Dayuma went on to urge the two women to trust Betty Elliot—the “tall woman with the white-haired baby”—and not to run back into the jungle. She asked them what rivers they lived on and whether her mother, sister, and brothers were still alive, ending with, “Long ago we did not live well, not loving God. Our old grandfather spoke and said that God created all things. All men and women He created. Yes, I now love that God. I now talk to that God. Now I live very well. Before I did not live well.”
Rachel sent the tape off to Betty in Ecuador and waited anxiously for a reply. Before it arrived she heard from Marj once again. The call confirmed Dayuma’s prediction. A Waorani raiding party had come out of the jungle and kidnapped the Quichua woman who had offered the two Waorani women refuge. They then speared the woman’s husband to death with twenty-two spears. Following Dayuma’s advice, the two Waorani women had been moved to Shandia before the attack took place to stay with Betty.
Strangely enough, Dayuma was relieved to hear the news of the killing. “Now that my people have taken a woman to replace the two that were lost, the killings will stop.”
Finally a tape arrived at Sulphur Springs from Ecuador. Eagerly Rachel threaded it onto the tape machine and pushed the play button. Dayuma sat motionless in front of the machine waiting to hear the recorded voices. The tape, which had been recorded by Dr. Tidmarsh, was taped over a piano concerto that made the voices on the tape hard to understand at times. Still Dayuma sat transfixed and listened. Rachel listened also, but she found the tape hard to understand. She recognized a number of the Waorani words, but the voice on the tape spoke much faster than Dayuma and was much more high-pitched and nasally. At times Rachel wanted to stop the tape and rewind it to hear a portion of the speech again, but Dayuma would not allow it. She was eager to hear all that was on the tape recording.
Finally the tape drew to a close, and Dayuma relayed to Rachel all that was said on it. The woman who was speaking on the tape had identified herself as Maengamo, the wife of Dayuma’s Uncle Gikita. And the woman who had fled with her was indeed Mintaka, Dayuma’s aunt. But the girl who had fled back to the jungle turned out to be not a girl at all, but one of Maengamo’s young brothers.
Maengamo had talked much about the continuing cycle of killing that went on inside the tribe and about the numerous atrocities carried out by Moipa. Maengamo also related how one day Moipa had been cornered and speared, but she did not say whether or not he was killed.
To Rachel’s surprise, instead of exciting Dayuma, the tape seemed to send her into a downward spiral. Old hatred and fear began to surface in her conversation as she talked about her people. She was particularly upset to think that Moipa, her father’s killer, might still be alive. As well, the fact that Maengamo had not indicated whether Dayuma’s mother, Akawo, was alive or dead troubled her. Rachel did her best to encourage Dayuma, praying with and for her, but Dayuma continued to feel depressed.
When another tape arrived from Ecuador, Rachel nervously threaded it onto the tape player, hoping the contents of this tape would not upset Dayuma as much as the previous one had. Again Dayuma sat transfixed in front of the machine and listened. Once again, Maengamo was the main speaker, and as she had done on the previous tape recording, she recounted many of the killings that had gone on among the Waorani over the years. Then she relayed some information that caused Dayuma to yelp for joy. Moipa was indeed dead, speared by an angry mob several years before.
Dayuma’s joy quickly subsided, however, when she learned that her big brother Wawae had been murdered. “He always brought me meat from the jungle, and I loved him very much,” Dayuma told Rachel. As far as Dayuma knew, this left only her sisters Gimari and Oba and her brother Nampa alive.
The news of Wawae’s death depressed Dayuma, and then her depression turned to anger. Rachel wanted her to go back into the jungle to share the gospel with her people, but Dayuma told Rachel that because of what had happened to her brother, she was no longer in a mood to agree to that request. “I will not return,” she adamantly told Rachel.
Rachel was alarmed. She knew that bitterness had crept into Dayuma’s heart. But without Dayuma it was difficult to imagine how she would ever make it safely into the Waorani tribe herself. So she thought and prayed about the matter. Finally, one day she said, “Dayuma, what if Jesus Christ had said, ‘I will not go to those horrible people on earth. They are too wicked and sinful, and I cannot be bothered with them. I will stay in heaven with My Holy Father. It is a much better place than down on earth with all of those evil people.’ What would have become of us if the Lord Jesus had said that?”
Chapter 11
Nimu
Rachel received no immediate response to her challenge, but she had not expected one. She knew that Dayuma would take several days to think through what she had said. Sure enough, several days later Dayuma finally said to Rachel, “When are we going back to my land? I want to go to my people and tell them about God.”
Rachel was delighted and relieved. She had prayed hard that Dayuma would change her mind and let go of the bitterness she felt toward Moipa and others in her tribe. She also prayed about something else that would help to cheer Dayuma—her son Sam. Rachel had tried her best to get Sam to the United States, but her efforts had led nowhere. So when Larry Montgomery visited Sulphur Springs at the beginning of March 1958, Rachel wondered whether he might be part of the answer to her prayers. Larry had been instrumental in taking charge after Nate and the other four men were killed, and Rachel wondered whether he could help her to get Sam to the United States. She talked to him and explained the situation regarding Sam and asked if there was anything he could do to help. As he had done in Shell Mera, Larry started working immediately on a solution. Within two weeks he had cut through all the red tape, and Sam was soon reunited with his mother and Rachel at Sulphur Springs.
