a field telephone in the bucket. In this way he could talk by telephone to a missionary on a sandbar or in a jungle clearing in areas where there was no landing strip.
One of the essential safety measures was the maintenance at all times of short-wave contact with the plane. This was Marj's job. Whenever the plane was in the air, she stood by for regular checks of location, altitude, and fuel load. She checked on weather conditions in Shell Mera, and kept in touch with the missionary to whose station Nate was flying fora check from that end. Each missionary station was equipped with transmitter and receiver, and at seven o'clock every morning the missionaries called in to Shell Mera. If a medical emergency had arisen since the previous call, help could be obtained, and flights arranged for evacuating the patient. Routine supplies were ordered, and flights scheduled by means of this contact. It meant hours and hours of sitting by the radio, but Marj was as convinced that this was her share of missionary work as Nate was that flying was his. Thus on any morning a visitor to Shell Mera might have heard something like this:
"Shell Mera is standing by for Macuma, Macuma. Over."
"Macuma standing by. We'd just like to know how many carriers to have at the airstrip when our cargo arrives. Over."
"Good morning, Macuma. I think two will be enough. Over."
"Okay, thanks. And how is the boy we sent out to the clinic? Over."
"I'll phone the clinic and find out if he can come home on Thursday's flight. Incidentally, you'll be having a visitor on Thursday. A missionary just came in on the bus and would like to see a typical jungle station. Over."
"Okay, Marj. We'll be glad to have him. Better send us a little more food than our usual order this week, though. Over."
"Okay. Okay Macuma. Shell Mera calling Shandia, Shandia. Do you have any traffic? Over."
"Shandia standing by. No traffic, Mad. Over."
And so the morning would pass, Marj taking orders for food, supplies for the Indian schools, medicine for the dispensaries, standing by while one station talked with another, relaying messages from missionaries to the doctor, getting his answer by telephone and relaying it back to the missionary, and calling "56 Henry," Nate's plane, as he flew out over the jungle, carefully noting down his position every five minutes.
There were those back home who smiled at Nate's constant concern for safety. "After all," they said, "a missionary is supposed to trust the Lord!"
"Perhaps my reasoning is pagan, as I've been told," Nate wrote home. "I do believe in miracles. They are nothing to God, surely. But the question is one of finding the pattern that the Lord has chosen us to conform to. I wouldn't be here if I weren't trusting the Lord. Chances are that those who shrug it off by saying, `The Lord will take care of you,' are the same ones who would hardly expose themselves to the bacteriological risks of working in a downtown rescue mission. Forgive me if I feel a little strongly at this point. I'm concerned about safety, but I don't let it keep me from getting on with God's business. Every time I take off, I am ready to deliver up the life I owe to God. I feel we should be quick to take advantage of every possible improvement in carrying out the job before us."
Besides facilitating the work of the jungle missionaries, Nate had a direct influence on the Ecuadorians at his own doorstep. He never appeared to be hurried, and many a national came to him just to talk, recognizing in him a love for God and a sympathetic heart which drew them. He improved steadily in the Spanish language, and was respected for this effort. Street meetings, Sunday school and literacy classes, personal chats-these things made Nate a missionary as well as a pilot.
Small contrivances to add to the convenience and pleasure of his family also took his attention. He built a concrete cistern to catch rain water from the roof, and also built up a lower outer wall so that the children-Kathie born in 1949 and Stevie born in 1951-could have a place to wade in the overflow from the larger tank. He put a bell-ringing timer on the washing machine to save Mad steps while she was at the radio. Dampness is a major problem in Shell Mera, so Nate created a drying room behind the kitchen by building the kerosene refrigerator flush with the kitchen wall and backing the heating unit into the little room, into which he also put the hot water heater. Thus clothes and other equipment could be kept dry.
What had brought a man with this inventive, ingenious turn of mind, with these modern technical skills, into the primitive jungle of Ecuador? Like Ed, Pete, and Jim, Nate came from a family whose guiding principles of life were rooted deep in the teachings of the Scriptures. As a small boy, he understood the personal implications of the New Testament, and placed his faith in Christ as the only ground for his hope of salvation. In the Saint home in Philadelphia, where Nate was born in 1923, movies and dancing were not allowed, nor any form of gambling, from pitching pennies to playing poker. But it was no monastery. The children went fishing, trapping, sledding in wintertime, and were allowed such adventures as sleeping out-of-doors. Nate blueprinted and built model gliders, boats, and locomotives. His older sister Rachel was "like a little mother" to him, reading him missionary books about Africa, Japan, India, and South America. His imagination fastened eagerly onto these stories, and he once said, "I don't expect ever to be a preacher, but someday I would like to talk to someone who has never heard about Jesus."
His older brother Sam took him flying when Nate was seven-so small that he had to stand on the seat to see out of the cockpit of the old biplane. From that time on he was captured by wings and the wide sky.
At thirteen he suffered a severe case of osteomyelitis in his leg, and enforced inactivity gave him time to think. Could it be that God wanted him to be a missionary?
