Once the students had been taught the basics of learning and writing in a foreign language, it was time for them to try out in a real situation what they had learned. To help them do this, the camp organizers had brought in what they called informants—missionaries who had lived in remote areas of the world and had mastered little-known languages. Each student was given an informant to work with for a month. It then became the student’s task to listen to the language the informant spoke and, using the principles learned in the first half of the school, figure out how the language was put together.
Students waited eagerly to see who their informant would be, and no one was more eager than Jim Elliot. Finally, Jim was introduced to a retired missionary who had been working in Ecuador among the Quichua Indians. Jim could hardly believe it! He began to think it was more than a coincidence that Bert had sent him Dr. Tidmarsh’s letter and that he was about to spend a month with a man who had worked with the exact same Indian tribe.
The next few weeks were fascinating for Jim. From his informant, Jim learned that the Quichua Indians numbered a little over 800,000 people but had only five missionaries working among them. Even after all the times he’d preached on the need for foreign missionaries, it was still mind-boggling for Jim to think that there were only five missionaries serving nearly one million people. Something inside Jim stirred. This time he felt more certain that God wanted him to go to the Quichua Indians.
In one of their conversations, Jim’s informant mentioned a tribe that Jim had never heard of—the Auca Indians. Jim paid rapt attention as he learned that the Aucas were one of the most difficult tribes in the entire world to reach. The Aucas were a people shrouded in mystery, still living in the Stone Age just miles from one of the most sophisticated oil exploration operations on earth. And they didn’t like outsiders, killing most of them on sight. As a result, little was known about the tribe.
Jim could feel the hair on the back of his neck rise as his informant told him all he knew about the Aucas. Jim prayed that one day he might get to meet them himself and play a role in introducing the gospel message to their tribe.
As Camp Wycliffe came to an end, Jim needed to plan for the future. He set aside ten days to pray and ask God for guidance. During this time, little things began to attract his attention. A missionary friend in Africa wrote to say she was praying especially for him because she felt he had an important decision to make. Someone put twenty dollars and an anonymous note in his mailbox. The note read: “God bless you. This is for Ecuador.” And his mother forwarded a letter from Dr. Tidmarsh that gave more information about Shandia and the missionary work there.
At the end of the ten days, Jim felt God was indeed calling him to Ecuador—and soon. He wrote to the elders of the Brethren church in Portland, asking if they would sponsor him as a missionary. He also wrote to Dr. Tidmarsh to tell him he was interested in taking over the missionary work at Shandia. Dr. Tidmarsh, who had already moved to Quito, Ecuador’s capital city, was thrilled to hear that someone would be replacing him among the Quichua Indians.
There was one final matter Jim was sure would confirm whether or not God wanted him in Ecuador. It was the matter of the draft board.
Jim’s childhood had been lived safely in the midst of a loving family in a tight community. It had been ideal in many ways, except for a single cloud: World War II. The United States had entered the war in 1942, when Jim was fourteen years old, and continued until August 1945, when he was seventeen. During this time, many young men had been drafted into the armed services. But by the time Jim attended Camp Wycliffe in 1950, the war had been over for five years. However, a standoff had developed in Europe between the Soviet Union and the United States and its Allies. The standoff became known as the Cold War. As a result, every young man in the United States over the age of eighteen had to enroll with the draft board and be ready to fight if the need arose. Before he could travel overseas long-term, Jim had to receive permission from the draft board. After waiting anxiously for several weeks, Jim received notice from the draft board that he’d been granted permission to leave the United States.
All of these events, some large, some small, led Jim to where he was right at that moment: a few hours away from the end of his voyage and setting foot in his newly adopted land, Ecuador.
On February 21, 1952, the Santa Juana dropped anchor off Puna Island in the Gulf of Guayaquil. Jim and Pete watched as a small yacht, the Santa Rosita, tied up alongside the freighter. The captain had already explained to them that no dock in Guayaquil was large enough for the Santa Juana. The passengers disembarking there would have to be transferred to a smaller vessel, the Santa Rosita, to go ashore while their baggage and other cargo would be transferred to barges and towed in by tugboat. The captain told Jim it would take about four hours for the Santa Rosita to make the thirty mile trip up the river to Guayaquil.
Jim and Pete thanked the captain for his hospitality before climbing down the rope ladder slung over the side of the freighter and onto the deck of the Santa Rosita. Feeling a surge of excitement, Jim was eager to get ashore and meet Dr. Tidmarsh, who would be waiting for them at the dock.
Jim and Pete stood on the foredeck of the Santa Rosita as she plowed her way up the Guayas River. An assortment of boats paraded by—dugout canoes loaded with enormous stalks of bananas or mounds of coconuts, small ferryboats filled with passengers, barges stacked with crates of cargo, and fishing boats with their nets hanging to dry in the hot afternoon sun. Finally, a little more than four hours after leaving the Santa Juana, the young missionaries reached the bustling port city of Guayaquil, just south of where the Daule River flowed into the Guayas.
Twenty minutes later, the Santa Rosita was tied up firmly alongside the dock, and the passengers began to disembark. Jim stood on deck and scanned the milling crowd for Dr. Tidmarsh, but he could see no white face. Not to worry, by the time he and Pete clambered up onto the dock, Dr. Tidmarsh would emerge from the rear of the crowd. When he did not, Jim and Pete wondered what they should do next.
