Nate was very pleased with the way the Piper Cruiser performed as he flew his family across the United States from California to Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. He landed at the same airstrip where Sam had taken him up for his first flight twenty-three years before. Sam and most of the family were waiting for them at the old house. It was a proud moment for Nate to introduce his two children to all their aunts, uncles, and cousins. Of course, their time together went by too fast, and before long, Nate and a copilot from MAF were headed south over Mexico toward Ecuador in the Piper Cruiser. Marj and the children followed later by commercial airliner.
Seven days later, Nate flew over the patch of cleared Ecuadoran jungle he called home. He was glad to get back. As he circled the landing strip, he could see Bob and Keitha Wittig waving enthusiastically to him. It wasn’t long before he was sitting in his own living room sipping lemonade and listening to Bob tell the story of his “unfortunate” adventure.
Just several days before, Bob had been delivering a load of building materials to the Dos Rios missionary base. He was hurtling down the Shell Mera airstrip at full throttle for take-off when a huge dog began racing across the airstrip toward the plane. Bob could see it getting closer and closer, so he pulled on the control wheel and tried to get the plane off the ground. He didn’t have quite enough speed, so the plane responded slowly. Bob heard a heart-sickening thud, and he knew the dog had hit the plane. He managed to get the plane into the air and then began to scramble for what to do next.
Nate leaned forward, waiting to hear what happened next. Bob went on. He knew the dog must have collided with the landing gear, so he would have to make an emergency landing and check it out. The most important thing to do before making the emergency landing was to make the plane as light as possible. The building materials for Dos Rios would have to go. Bob banked to the right of the airstrip, and while keeping one hand on the control wheel, he managed to maneuver the kitchen sink to the plane’s doorway, where he shoved it out. Next went two sacks of cement, several boxes of groceries, and a fifteen-gallon can of kerosene. Thankfully, he had taken the door off the plane before he left, making one less obstacle to overcome in ditching his cargo.
Nate nodded in understanding. Bob had done just what he would have done under the circumstances. “How was the landing?” he asked.
Bob explained how he brought the Piper Pacer around for a landing. He slowed it down as much as possible as he approached the end of the runway. The undercarriage of a plane is very strong and built to handle landing on rough surfaces if need be, so Bob figured a collision with a dog probably hadn’t done much damage. As he approached the end of the runway, though, he realized he must have figured wrong. His wife and a number of students from the Berean Bible Institute were pointing furiously at the right side of his landing gear. Bob knew something was wrong with it, and he worked his controls gently to make sure he got the left wheel of the plane down first. The left wheel ran along the runway, and Bob waited for the right wheel to connect with the ground. It didn’t. The Piper Pacer just got lower on the right side until the end of the wing clipped the ground and dragged along the runway. Before coming to a halt, the whole plane skewed sideways in a shower of sparks from the wing rubbing on the ground. Fortunately, Bob was not hurt, which was more than could be said for the plane. The collision had ripped the right landing gear completely off, and the crash landing had bent the propeller and torn up the end of the right wing. But it was all fixable, and the Piper Pacer would fly over the jungle again.
Nate was soon in the hangar inspecting the damage. The Pacer would take a bit of fixing, but compared to the Waco biplane repair job in Mexico, this job would be simple and straightforward. Nate had all the equipment he needed and the correct blueprints for the Pacer. Fortunately, MAF now had two planes based at Shell Mera, so the pilots wouldn’t be out of action while the plane was being fixed, and missionaries wouldn’t have to resort to walking the jungle trails to get where they wanted to go, as they’d had to do after Nate crashed the Stinson in Quito.
A couple of weeks later, Marj and the children finally arrived back at Shell Mera, and the Wittigs returned to the United States. Soon life for the Saints was busier than ever. While back in the United States, Nate had drawn up plans to enlarge the house. It was too small for the number of visitors who flowed through, and Marj needed a separate radio room. The plans called for pushing out both ends of the house and raising the roof for a second story. This would give the home eleven bedrooms, which sounds like a lot of rooms, but it wasn’t long after the renovations were complete that the bedrooms were often filled with missionaries and their guests, who stayed over on their way in and out of their jungle stations or came to Shell Mera to visit the doctor. Sometimes the rooms housed children on their way home from boarding school in Quito.
Besides enlarging his own house, Nate had to build a house for the second couple that MAF was sending to join them. The days were busy for Nate, because he also had his regular rounds of the missionary stations to make by plane. But since his furlough in the United States, he had a lot more energy, and he worked away quickly and happily. Still, he was glad when the Keenans finally arrived at Shell Mera to help with the work.
Johnny and Ruth Keenan were the perfect couple to work with Nate and Marj. They were hard workers, and they could see what needed to be done without being told. They had twin boys who were five years old, a year older than Kathy Saint. Ruth home-schooled her two boys and Kathy. She also had all the guests who stayed at Shell Merita over for one meal a day so that Marj didn’t have to cook as often and was able to spend time alone with her family.