Later he recorded: "Through high school everything was evaluated in terms of flying machines and all emotions were tuned to imagined air adventures. All else became almost unbearably confining, in fact, any occupation that keeps me where I can't see the sky for a day is still one of my rougher tribulations."
The four walls of the classroom finally did become unbearable, and in his senior year Nate took a daytime job in a welding shop and went to night school, completing his high school course in a few months. A job at a small airport, where he learned to fly small planes, took up the next six months. After this he worked in an airline overhaul shop and gained a mechanic's license. The next step was to sign up for the Air Force pilot cadet program. "It looked as though the Eagle was about to lay the golden egg!" he said. "Twenty-five thousand dollars' worth of pilot training!" By this time he had piloted a 40horsepower light plane about eighty hours, but he had dreamed long of flying the big powerful planes of the military.
The night before he was to report for his first military flying instruction he became aware of pain around his old osteomyelitis scar. Yanking up his trouser leg, he knew the truth. It was inflamed. All his boyhood ambitions of the past years, wrapped up and focused on this shining opportunity to get into big-time flying, suddenly collapsed. "I didn't say a word to my roommate, but jumped into bed and turned out the light without a word. There I barred myself into the small, dark confines of my heart, which had now become a dungeon for solitary confinement. Except for the tossing, and choked, then sighing, respiration, no one would have known the thing that was almost overwhelming me. No fooling; I was heartbroken."
The shock of losing the opportunity of getting out of the flying "put-puts" into real airplanes left Nate in a state of numbness, not caring much about anything. When he came out of the hospital, the Air Force made him a maintenance crew chief. On this job he had time to burn and he used it for Bible reading, which he had neglected. One year after he was grounded, he was sent to Detroit on detached service to study new and larger engines that were soon to be on the line, and there, at a New Year's Eve worship service, he felt that the Lord was turning his heart to the mission field. "What was going on in the service wasn't important," he recalled later. "I wasn't hearing anything with my ears, anyhow. I pleaded helplessly with my Heavenly Father for the answer that stood between me and the peace that Jesus had said should be ours. Now, you've heard about people being spoken to by God. I don't know about the other fellow, but that night I saw things differently ... BING ... like that. Just as though a different Kodachrome slide had been tossed onto the screen between my ears. As soon as I could, I stepped out of the building and started out ... just to get away from people. It was snowing and there was already a deep virgin snow on the ground, and the moan of city traffic had been muffled as it is when deep snow is around. A joy, such as I had never known since the night I accepted Jesus' forgiveness for my sins, seemed to leave me almost weak with gratitude. It was the first time that I had ever really heard that verse: 'Follow me, and I will make you to become fishers of men.' The old life of chasing things that are of a temporal sort seemed absolutely insane."
It was at this juncture, when Nate thought that he would have to say good-bye to planes and flying and buckle down to a couple of years of college in preparation for the mission field, that he heard of the Missionary Aviation Fellowship. He wrote to his mother: "Methinks the aircraft industry has suffered the loss of a 'big operator,' and the Lord has won for Himself a 'li'l operator.' "
Shortly after V.E. Day he was shipped out to Salinas, California, to work as crew chief with the Fourth Air Force. There he met the two ex-Navy pilots who had founded MAF. It sounded like the perfect, made-to-order spot for Nate Saint. He got hold of an old, beaten up, 40-horsepower airplane, fixed it up, and began flying in every spare minute-practicing, always practicing.
While he was still in the Army he met Marj Farris, whom he later described in a letter: "Among other blessings, the greatest. She had just finished her State exams and is now a practicing registered nurse in California. She is a graduate of U. of California at Los Angeles, an ardent student of the Word, and has a challenging love for the lost. She is the most selfless person I have met in my life except my Mother. She is a meek girl of deep conviction ready for service for the Lord of the Harvest...."
When Nate was discharged from the Air Force he asked God specifically to show him his next move. Suddenly, he found himself with his first assignment with MAF. Early in July, 1946, he was asked to go down to Mexico to repair a plane that had crashed there during a landing. "When God took over my life a couple of years before," Nate said, "He had not defined my duties but somehow it seemed immediately clear that this was to be my first [missionary aviation] assignment." Less than two weeks after he accepted the job, he found himself near the Guatemalan border, in the town of Tuxtla Gutierrez, with a knowledge of Spanish "limited to my childhood acquaintance with the Lone Ranger."
He knew he was something of a sight, with a duffel bag containing forty pounds of tools, plus all his worldly goods. He wondered, too, if he might have difficulty at the customs office-"It's not exactly usual for tourists to carry seven-foot airplane propellors under their arms."
