After ten minutes of rushing along at a speed somewhere between fast walking and jogging, the men stopped in front of a small hut. Although Jim didn’t recognize the man who had guided them there, he did recognize the hut as one he’d visited a week or so before. There seemed to be a lot of activity inside. Jim and Pete followed the Quichua man into the hut. Once inside, the Quichua man led them over to a three-month-old baby girl lying in a hammock. The baby lay still; her eyes were open but vacant. Jim set the medical bag down and touched the baby’s forehead. “Poor little thing, she’s burning up with fever,” he muttered.
Pete walked to the other side of the hammock and stared down at the baby while Jim placed a thermometer under her armpit. The mercury shot up to 104 degrees Fahrenheit. There was little else the two of them could tell about the baby’s condition.
As Jim slipped the thermometer back into his bag, the Indian man who had led them to the hut pulled on Jim’s shirt sleeve and acted out injecting the baby with a syringe.
Jim nodded. He knew that the Indians thought that syringes were white people’s cure for every illness. In the past, whole tribes of Amazon Indians had been wiped out through contact with European diseases. Typhoid, even the common flu, had killed hundreds of thousands of people who had no previous exposure to or immunity from such diseases. But the same people who had inadvertently brought such diseases to the Indians had also brought relief in the form of antibiotics and vaccines. And since these medicines were usually administered with a syringe, the Indians had come to trust syringes.
“What do you think?” Jim asked Pete about the baby’s condition.
“My guess is she has pneumonia. I think we should give her an antibiotic shot now and maybe another one in a few hours.”
Jim nodded. He had arrived at the same conclusion.
“And,” Pete continued, “if she isn’t any better in the morning, we can radio Marj Saint and have Nate transport her to Shell Mera. Marj will have a better idea than us about what to do next.”
Jim nodded and broke the seal on a vial of penicillin. He drew the liquid up into the syringe and rolled the limp little girl over before gently jabbing the needle into her buttocks. Her body tensed, but the baby did not cry. The Indian man then pointed to a corner where some roughly made split-bamboo platforms stood.
“Sleep?” Jim asked in Quichua.
“Yes,” said the man.
Jim and Pete lay down on the platforms to sleep until morning. About an hour later, they were awakened by a series of high-pitched whistles and pops. Jim turned his head slowly and opened his eyes without making a sound. Through flickering firelight he could see the local witch doctor bending over the child. Jim heard him spitting and coughing over the little girl, and then the witch doctor began to chant and blow circles of smoke in the baby’s face.
Everything within Jim made him want to jump up and chase the witch doctor away. Nothing that “doctor” was doing could possibly help the girl, and the last thing she needed was someone blowing smoke in her face. Jim wished he knew enough of the Quichua language to properly share the gospel message with these people. He prayed silently until he again dozed off on the uncomfortable platform. It was three o’clock when he next awoke. Muffled gasps were coming from the direction of the baby girl’s hammock. Jim quickly jumped up and raced over to her. The gasps stopped. He felt her; she was still warm but no longer breathing. Desperately he searched for a pulse, but he couldn’t find one. He began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Puff. Puff. Puff. “Out, one, two, three,” he counted over and over to himself.
Several minutes later, Jim gave up. The baby girl’s body was becoming cold, and Jim knew it was pointless to keep trying to revive her. There would be no emergency flight to Shell Mera, no hospital, no second chance for her. With a heavy heart he turned to the parents, who had already begun calling other Indians from their huts.
By seven o’clock in the morning the funeral was well under way, but it was not like any other funeral Jim had ever attended. At this funeral, all of the “mourners” were happy and laughing. A group of men at the back of the hut were crowded around a game of checkers being played on a board etched on the dusty floor, with nuts as game pieces. Every few minutes, the men would erupt into howls of laughter. The louder the grieving mother sobbed, the louder the men laughed.
Jim and Pete stepped outside for a few minutes. The rays of the early morning sun slanted through the trees above. “I guess this is what Dr. Tidmarsh meant,” said Pete, shaking his head.
“I guess so,” replied Jim. “It sure is hard to get used to.”
The men pondered the silence for a while. Jim didn’t have the energy to go back into the hut and be “happy” again, yet he knew it was customary for Quichua mourners to laugh and joke as a way of taking a family’s thoughts off their dead relative. Jim wondered what his folks would say if they saw him acting like he was at a party while a dead baby girl lay gently swinging in a hammock in the corner.
Despite being desperately tired and lacking energy, the two missionaries finally went back inside. Both Jim and Pete understood the importance of sharing different experiences with the Indians, and a funeral like this was definitely a different experience.
Jim and Pete watched as a new game was played. In this game, a bowl of milky white liquid was placed in front of a man who then sat cross-legged and grasped the rim of the bowl in his teeth. With a swift action, the man whipped the bowl back over his head, its liquid contents splashing onto the floor behind him. A second man sat down. The bowl was refilled and its rim placed between the man’s teeth. With a flick of the head, this man too sent the bowl reeling backward, but not fast enough. The liquid from the bowl splashed all over him. The other men howled with laughter and then pointed to Jim. Their challenge was obvious—would he try?
