Jim tried to take everything in. From the taxi, he caught glimpses of quaint, cobblestone courtyards, vivid bougainvilleas trailing over ancient mud walls, and intricately decorated buildings. He could hardly wait to go exploring.
Soon the taxi pulled to a halt outside the gates of the Gospel Missionary Union compound. Dr. Tidmarsh served with the Gospel Missionary Union, and Jim and Pete would stay at the compound until they had mastered Spanish.
Eager to be on their way to Shandia sooner rather than later, the next day Jim and Pete plunged themselves into Spanish lessons. They had a private tutor who was very strict with them and corrected every little mistake they made. Jim didn’t mind. He wanted to learn the language as well as he possibly could.
About a month after arriving in Quito, Jim and Pete had the opportunity to visit Dee Short and his family, who were missionaries working among the Colorado Indians at Santo Domingo de los Colorados, seven hours west of Quito. As they bumped along over rutted dirt roads in the back of a pickup, Jim at last felt like a real missionary. In Santo Domingo de los Colorados he followed Dee Short around as Dee gave Bible studies and spoke in churches. Jim even handed out some tracts and, with Dee Short translating, spoke to a group of local schoolboys.
Jim returned to Quito more determined than ever to master Spanish and be on his way to minister to the Quichua Indians in Shandia.
When Jim arrived back at the mission compound in Quito, a letter was waiting for him. Jim immediately recognized the handwriting on the envelope. The letter was from Betty Howard. Excitedly Jim ripped the envelope open. By the time he had finished reading the letter, he thought he would burst. Betty was coming to Quito!
Immediately, Jim set about making preparations for her visit. At the same time, he thought about how he would explain his relationship with Betty to the other missionaries at the compound. In many ways he didn’t count Betty as his girlfriend, and they had never officially dated. Jim did not believe in dating. Of course, this had led to some interesting misunderstandings over the years.
Jim thought back to his senior year in high school. He’d been sitting in the cafeteria about to eat lunch with his friend Wayne. Jim had just bowed his head to give thanks for the food when the student president walked up and asked them both to buy tickets to the graduation dance. Wayne had made some excuse about being busy that night, but Jim didn’t beat around the bush. “No,” he had said flatly. “I’m a Christian, and the Bible says Christians are in the world but not of it. So I won’t be going to the dance.”
The student president just shook his head and walked away. So many girls had hoped that Jim would invite them to the dance. With his handsome looks, wavy black hair, gray-blue eyes, barrel chest, and rippling muscles, he was considered to be quite a catch—except that Jim had no intention of being caught. Period. In fact, throughout his high school career he never once invited a girl to go anywhere with him—not because he was shy but because he could see no point to it. There were simply more important things to do.
Now Betty was coming to Quito. And while he didn’t consider her his girlfriend, Jim nonetheless was caught off guard by how deep his interest in her had grown over the years. The two of them had met in Greek class during Jim’s third year at Wheaton College. It had taken Jim a while to realize that Betty was actually the older sister of his college friend Dave Howard. Betty was tall and slim and had a quick mind. She and Jim often studied Greek together or sat for hours in the lower dining hall talking about their faith. Jim marveled as he listened to Betty. For once he had met someone with views as strong as his! Jim and Betty were quite a pair when they didn’t agree on something.
In a letter home to his parents, Jim had described Betty as a tall, lean girl who “interested him.” But he’d had no intention of taking her on a date. He was single-mindedly focused on becoming a missionary, and he did not have room for distractions. Yet, when Betty graduated a year ahead of him, Jim was surprised at how lonely he felt. Even through his busy senior year, Betty was never far from his thoughts or prayers.
After leaving Wheaton College, Betty attended the same Wycliffe Bible Translator’s School as Jim’s brother Bert. From there she had traveled to Alberta, Canada, where she worked in a remote area of the province. She and Jim wrote to each other when they had time, but neither of them knew whether their paths would ever cross again. Jim did see Betty once when she visited his family on her way home from Canada.
Now, after much prayer, Betty felt that God was calling her to work in Ecuador. Jim’s and Betty’s paths were about to cross again, and Jim couldn’t have been more pleased. He began planning all the sights he would show her once she arrived. She would love visiting the bustling marketplace and climbing the slopes of Mt. Pichincha. Jim even planned to take her to a bullfight.
Chapter 5
Together Again
April 13, 1952: Jim Elliot waited nervously behind the wire mesh barrier, his eyes focused on the door of the DC-3. The door swung open, and a set of steel steps was wheeled up to it. An elderly man with a cane was the first to appear at the doorway. He wobbled his way down the stairs. Jim leaned forward, easily able to see over the people in front of him. Nine other people climbed out of the airplane, and then Jim’s heart skipped a beat. There she was, looking just as he’d remembered her—tall and slim, her dark blonde hair pulled neatly back in a ponytail. Betty Howard descended the stairs and began walking across the tarmac toward the terminal. Jim could scarcely wait for her to reach him outside the terminal building.
