Dr. Tidmarsh urged Betty and Dorothy to pray about where they should go. He told them about two young English women, Doreen Clifford and Barbara Edwards, who were struggling to hold down the fort, as he put it, running a tiny school and mission outpost among the Colorado Indians in San Miguel de los Colorados. This was forty-five miles west of Quito on the broad, jungle-covered coastal plain between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. He suggested that the two of them consider going there for a period of time to help the two English missionary women with their work among the Colorado Indians. The Colorados, Dr. Tidmarsh explained, were one of nine indigenous tribes in Ecuador, and their language had never been written down. As a result, no Bibles or other gospel materials existed in their language.
Betty’s heart soared as she contemplated joining Doreen and Barbara in San Miguel. Because neither of these two missionaries was a linguist, the job of learning the language of the Colorados and reducing it to a written vocabulary would fall to Betty and Dorothy. Betty was particularly excited about the opportunity to be the first to record the Colorados’ language and then, she hoped, work to translate the Bible into their language for them.
In early September 1952, the day arrived for Betty and Dorothy to leave for San Miguel de los Colorados. Betty packed file boxes and cards, spare pens and bottles of ink, dictionaries and Bibles—tools that she would need to help in the work of reducing the Colorados’ language to written form. Very early one morning an old pickup truck pulled up outside the house where they were staying in Quito. The man driving the pickup was an American missionary, whom everyone simply called E.T. He and his wife and children lived and worked among the Colorados at Santo Domingo, which was on the way to San Miguel. The pickup truck was loaded high with supplies, leaving the tailgate as the only place for Betty and Dorothy to sit. The women took their positions, their hands gripping the side of the truck.
First the pickup climbed up and out of the valley in which Quito was nestled and headed for the village of San Juan, located at an altitude of eleven thousand feet. San Juan marked the start of the road that would take them down the western slope of the Andes onto the coastal plain. However, this road was so narrow and winding that vehicles could travel on it only in one direction at a time. A chain was stretched across the road and was dropped only at nine in the morning and two in the afternoon for vehicles headed west. Unfortunately, despite their early start, they managed to miss the nine o’clock dropping of the chain and were forced to wait until two o’clock that afternoon. The wait was not at all comfortable, as a misty rain settled over the area. Betty passed the time eating ears of freshly boiled sweet corn and fried potatoes, which she bought at the small makeshift store beside the road.
Finally the two o’clock chain was dropped, and off they went. E.T. explained that a man would count the number of vehicles headed down the road before putting the chain back up. He would then radio that number to a man at the chain at the other end of the road. When that number of vehicles had passed through the chain at the other end, vehicles would be allowed to start traveling the road in the opposite direction.
The road down the Andes was more narrow, winding, precarious, and bumpy than Betty could have imagined. Betty and Dorothy balanced on the tailgate, often staring over the edge of the road and straight down hundreds or even thousands of feet to the bottom of a ravine. Along the way were many rivers and streams to cross. Some had rickety bridges over them, but many didn’t, causing E.T. to ford them, splashing water on Betty and Dorothy.
It was nearly midnight when E.T. finally pulled the pickup truck to a halt. “We’re home,” he called out as he cut the engine.
After fifteen hours of sitting and holding the side of the pickup so tightly that her knuckles were white and her bottom was numb, Betty slid off the tailgate and gingerly stood up. Every bone in her body ached as she stumbled into the tiny, blackened shanty.
After all she had been through, Betty would have loved a strong cup of coffee in clean, comfortable surroundings, but it was not to be. She was not sure which hit her first, the putrid stench of the field beside the house that seemed to serve as a public latrine or the damp smell of the house’s moldy walls. And it wasn’t just the smell. The entire house had a depressing air about it. The room was filled with smoke, the few sticks of furniture in the room were old and rickety, and the curtains that partitioned off the room were filthy.
Even though it was midnight, four small children roamed the house, unable to sleep until their father returned. Their dirty, oversized clothes hung off them, and their skin was ingrained with dirt. Betty smiled and said hello, but none of them responded. She couldn’t help but think of the training in manners the missionary children at the Hampden DuBose Academy received. What a contrast these four bedraggled urchins in front of her were to her fellow students at the academy.
Betty and Dorothy spent the weekend with E.T. and his wife, Vera. Betty counted every passing hour. She was appalled at the way E.T. and his family lived and was confused by her own reaction to the situation. Surely this family had given up everything, every semblance of civilization, to be missionaries. Wasn’t that what she had been taught to do? Yet Betty wondered whether there was a place for beauty and light and cleanliness on the mission field. Was living in squalor part of taking up the cross to follow Christ? Betty sincerely hoped not, and it was with a mixture of relief and dread of what might lie ahead that she left Santo Domingo for San Miguel.
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.