Jim had been concentrating hard on the technique of the game, so he nodded and sat down. The room went silent. All eyes settled on the white missionary sitting cross-legged holding a bowl rim between his teeth. Jim concentrated for a moment, and then, with a fast and sudden jerk of his head, he sent the bowl and its liquid contents hurtling backward. The bowl shot across the room and hit the wall, sending the liquid cascading to the ground. The men cheered. “Pacha!” they yelled.
A broad smile settled across Jim’s face. Jim knew the word was the local equivalent of wow, and he was proud of his new skill. Of course, the men didn’t know that years of wrestling had given Jim excellent coordination. They were surprised that an outsider could master their game.
An hour later the two missionaries excused themselves and returned to their hut, where Jim made a tiny coffin from a crate used to transport radio parts to Shandia. As the late afternoon sun sank, Jim and Pete helped bury the baby girl behind the schoolhouse.
It had been a long day, and Jim fell into bed that night exhausted. As he drifted off to sleep, he thought about the letter he’d received a few days before from Ed McCully. According to the letter, Ed had finished a year-long course at the School of Missionary Medicine in Los Angeles, and he, his wife Marilou, and their eight-month-old son Steve were planning to join the team in Shandia. The whole family planned to be in Quito by Christmas and in Shandia as soon as they had learned enough Spanish.
Jim was very excited by the letter. He had thought that Ed would settle down after he got married and not want to do missionary work. Instead, Ed wanted to be a missionary with Jim and Pete at Shandia. After the day’s events, Jim felt great relief at the thought of Ed’s taking over the medical work. Maybe Ed would have been able to save the baby girl’s life.
The more Jim thought about Ed and Marilou McCully joining the team in Shandia, the more he began to see the advantages a married couple would have working together on the mission field. A woman could talk to the Indian women more easily and would be a natural choice to help with childbirth. Jim also thought about how, in Marilou, Ed had his best friend with him for company. He began to feel a little envious. He would love to have Betty working at his side.
In January 1953, Jim was scheduled to visit Quito for a two-week missionary conference, though he had mixed feelings about leaving Shandia. He and Pete had made many good friends among the Quichua Indians, and the ministry work was moving ahead as planned. The airstrip was finished, and the school was up and running for boys grades one through four. Early on, Dr. Tidmarsh had hired a Quichua schoolteacher, relieving Jim and Pete of having to teach using their growing but limited grasp of the Quichua language. An electric generator had also been flown in and hooked up, providing a source of electricity, even though, due to the cost of fuel, it ran only three times a week. All this combined to make Shandia a comfortable place to call home.
Even though Jim was reluctant to leave, especially since Pete would be running everything alone, he knew he had to go. In the previous few weeks, Jim had decided to do something he’d never done before: propose marriage to Betty!
Once he arrived in Quito, Jim quickly realized he had made the right decision to leave Shandia for two weeks. It was energizing to be around other missionaries, and it was fun to be communicating in English again. He also wasted no time sending a telegram to Betty. He was sure the message would leave her guessing. It simply read: “Meet me in Quito. Love, Jim.”
While he waited for Betty to arrive, Jim had lots to do. Ed McCully had arrived in Quito the month before, and he and Jim had much news to catch up on. Jim also met Ed’s wife Marilou and now nine-month-old Steve. When Jim saw Ed in Quito, he was reminded of the first time they’d met. It had been at Wheaton College, when Jim was president of the Foreign Missions Fellowship. Jim had challenged each member of the fellowship to target five other students for whom to pray. Jim chose five people he thought would make excellent missionaries, including the senior class president, Ed McCully. Ed had everything going for him. He was a brilliant student, a star player on the football team, holder of the college record for the 220-yard dash, and winner of a national oratory competition. Also, Ed was not one bit interested in being a missionary. His sights were set on becoming a lawyer.
Although Jim had prayed faithfully that Ed would rethink his career choice and become a missionary, Ed’s career path did not change. Indeed, Jim had been deeply disappointed when Ed left Wheaton and went off to law school at Marquette University. The two of them, though, had kept in touch by letter. Now, miraculously, the person Jim had prayed would become a missionary was in Quito learning Spanish and preparing to work among the Quichua Indians.
Three days after Jim sent the telegram, Betty arrived in Quito. She had ridden a horse from her mission station to Santo Domingo, where she had hitched a ride to Quito on a truck hauling bananas. The bumpy ride had taken her ten hours.
Betty was eager to find out why Jim had mysteriously summoned her. That night, beside the fireplace in the Tidmarsh house, Jim Elliot asked Betty Howard to marry him sometime in the not too distant future. First, he explained to Betty that he had to build a house for the McCullys, and then he reminded her that she would need to learn the Quichua language. Betty accepted his proposal with joy!
Although they spent ten wonderful days together, the time raced by, and the two of them now had to go their separate ways. Jim packed for the flight to Shandia, and Betty prepared for the journey to the western jungle to continue her translation work in the Colorado language and to figure out some way to learn the Quichua language— quickly!
Soon after they parted, Betty wrote to Jim that her time helping to record and translate the Colorado language was almost at an end. She planned to organize her files, charts, and notebooks and hand them over to her partner Doreen, who would continue the painstaking work.
