Now, as the ship’s engine throbbed beneath him and as the smell of salt-laden air drifted in through the porthole, Jim pondered some of the facts recorded in his notebook. There were seventeen hundred languages into which no portion of the Bible had been translated. Ninety percent of Christians who said they wanted to become missionaries never got to the mission field. Sixty-four percent of the people in the world had never heard the name of Jesus Christ. Every hour, 5,000 people died worldwide, making a total of 120,000 deaths a day. There was one Christian worker for every five hundred people in the United States, while the rest of the world averaged one Christian worker for every fifty thousand people. For every man who applied to be a missionary there were eighteen women.
Jim thought about how those facts had motivated him many times. Like a compass, they’d steered him toward his goal. Whenever he had had a spare moment, he had pulled the black notebook from his pocket and considered the facts written in it. He promised himself he would not be one of the 90 percent who didn’t make it to the mission field. He wouldn’t let anything distract him or stop him. He also thought about the 120,000 people who died every day. If 64 percent of them had never heard of Jesus Christ, that meant that at least 76,800 people died every day without knowing the way to heaven.
When he preached about these facts, Jim always emphasized the need for Christian workers to leave the United States. He told people that since there was one Christian worker for every five hundred people in the United States, and only one for every fifty thousand people in the rest of the world, the United States had one hundred times more Christian workers! Not only that, the United States also had Christian radio shows, books, and records. Jim pointed out how unfair it was for one country to have so many Christian resources when so many other countries had so few.
Jim had always tried his hardest to convince his fellow students, and others, of the need for missionaries to serve overseas. In the process, he had thoroughly convinced himself that he also had to go. Now, as he drifted off to sleep, rocked gently by the Pacific Ocean, Jim knew he was one of the ten percent who followed through on what they said. He was finally on his way to become a missionary.
The next morning, Jim bounded up the steps two at a time to the aft deck. On his way to the officers’ dining room for breakfast, he stopped and peered over the side of the ship. He took a deep breath of the fresh sea air. The wind kicked up small whitecaps on the crests of the waves, and Jim watched as the waves crashed into each other and showered salty froth into the air. He couldn’t have been happier. He had dreamed of sailing since he had been in grade school and of going to South America since college. Now, he could hardly believe he was on a ship bound for Guayaquil, Ecuador.
“Come on, dreamer. It’s breakfast time,” said Pete Fleming, his voice breaking the ocean’s spell over Jim.
“It’s so easy to forget time out here,” replied Jim as he turned to follow Pete to the dining room.
Jim and Pete ate at the captain’s table along with the ship’s officers and the other seven passengers on board. Over a plate of bacon and eggs, Jim and the captain struck up a conversation. When the captain learned how interested both Jim and Pete were in the ship, he gave them his permission to explore anywhere they liked. But since the vessel was a cargo ship, he warned them to watch out for the derrick booms and winches used to load cargo and move it around in the ship’s hold. This equipment could crush a man in a second.
After three days at sea, as the ship was approaching the tropics, Jim began to notice changes in the ocean that delighted him. He chuckled as he watched huge sea turtles lumber past, some of them serving as mini-islands for the gulls perched on their backs. Occasionally, the water churned with schools of flying fish that looped in and out of the water. In the distance, Jim even saw the waterspout of a lone, majestic gray whale. With a click of his camera, he captured the image.
During the voyage, Jim spent as much time as possible speaking Spanish. Most of the crew were from South America, and they were only too eager to laugh at Jim as he attempted to communicate with them. Still, they were patient, and Jim learned a lot from them. The only other exposure he’d had to Spanish was during the six weeks he’d spent in Mexico at the end of his second year of college. Ron Harris, a college friend, had invited him to spend the summer in Mexico with his parents, who were missionaries there.
The six weeks Jim had spent in Mexico were eye-opening. Jim fell in love with the Mexican people and came to see that missionaries were not “special” or superhuman. Instead, missionaries were ordinary people with an extraordinary message to share. Because of the language barrier, Jim had also learned how frustrating it was not to be able to talk to people. He had set out to learn some Spanish as quickly as he could. By the sixth week, he’d learned enough to be able to address a small group of children. The topic he chose was Noah’s Ark, and he had a great time miming the animals climbing the gangway into the ark. The children loved listening to the foreigner with the funny accent, and they giggled when he mispronounced a word and filled in for him when he didn’t know a word. But giving a five-minute talk to a group of little children and knowing the language well enough to conduct a church service or official business were two very different things.
Jim knew he had a long way to go before he mastered Spanish, the official language of Ecuador. He also knew that Christian Missions in Many Lands, the Plymouth Brethren missionary society he would be serving with, required all its missionaries in South America to speak fluent Spanish before they were sent to their chosen mission stations. So although he was on his way to Ecuador, he still had many challenges ahead of him before he would reach his final destination: the mission station at Shandia in the jungles of eastern Ecuador.
Chapter 3
The Letter
The Santa Juana hugged the coastline as it steamed southward past Mexico and on to El Salvador, where it had cargo to deliver. While the ship bobbed at anchor off La Libertad, unloading large crates of goods onto tender boats, Jim, Pete, and four of the other passengers went ashore. The six of them hired a taxi to drive them to San Salvador, the capital city. Although the city was every bit as noisy, busy, and dirty as Jim had imagined it would be, Jim loved every minute he spent there.
