Just when Rachel thought things could not get any more bizarre, she heard the unmistakable voice of a Shapra Indian. She recognized it immediately as the voice of Chief Tariri. Moments later, followed by his wife, Irina, and his youngest son, Tariri was bounding across the stage toward Rachel. He was wearing his chiefly regalia, complete with feathered headdress, beads, and beetle-wing earrings. He greeted his “sister” Rachel with a kiss.
“Tiyotari [Rachel] wrote paper day after day,” Chief Tariri said. “She told us, ‘In God’s house you will live well. If you obey Jesus, then you will be good.’ In my heart I thought, ‘You are telling the truth.’ I began to love Jesus. Who else is like Him? What person can do the things He did?”
After the filming and broadcasting of the thirty-minute show, the entire “cast” moved to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, where Rachel and Dayuma were staying. Rachel laughed to herself as they all walked through the lobby; they were an odd-looking group. She assumed that the staring hotel guests would think that Tariri was dressed in some kind of movie costume. No one would suspect that he was an ex-headhunting chief from the Peruvian jungle.
Rachel’s friends and family stayed at the hotel for the next two days, which proved to be two of the best days of Rachel’s life. Rachel told everyone that she had never expected that such a group of people so dear to her would ever meet each other this side of heaven. The guests were served their meals in their rooms so that they could avoid the public eye and be allowed to talk freely together. A worker with Wycliffe Bible Translators in Los Angeles even arranged to keep the disoriented Indian visitors supplied with chicken and boiled rice.
During this time Chief Tariri and Dayuma tried to communicate, though it was not easy because of the language gulf that existed between them. Except for the translation of a few simple phrases by the Wycliffe missionaries present, most of Tariri and Dayuma’s communication was through smiles and gestures. Still, Chief Tariri seemed genuinely pleased with the meeting. “Tiyotari,” he told Rachel, “it is good to meet one of the Aucas that God has sent you to. I can see with my eyes that they also need the same message you brought to us.”
It took Rachel several days to recover from the shock of being thrust onto the This Is Your Life show. It took her even longer to adjust to the idea that Uncle Cam and the Wycliffe Bible Translators had a full year’s agenda planned for her and Dayuma in the United States. Both Rachel and Dayuma wanted to return to Ecuador, but once again Rachel found herself outmaneuvered by the powers above her.
From California Rachel and Dayuma traveled to the University of Oklahoma, where another Summer Institute of Linguistics was under way. When they arrived there, Dayuma obligingly allowed the would-be linguists to interview her and try out their new language acquisition skills on her. As well, Rachel received help with some difficult Waorani language concepts from her mentor Ken Pike.
Sometimes Rachel despaired that Dayuma did not grasp the gospel message at all, but she saw some encouraging signs along the way. While in Oklahoma, Rachel explained to Dayuma how to pray a simple prayer, but Dayuma seemed reluctant to say anything. In response Rachel wrote down a simple prayer in Waorani and read it aloud. When Dayuma heard it, she shook her head disapprovingly. “We don’t talk like that in our language,” she said.
Rachel scanned the text for the grammatical error she was sure Dayuma was referring to. “Tell me what mistake I made,” she said.
Dayuma’s response was short. “It’s not the words you said. We just don’t talk to God in our language.”
Now Rachel understood. Dayuma had never heard anyone pray in Waorani, and she assumed that to pray she would have to use Quichua or learn English. It took some convincing before Dayuma felt comfortable praying in her native language.
On June 15, Rachel and Dayuma flew to New York City to speak at a Billy Graham Evangelical Crusade in progress at Madison Square Garden. A crowd of over sixteen thousand had packed into the building, and Rachel was concerned about how Dayuma would react when placed in front of such a big crowd. After all, until recently Dayuma had no idea that there were that many people in the rest of the world.
Much to Rachel’s relief, Dayuma seemed to take addressing the huge crowd in stride. She was a little shy at first, but then she started recounting one of the Bible stories Rachel had told her. It was the one about how Jesus raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead. Rachel translated Dayuma’s version of the story into English, delighted by how the crowd was enraptured at the simple storytelling of a tribal woman. When Dayuma ended with the thought that Jairus’s parents were very, very happy, the crowd cheered. Later, when there was a call for people to go forward who wanted to become Christians, hundreds of people headed toward the front. Dayuma was astounded that so many people did not follow “God’s Carvings” (the Bible) in a land where they were so accessible.
While staying in Manhattan for the crusade, Rachel realized that Dayuma had no way to comprehend many of the things she saw. The skyscrapers and the Statue of Liberty did not seem to impress Dayuma. What fascinated her were the window cleaners dangling from the Empire State Building. How did they get there? she wanted to know. And why don’t they fall?
From New York the pair traveled on to Philadelphia, where Rachel visited her parents. Rachel was gratified to see that her mother and Dayuma got along very well. Despite the language barrier, the two women seemed to understand each other. Dayuma was well aware that Nate was Mrs. Saint’s son. She told Rachel later that she had looked for any signs of bitterness in her mother over the death of Nate and was astounded to find none. Now she believed Rachel when she said that she did not want to make contact with the Waorani to avenge the death of her brother Nate.