"I tried to imagine the damaged plane. It wouldn't be too bad-a damaged landing gear, and probably a splintered prop. Little did I dream that I would later find two completely demolished wings in a bushel basket." The plane had crashed in the bush at the edge of a jungle airstrip. Pieces of wing struts, landing gear, and the panels had been brought out to the Tuxtla airport for Nate to rebuild. With the help of a Mexican cabinetmaker to whom everything had to be explained by drawings, he set to work to put the pieces together again. He was impeded by the fact that the blueprint he had been given did not match the plane and that a factory-made wing spar sent down as a replacement matched neither the blueprint nor the plane. When he had finally reassembled the parts, the problem arose of taking the wing panels out to the airstrip in the bush where the wrecked plane lay. It was not feasible to crate them and send them on the trail, where narrow canyon walls had to be scaled; the crates would never make the turns. So the wings were built up like a model plane kit, piece by piece without any glue, then each piece labeled, the whole works disassembled, tied up in bundles, and flown out to the jungle airstrip. When Nate got to the wrecked plane, he found that some parts had been stolen and that mud wasps had lodged in the fuel tank and lines. For lack of rigging data, he had to prop the tail up on a stump and rig the new wings to match the old by eye, just as he used to rig model planes as a child. Thus he finished his first MAF assignment, the plane being flown out barely within the work-permit time limit.
Later Nate went to Los Angeles and spent ten happy days with his little nurse. As he bade her good-by he said, "Well, Marj, as far as I'm concerned, it's all settled but the hardware!"
The winter of 1947-48 found him enrolled at Wheaton College, and in January Marj took a nursing job in a nearby town, studying Bible at the college in preparation for the missionary life they anticipated together. They started a Bible club for teenagers. Nate called the program "a sort of candy-box, loaded with Gospel dynamite."
But their training practice period was shorter than they had expected. The need of a pilot in Ecuador was presented to them. They cut short their courses, pooled their funds, bought an engagement ring and Model-A Ford, and set out one midnight for Long Island, New York, nearly a thousand miles away. They stayed with his brother Sam, and were married. After a four-day honeymoon, they headed their old Ford west, all their worldly goods stacked up in the back seat. Meals were cans of food heated on the engine. Finally they reached California and Nate began final work on a plane that had been purchased by the MAF for its operation in Ecuador. Marj took another nursing job.
On September 8, the plane was ready and Nate, with another MAF pilot, flew it to Ecuador, leaving Marj to follow later that month by commercial transportation.
The years at Shell Mera passed quickly. The house grew into a large chalet of dark wood, with spacious porches, wide eaves for protection against tropical rains, a running water system for kitchen and shower, connected with the rain pipes from the aluminum roof and with tanks under the eaves. After they raised the roof and built in a second story, there were ten bedrooms to accommodate the many guests who came through, and a radio room where Marj could work efficiently and where radio repairs for the missionaries could be made.
Another pilot, Johnny Keenan, arrived with a second airplane to help in the work, and Nate soon had a comfortable house well on the way for the Keenans, plus accommodations in the hangar for the two planes. He installed a hydroelectric plant down by the river behind his house to furnish electricity for the establishment.
They were now set up to operate with the greatest efficiency; jungle stations were all being supplied, and Nate and Marj began to ask God in what new way they might forward His work in the Ecuadorian jungle.
Nate, despite the unceasing load of responsibility that weighed on him, had never forgotten that the Auca Indians lived only some sixty air miles from Shell Mera. Shortly after arriving in South America Nate had written home: "Not long ago we talked with another missionary who is longing to reach a tribe of killers, the Aucas. Few white persons have contacted them in a friendly way and lived to tell about it. We expect the airplane to play an essential part in reaching these people with the Gospel." Nate used his plane to make an occasional survey flight over Auca territory, but not much was located on any of the flights-only a house or two which had been abandoned. He was beginning to wonder where they were. Then one day in July, 1954, the jungle grapevine carried the news that there had been another Auca killing and this time Nate became personally involved. He wrote home his own account of what happened:
"Yesterday I landed at Villano, about 45 miles west of here. Just after I got on the ground a runner came up and told me of an Auca raid. Later two Quichua survivors arrived at the airstrip. The woman was being carried on a bamboo stretcher and had a serious-looking lance puncture under the armpit. They told us that the lance broke off in the wound. Her attacker was going to jab her again but she grabbed the end of the lance and hung on to save her life. She is about six or seven months pregnant. The man arrived under his own power although considerably crippled up with chest punctures, a hole all the way through one thigh and a hole through his hand where he had apparently tried to stop one of the deadly shafts. We loaded the two patients onto the plane. Once in the air I told Marj what had taken place so that when we arrived here in Shell Mera she had cots set up and, with another woman helping, the Indians got the best care that local facilities would permit.
"We can't talk directly to our patients but our hired couple speak Quichua and converse easily with them. Last night our hired man read the Bible to them in Spanish, interpreting into Quichua as he went along. They had never heard of the Bible. Apparently the truth had not yet found its mark because this morning the man asked if I couldn't fly back out there in the plane and kill at least one of the Aucas for him. Again the hired man explained that we were not interested in taking life but rather in saving it through the Lord Jesus Christ."
Greatly as this incident intensified Nate's sense of urgency about reaching the Aucas, there were also other tribes whose ignorance of the Gospel offered a spiritual challenge to missionaries. In 1954 came an unusual opportunity for Nate to help push deeper into the dark reaches of the jungle. One of the key figures in this new page of missionary history was Roger Youderian.