With the sightseers safely back aboard, the Santa Juana weighed anchor and continued on its journey south. Jim was so busy writing to people back home on the postcards he’d bought in San Salvador that he didn’t even notice the coastline of Nicaragua slip by.
The following day, as they steamed past Costa Rica, the captain invited Jim and Pete to go shrimping with him, the chief steward, and the second engineer. Jim helped the second engineer haul the canvas cover off the motorboat that sat in a cradle on the aft deck. Once the cover was pulled clear, the boat was swung overboard by one of the derricks and lowered into the water. Soon Jim, Pete, and the second engineer were joined in the boat by the captain and chief steward, who scaled down a rope ladder lowered over the side of the ship.
The captain had evidently had too much alcohol to drink at lunch and almost immediately fell asleep at the back of the boat. He did not wake up until the boat was ready to be hauled back onto the ship. The other four men, though, had a lively time. They threw out nets behind the boat and hauled in one hundred fifty pounds of the biggest, plumpest shrimp Jim had ever seen. But it wasn’t just the shrimp that delighted Jim. The contents of the net were a marine biology exhibit spread out for him to examine. Wiggling in the net were several hammerhead sharks, squid, sharp-toothed corbina, and blowfish, a stingray, a sea cat, and many other weirdly-shaped fish that even the steward could not identify. All in all, the outing was a great success, especially since Jim and Pete had had the opportunity to discuss at length with the second engineer their reason for going to Ecuador.
The final days of the voyage rushed by. The ship skirted the coast of Panama, then Colombia, and finally was steaming down the coast of Ecuador.
The day before they were due to dock, Jim reread the letter he’d received from Dr. Tidmarsh several days before setting sail from San Pedro. Dr. Tidmarsh had expressed his delight that someone was coming to take over the mission base he had established at Shandia. There was still lots of missionary work to be done there. Dr. Tidmarsh also said he would be at the dock in Guayaquil when Jim and Pete arrived and would have airline tickets for them all to fly to Quito.
As Jim read the letter, he couldn’t help but think of why he had decided to become a missionary in Shandia, a tiny dot on the map surrounded by dense jungle. Some people called the string of events that had led him to choose Shandia mere coincidence, but Jim believed differently. To him it was the hand of God guiding him toward his destiny.
The first time Jim had even heard of the Quichua Indians and Shandia had been in a letter from his older brother Bert, who had been a missionary in Peru. Tucked inside Bert’s letter to Jim was a letter addressed to Bert and signed by a Dr. Wilfred Tidmarsh. As Jim read that letter, he became very excited. Dr. Tidmarsh had been working for many years among the Quichua Indians in eastern Ecuador. He had set up a mission station in the jungle at a place called Shandia and had established a school for boys and a medical clinic. As a result, several Quichuas had become Christians. Dr. Tidmarsh’s wife had become ill, however, and was in need of constant medical attention. As a result, the family was going to have to relocate to the city, where Mrs. Tidmarsh could get the medical help she needed. Dr. Tidmarsh was greatly saddened at having to leave the mission station he’d spent so many years establishing. So he had written to Bert in the hopes that Bert might know someone willing to take over the work in Shandia.
By the time Jim had finished reading the letter, his heart was racing. Jim immediately began to respond to the doctor’s request. This was just what he’d been waiting for! Fifteen minutes later, the letter offering his services to Dr. Tidmarsh was sealed in an envelope and ready for a stamp. Just then, a thought struck Jim. Instead of asking God whether this was the next move for him, he had presumed it was. He looked at the envelope and shook his head. He knew he could not send that particular letter. But he could write another one, a more general one, asking Dr. Tidmarsh for information about Shandia and the Quichua Indians.
The next time Shandia grabbed Jim’s attention was in the summer of 1950 while he was at Camp Wycliffe in Oklahoma City. Camp Wycliffe was an amazing experience for anyone interested in becoming a missionary. Several hundred people attended, staying in university dormitories while the students were in summer recess. Some who attended the camp were older missionaries planning to go into new or unreached areas of the mission field, but most were like Jim, with little or no missionary experience.
Jim loved everything about the camp. Mealtime was filled with interesting conversations about real missionary experiences, and Jim sat in classes with Christian workers from all over the world. Most of all, Jim loved what he was learning in the classroom. Classes were divided into three topics. The first was phonetics, where Jim learned to listen to the different sounds of a language and write them down. Sometimes this was difficult because some languages had gulping, humming, and clicking sounds that were not easy to put in writing using the English alphabet. However, phonetics was an important skill to master, because a missionary who wanted to write in another language would first have to listen carefully and write down the various sounds of the language. Next was morphology class. Here, Jim learned how to find out what words were related to each other in a foreign language. While the English language used prefixes and suffixes to slightly change the meaning of a word, other languages did not, so it was important to know how to discover what words were linked to each other. Finally, there was syntax class, where Jim learned how to discover the way a sentence was put together in a foreign language. All of these classes required a lot of hard study, but Jim enjoyed the challenge.