Dayuma was much more settled with her son by her side. And six-year-old Sam adjusted remarkably well to life in the United States. Within a few weeks of arriving he was able to make himself understood in simple English sentences.
Meanwhile, Rachel and Dayuma continued with their Waorani language work. Rachel had reached the stage where she was attempting to translate and write down in Waorani several stories from the New Testament. One of the stories she was working on was the story of the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8. When she had translated the passage as accurately as she could, Rachel read it back to Dayuma. After sitting and thinking about the passage for several minutes, Dayuma repeated in Waorani the Ethiopian’s request, “What does hinder me to be baptized?” and Philip’s reply, “If you believe with all your heart, you may.”
Rachel translated more stories from the New Testament into Waorani. Then two weeks after hearing the story of the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch, Dayuma came to Rachel and asked, “What good man of God can enter me into the water?”
Rachel immediately thought of Dr. Edman, the president of Wheaton College in Illinois, who had long been interested in the Waorani. Dr. Edman had spent the previous Christmas in the Ecuadorian jungle and had written many articles and news reports about the Waorani. Rachel knew that Dr. Edman had a son living near Sulphur Springs, and she wrote to him and asked if he might be visiting his son anytime soon. If so, she asked, would he be available to come by and baptize Dayuma?
The reply she received from Dr. Edman was not what Rachel had expected. Dr. Edman was very excited about being asked to baptize Dayuma, but he saw the baptism as an opportunity to further the cause of reaching other Waorani with the gospel. To that end he proposed that Rachel and Dayuma fly to Wheaton, where Dayuma could be baptized in the Wheaton Evangelical Free Church. He pointed out that three of the five dead missionaries had many connections to Wheaton. Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, and Nate Saint had all attended Wheaton College, and the pastor of the church was Marj Saint’s former pastor. Dr. Edman explained that, if Rachel agreed, he had arranged for a wealthy Christian businessman, R. G. LeTourneau, to fly Rachel, Dayuma, and Sam to Wheaton, Illinois, in his private airplane.
Once again Rachel was torn. She hated the idea of more publicity, more show. But she had to admit that Dr. Edman had a point. There was a sense of completion with the first Christian Waorani’s being baptized in the place where three of the martyred men had trained. Rachel wrote back to Dr. Edman, agreeing to his proposal.
Soon the details of getting the three of them to Wheaton were being worked out. At the same time Rachel decided that it was long past the time for the three of them to return to the Oriente. She booked flights from Illinois to New York to visit her brother Sam and then flights from there back to Ecuador.
On April 14, 1958, Rachel, Dayuma, and Sam found themselves surrounded by friends of the cause of reaching the Waorani with the gospel. Rachel’s parents were among those who witnessed the baptism, as was Ed McCully’s mother. Jim Elliot’s parents had come all the way from California for the occasion. Wheaton College had also dispatched press releases announcing the baptism, and since Rachel and Dayuma were still in the public eye following their appearance on This Is Your Life, newspapers from across the country picked up on the event and relayed it to millions of people. Once again, Rachel and Dayuma found themselves the center of attention, something Rachel always did her best to avoid.
After the baptism, Rachel, Dayuma, and Sam flew from Chicago to New York City, where they were guests of Sam Saint and photographer Cornell Capa. Cornell told Rachel that the publishing company of Harper and Row was eager to publish Rachel’s biography, but Rachel refused to entertain the idea. The last thing she wanted was more publicity.
Following their stopover in New York at the end of May 1958, Rachel, Dayuma, and Sam boarded another airplane and flew south. As they got closer to Ecuador, Rachel watched Dayuma’s excitement about going home slowly turn to nervousness as she contemplated meeting her relatives. Finally she turned to Rachel and said, “I will call you Nimu. It means star, and it was the name of my little sister who was hacked to death by Moipa.”
Rachel nodded, unsure of what the point was of being given the new name.
Dayuma went on. “That will make you my sister, and being my sister, you are also their relative. They will not spear their relative.”
Rachel smiled reassuringly. She appreciated how much Dayuma cared for her safety. “Nimu is a lovely name,” she replied.
“And to our relatives, you must never ask about the men who killed your brother,” Dayuma added. “Hearing this, my people will think you want revenge. And then they will have to kill you first.”
Again Rachel nodded. All she could do was trust that God would lead her into the Waorani tribe at the right time, as the way was filled with pitfalls, all of which appeared to end with her death at the end of a spear.
Once the three of them arrived back in Ecuador, rather than going back to Hacienda San Carlos, Rachel arranged for them to go to Limoncocha, where Wycliffe’s new Dawson Trotman Memorial Base, the mission’s center of operations for Ecuador, was located. Limoncocha was situated thirty miles north of the Rio Napo, on the edge of Waorani territory.
Rachel, Dayuma, and Sam settled in to their new home and awaited the arrival of Mintaka and Maengamo, along with Betty and Valerie Elliot, from Shandia. As they waited, Rachel observed Dayuma becoming more moody with each passing day.
“What if coming, they bring bad news?” Dayuma finally asked.
Rachel had no way of reassuring Dayuma except to urge her to pray for peace.