The next few weeks zipped by. Although Jim and Betty had continued to write to each other since being students together at Wheaton College, there was something about being able to speak face-to-face. Betty wanted to know how Jim’s older brother Bert and his wife were doing. (Bert and his wife were missionaries several hundred miles southeast of Quito in Peru.) Jim was anxious to hear how Betty’s younger brother Dave and his wife were doing at their mission station in Costa Rica. Mostly, though, they wanted to hear how the other was doing.
Although they were not officially a “couple,” they spent as much time together as they could. Betty fell in love with Quito and its majestic mountain setting, and she and Jim spent many happy hours exploring the place together. They took a bus ride to La Mitad del Mundo, sixteen miles north of Quito, where the equator passes through the middle of town. They rambled through the Mercado de Santa Clara market with its brightly painted balsa-wood birds, cedar statues, bundles of dried herbs, and enormous bunches of freshly cut flowers.
Of course, Jim and Betty kept busy studying Spanish. Most of the places they went, their Spanish tutor went with them, and they would all talk to each other in Spanish the entire time.
They had other studies to occupy their time as well. Though Dr. Tidmarsh was not a medical doctor but was a doctor of philosophy, he had been called on countless times over the years by the Quichua Indians to act as a medical doctor. Since he had learned as much as he could about jungle medicine, he conducted a course on basic medical procedures for several of the new missionary recruits, including Jim and Pete.
Jim loved the course. Because his mother was a chiropractor, he had been around the medical field most of his life and found it easy learning about everything from leprosy to jungle nutrition and childbirth. By the time he’d finished the course, he could hardly wait to put all his newfound knowledge into practice. He longed to be about the business of being a “real” missionary.
As his months in Quito rolled by, Jim felt that everything was moving much too slowly, especially learning Spanish. A real problem for him was that apart from formal Spanish lessons, he lived in an English-speaking world. Everyone at the Gospel Missionary Union compound spoke and wrote in English; even the newspapers were all English editions. At the rate he was going, Jim figured it would take him a year or more before he would learn enough Spanish to be ready to move to Shandia. That was much too long for his timetable. He needed a way to seclude himself so he would be forced to think and speak in Spanish twenty-four hours a day.
By May Jim had come up with a solution. He had been introduced to a Dr. Cevallos and his wife and seven children. To make ends meet, the family lived in two rooms of their house and rented out the third. Dr. Cevallos offered the room to Jim and Pete to live in. The men gladly accepted the offer. Jim soon found out that living with a Spanish-speaking family sped up his language skills, especially when he practiced with the children, who quickly lost their shyness and happily corrected his mistakes. Jim and Pete also agreed not to talk to each other in English, and soon Jim was even dreaming in Spanish!
The next month, Dr. Tidmarsh offered Jim and Pete the opportunity to get out of Quito for a few days. The mission had undertaken a comprehensive aerial survey of the central Oriente region, and Dr. Tidmarsh asked Jim and Pete if they would like to go to Shell Mera to help with it.
The two of them were thrilled to take part in the aerial survey. The Oriente was the jungle region of Ecuador east of the Andes Mountains. It formed the western reaches of the Amazon Basin. For two thousand miles the jungle ran eastward from Ecuador all the way to the Atlantic Ocean in Brazil. But more important to Jim and Pete, the central Oriente region was where Shandia was located. At last, they would get a chance to see their future home.
The trip to Shell Mera was every bit as torturous as Dr. Tidmarsh had described. The bus bumped and twisted its way south past Mt. Cotopaxi and toward Ambato. Every half hour or so it ground to a halt in a cloud of dust accompanied by excited shouts. Local people either clambered on or off the bus, and the loudness of the shouting depended on how much luggage they had stowed on its roof. Before getting aboard, each passenger heaved onto the bus roof bags, crates, and sacks containing everything from vegetables to bantam hens. It was a lot more difficult, though, to get those things down than it was to toss them up. Sometimes an item of luggage would get stuck at the bottom of the pile, and everything had to be unloaded to retrieve it. It seemed to take forever. Then the mass of passengers would crane to see out the window, making sure all of their belongings were reloaded and not left behind.
Dr. Tidmarsh had warned Jim and Pete not to get off the bus during these stops. There was no scheduled time for the bus to leave a town or village, and if they happened to be too far from the bus when the driver decided it was time to go, they would be left behind without a second thought.
At every stop vendors took advantage of the captive, hungry passengers on board. Of course, Jim and Pete were stand-out targets. The vendors seemed to think the rich gringos would automatically want to buy some of their tasty goodies, everything from homemade lemonade poured into old beer bottles to whole roasted guinea pigs, complete with hair, paws, and teeth.
Finally, at lunchtime, the bus arrived in Ambato, the so-called Gateway to the Oriente. Jim remembered reading about a destructive earthquake that had hit the area three years before, and the damage from it was still visible. Many of the stone buildings lay in ruins or had collapsed roofs. But life seemed to go on despite the damage. Golden brown cocoa beans were spread to dry among the rubble, and small boys ran nimbly over the rocky piles.
From Ambato, the route veered to the east and dropped steeply through the town of Baños, where Jim and Pete bought bananas and mandarins. As the bus moved on into the eastern jungle, the scenery was suddenly completely different. Lush green vegetation laced through with masses of orchids grew right up to the edge of the rutted road.