Chapter 4
Spanish Lessons
An hour passed, and still no sign of Dr. Tidmarsh. Jim wondered what could have happened to him. Dr. Tidmarsh’s letter had said he would definitely be there to meet them. Finally, late in the afternoon, Jim and Pete decided the doctor wasn’t coming and they had better do something themselves. Jim struck up a conversation with a crewman on the Santa Rosita, and the crewman offered to help them find a room for the night. Jim went with him while Pete stayed behind in case Dr. Tidmarsh did show up, and to clear their hand luggage through customs.
An hour later Jim was back. Pete was waiting for him on the dock, having cleared customs without needing to open a single bag. Jim told him he had found them a room for the night in a boarding house run by an elderly German couple. He and Pete hired a man with a wheelbarrow to transport their bags and set off to find their room for the night.
After eighteen days at sea, Jim was thrilled to be greeted by the sights, sounds, and smells of Guayaquil. On the sidewalk were mats spread with brightly colored objects: Panama hats, ponchos, silver jewelry, cocoa beans, and balsa wood models. Squatting by each mat was a man or a woman, bright-eyed and dark skinned, each beckoning Jim and Pete to inspect their wares. Jim wanted to stop to see if he could communicate with them in his limited Spanish, but the sun was setting, and he wanted to get to their destination before dark.
By the time Jim and Pete reached the front door of the guest house, the last glimmer of daylight was fast fading. Inside, the young men gladly accepted the German proprietor’s invitation to have dinner with him and his wife. It was nine o’clock by the time they sat down to dine together, and it was still unbearably hot. The proprietor told them it would be hot in Guayaquil every night through April, when the rainy season ended. Jim was glad he was heading for Quito, nestled 9,530 feet above sea level. At that altitude there was no hot, humid wet season to sap a person’s energy. Of course, if Dr. Tidmarsh didn’t show up the following day, the young missionaries would have to figure out how to get up to Quito on their own.
After dinner, Jim and Pete excused themselves and prepared for bed. It had been a long day, and they needed some sleep.
Jim might have wanted sleep, but it wasn’t that easy. The plastic cover on the mattress stuck to him through the cotton sheets, and the tiny room he and Pete were sharing hummed with mosquitoes. The pests seemed to have x-ray vision that allowed them to locate holes in the mosquito net draped over Jim’s bed; they bombarded him mercilessly. And then there was the noise. Somewhere in the distance a church clock rang every quarter hour, and the noise of people yelling, mules clopping along on the street, and doors closing seemed to amplify into the room and reverberate off the walls. And when there was no noise from outside, there was the annoying click of the ceiling fan with every rotation.
Finally, after a night of tossing and turning and scratching bug bites, Jim was awakened by the first rays of the morning sun seeping in through the open window. He stumbled out of bed and woke Pete. The two of them ate a quick breakfast with their German hosts and set off for the shipping office to claim the rest of their baggage and cargo that had been brought ashore from the Santa Juana by barge and that should now be unloaded. They were also eager to see whether Dr. Tidmarsh had left a message for them. Better than that, Dr. Tidmarsh was waiting for them. The three men shook hands, and the doctor apologized for not meeting Jim and Pete the day before. He explained that the shipping office had given him the wrong arrival date.
Jim and Pete waited patiently for their two tons of baggage and cargo to be cleared through customs. Their bags, boxes, and barrels contained everything the two men thought they might need to start their new lives in Ecuador. Amazingly, no import duties were assessed, and Jim and Pete claimed their belongings. Dr. Tidmarsh arranged for their baggage to be trucked to Quito, and then he pulled three airplane tickets from his coat pocket for the afternoon flight.
As Jim peered out the window of the DC-3 airplane, he was more than relieved that they were flying to Quito and not going by truck. From the air the roads did not look inviting. After leaving Guayaquil, the plane flew over the coastal plain of Ecuador which was divided into huge plantings of green crops with farm buildings and houses dotted among them. With a turbulent bump, the DC-3 then entered a bank of clouds, and when it emerged, the rolling coastal plain had been replaced with the jagged, snowcapped peaks of the Andes Mountains. Jim watched as a narrow valley came into view. He had studied it on the map a thousand times, but it was breathtaking to actually see it spread out beneath him. Tucked in the valley, Quito slowly came into view. The plane circled the city once before coming in to land.
A rush of cool air blasted Jim as he climbed down the steps from the plane and walked across the tarmac. It felt wonderful and refreshing after the steamy air of Guayaquil. Mrs. Tidmarsh was there to welcome Jim and Pete.
From the start, Jim liked Quito. In many ways, it seemed more dignified than Guayaquil. As the men bumped along the city streets in a taxi, Dr. Tidmarsh explained the differences between the two cities. The old Spanish buildings of Guayaquil had all been made of wood and had burned down at various times. By contrast, the buildings of Quito were constructed from huge slabs of stone. The city had been founded in 1534 by a Spanish explorer and was soon the country’s main center for trade and culture. Many of the churches and public buildings were nearly four hundred years old.