Ruth also helped with buying and packaging the groceries for the various mission stations. Marj took her to the “store” at Shell Mera, where a Quichua Indian woman stocked the shelves from a once-a-week trip to the market at Ambato. It was best to visit the store the day after the woman’s trip to Ambato to ensure the vegetables were as fresh as they could be. Otherwise, by the end of the week, everything in the store was a little wilted.
With their supplies in hand, Marj and Ruth looked at the list showing the number of people at each mission station, plus any guests they were expecting, and figured out how much fruit, vegetables, flour, rice, oil, and milk powder they would need. On the dining room table in Marj’s kitchen they would separate the food into family lots and label and weigh each box for Nate to load up and deliver the next day. Marj would enter the cost of each family’s groceries into a black ledger and then bill each family at the end of the month.
Johnny Keenan was an excellent pilot, and it didn’t take him long to learn the art of jungle flying. Like Nate, Johnny wasn’t a man to take any chances, so the two of them got along well.
It took only a couple of weeks for Nate and Marj to wonder how they’d ever managed without the Keenans to help them. Together they were responsible for serving twenty-seven missionary families. That was a big increase from the six families Nate had started out serving in 1948. And more stations were being established in the jungle all the time.
About this time, Nate got a letter from Rachel, who was back working among the Shapras Indian tribe in Peru. Rachel wrote about her conversations with Chief Tariri of the Shapras and her attempts to convince him that head-hunting was wrong. But he didn’t seem to listen to what she said. Still, the two of them had become good friends. Rachel had also kept busy with her two Wycliffe coworkers translating the New Testament into the Shapras language. In the letter, she also told Nate that she couldn’t shake the feeling that the Aucas were the group God had singled out for her to work with, although she didn’t know how this would come about. In the meantime, she continued to trust God.
Amazingly, things began to work out, though perhaps not as quickly as Rachel would have liked. At a Wycliffe Bible Translators meeting in Peru, Cameron Townsend, the founder of the mission, announced that Wycliffe had been invited by Ecuador’s president, Velazco Ibarra, to begin working in his country. Ibarra realized that someone had to help the Stone Age tribes who lived in the jungle of the Oriente to enter the twentieth century. Christian missionaries, the president noted, seemed to be the only ones who were brave enough to try!
By February 1955, Rachel was back at Shell Mera. Her first priority was to see Nate and Marj’s new baby boy, Philip, who had been born right after Christmas. Big sister Kathy eagerly showed her Aunt Rachel exactly where Philip slept and how her mother bathed him.
Rachel had come from Quito where, along with a group of Wycliffe Bible Translators, she had met with President Ibarra. Nate and Marj wanted to hear all about the meeting. Rachel began by describing what she’d worn to the meeting. Since she didn’t have any fashionable new clothes, she decided to wear the red headdress Chief Tariri had given her as a farewell gift. She sewed a black veil onto the front of the headdress, which, according to her, looked very glamorous in its own special way.
Nate smiled to himself. The sight of his stocky, middle-aged older sister in an Indian headdress with a veil at an official function was something he would have loved to have seen.
Anyway, Rachel’s “hat” had caught the president’s attention, and he stopped to talk to her. He asked her where she was going to work. “Among the Aucas,” she had told him. Stunned by her response, President Ibarra had replied, “You are going to work with the Aucas? When I flew over their territory a while back, they threw spears at my plane. No white person has ever been able to live among them. Are you sure you really want to try?”
Rachel grinned at Nate. “I don’t know what came over me,” she said. “I forgot he was the president. I looked him right in the eye and said, ‘Yes, I believe God will make a way for me to do that.’”
Nate patted her on the back. That was his sister, never beating around the bush when she had something to say. He was proud to have her in Ecuador and know that when she finally made it into Auca territory, he would be the one serving her in his plane. Of course, a lot of changes would have to take place before it was safe for a single woman to live among the Aucas. But if Rachel believed that’s where God was leading her, then Nate and Marj would believe right along with her.
Within days, Rachel had her first assignment. An Auca girl named Dayuma had been located at a large plantation, called Hacienda Ila, to the west of Auca country. Dayuma had fled from the jungle after her father had been killed by another tribal member. She was too scared to return to her people, so for eight years she had been chopping sugar cane and digging yucca root on the plantation. The owner of the hacienda, Don Carlos Sevilla, a tall man about sixty years old, had allowed Dayuma to stay and work, even though he’d had some bad experiences with other members of her tribe. He bore six scars, made by razor-sharp Auca spears, that were a reminder to him of one particular rubber expedition up the Curaray River into Auca territory.
Rachel was thrilled by the way things were working out. She did not need to go into the jungle to learn the Auca language. Dayuma had come out from the jungle. Rachel was also thankful for the kindness of Señor Sevilla, who offered her the run of his house. During the day, Rachel organized her language learning and translation work, and her evenings were spent with Dayuma. It was a perfect arrangement, and one day, she hoped not too long in the future, Rachel would trek into Auca territory to meet and speak with these mysterious people face-to-face. At least, that was her plan.