As Rachel thought about the rapport between her mother and Dayuma, she realized that Dayuma had been around very few older people. In the jungle, almost every adult Dayuma knew had been speared to death by early middle age. Rachel understood that seeing old people living well and without fear of death was a tremendous encouragement to Dayuma.
Rachel enjoyed the time at home with her parents, but it had become a strain for Rachel and Dayuma to be anywhere outside the confines of the family home. Following the This Is Your Life show, Rachel and Dayuma had become quite famous, and strangers would stop them in the street to engage them in conversation or ask for an autograph. After a while the constant attention became very tiring, and everyone decided that it would be best to rent a quiet cabin for a month in the pine forests of Pennsylvania. As it turned out, this was a wonderful decision. For the first time since arriving in the United States, Rachel was able to relax. And Dayuma seemed to be more at home in the forest, although at times she had flashbacks to her childhood and became very scared.
As the weeks went by, Rachel could see that Dayuma still had many old fears. Dayuma believed, for instance, as did the Waorani, that mosquitoes possessed evil spirits, which they passed on to anyone they bit. To Dayuma the forest seemed infested with devils that could pounce upon a person and suck the lifeblood from them. The situation saddened Rachel and drove her to pray harder than ever that Dayuma would understand the power of God to overcome such fears.
In September, Rachel and Dayuma attended the Wycliffe Bible Translators’ biennial meeting in the tiny town of Sulphur Springs, Arkansas, where Rachel met with many of the Wycliffe workers she had known through the years. It was a joyous reunion, until Dayuma came down with the Asian flu. Her temperature soared, and every bone and muscle in her body ached. Rachel grew desperate; she knew that the flu could easily kill a tribal person with no immunity to foreign diseases.
As she prayed for guidance, Rachel remembered Dr. Ken Altig, a Wycliffe doctor she had worked with in Peru. Dr. Altig was on furlough in California, and Rachel was confident that he would be able to give her the best advice on how to treat Dayuma’s illness. She tracked down Dr. Altig and, after talking to him by phone, followed his instructions to the letter. Within a few days Dayuma was showing signs of recovery. But her progress was slow, and Rachel spent many nights sitting beside Dayuma, coaxing her to drink a little water.
It was early November before Dayuma was strong enough to go outside again. Her first foray outdoors was for a very special reason—it was snowing. Dayuma was awestruck. In the rain forest she had never known anything colder than the mist that crawled up from the rivers and spread over the land in the early hours of the morning. But now she was surrounded by frozen water falling gently from the sky.
“I wish Sam were here,” she told Rachel.
Rachel knew that Dayuma was homesick for her son. The two women discussed the matter, and Rachel promised to do her best to get Sam to join them in the United States. Of course, she knew it was a daunting task. Sam, like the Waorani and many other tribal people in the Amazon basin, had no official written record of his birth. This made getting a passport difficult, but Rachel did everything she could to handle the situation.
On November 18, 1957, stunning news awaited Rachel and Dayuma. It came by way of a phone call from Sam Saint in New York. Sam told Rachel that Betty Elliot wanted her to know that two Waorani women had walked out of the jungle. Although Rachel had a thousand questions, Sam did not have any more information than that, but he assured Rachel that Marj Saint, who was on furlough in California, would be calling her to fill her in on a few more details.
After waiting an hour or so, Rachel took matters into her hands and tracked down Marj. Even though it was predawn in California, Marj was happy to tell Rachel what she knew, although it was not much. According to Marj, Betty and her daughter Valerie were staying at a Quichua village when a Quichua woman brought two naked tribal women to her. Betty could tell straightaway that the women were Waoranis; they had the telltale round balsa wood plugs in their earlobes and spoke no Quichua at all. The woman who brought them to Betty said that a third person, a girl, had emerged from the jungle with them but had fled back into it when she was approached. Betty thought that one of the women was the older woman who had appeared in the photographs developed from Nate’s recovered camera. This would make her Dayuma’s aunt, Mintaka.
Rachel was delighted to think that more Waoranis had decided to trust the “outsiders,” but Dayuma was distraught. “Tell your friends to take the visitors away to safety,” she told Rachel. “My people will come and kill them.”
This was a serious threat, and Rachel was sure that Dayuma was not being overly dramatic. She called up Marj again and asked her to relay Dayuma’s warning to the radio operator at Shell Mera.
The one thing that did cheer Dayuma was the thought that the other woman might be her mother, and the runaway teenage girl her little sister Gimari.
Rachel could find no way, however, to persuade Dayuma to return to Ecuador immediately. Dayuma seemed too afraid to face her past, and she was not completely over the flu. Rachel decided it was wisest not to push Dayuma, but at the same time she was frustrated at the thought that she and Dayuma were the only two people who could communicate with the women, and they were thousands of miles away. Rachel did what she could. She suggested that Dayuma make a tape recording to be played to the two Waorani women back in Ecuador. Dayuma approved of the idea, and soon she was sitting tensely in front of a microphone.
“Long ago Moipa speared my father, and Umi, Aepi, and I fled from the jungle,” Dayuma began. “My father was Tyaento. My mother was Akawo. I am Tyaento and Akawo’s daughter Dayuma. Now I am living here with another who is like a relative. Here, far away, big-water other side I live. Later, returning I will come. Who are you two? I do not know.”
