Rachel was as delighted to see her nephews as she was the newly printed Gospel of Mark. A jubilant dedication service was held on Easter Sunday. Of course, Rachel now realized that with the Gospel printed in Waorani, her next challenge was to teach the people to read.
Soon after Easter, sixteen-year-old Kathy Saint arrived at Tiwaeno. She wanted to be baptized and asked Rachel if a Waorani Christian elder could baptize her. Rachel spoke to the members of the church about it, and everyone agreed that it was a great idea. Then Steve, a teenage boy named Iniwa, and Oncaye asked to be baptized.
Marj Saint flew in from Quito to witness the baptism, and on June 25 a large group of people set out from Tiwaeno for Palm Beach. Kimo and Dyuwi led the way. The following day the group gathered on the edge of the Curaray River at Palm Beach. They stood beside the grave of the five martyred missionary men as Kimo, Kathy and Steve Saint, Oncaye, and Iniwa waded into the river. The crowd sang “We Rest in Thee,” which had been the five dead men’s favorite hymn. When they had finished singing, Rachel looked up and saw five red jungle flowers. For her they symbolized Nate and the other four men who had given their lives so that such an event as the baptism might one day take place among the Waorani.
After the final bars of the hymn faded away, Kimo baptized each of the four candidates one after the other. When he was finished, he asked the people to bow their heads while he prayed. “Father in heaven,” he began, “You know that we have sinned here. We were ignorant. We did not know that our brothers had come to tell us about You. But now You have put our sins in the deepest water, and happily we serve You and know we will see again those that we killed. Father God, these young brothers and sisters have entered into the water. Help them to live happily, as we do. Help them to be true to You and Your Carvings. Amen.”
By the time Kimo had finished praying, tears were streaming down Rachel’s cheeks. Once again she wished that Nate could have been there to witness the scene. Yet she knew that it was his death and the death of the other four that had paved the way for the baptism she had just witnessed. And she knew that Nate would have been touched by the fact that Kimo, one of the killers, was the man who conducted the baptism.
The next visitors to Tiwaeno arrived in November 1965. They were Dr. Raymond Edman from Wheaton College and his wife. They came to hold the first ever Waorani Bible conference. On the last day of the conference, Dr. Edman read from Acts 13 about Paul and Barnabas being sent off as missionaries. Then he challenged those present to renew their dedication to reach their downriver neighbors. Dyuwi, Tona, and Oncaye all came to the altar at the end of the service to pray for strength and courage to go to the downriver people.
Rachel knew how important it was to get to the downriver Waorani as soon as possible. The oil-drilling situation was becoming more menacing with each passing week. Oil workers were encroaching more and more into Waorani territory, and plans were under way to crisscross the Oriente with pipelines.
Don Smith, the JAARS pilot, kept Rachel up to date with any Waorani sightings, and in February 1966 he reported seeing a settlement. He flew into Tiwaeno and picked up Dyuwi, Dayuma, and Oncaye so that they, too, could see the settlement from the air. When they got back, Oncaye was breathless with excitement. “Swooping down low, I saw my mother.”
Dayuma was more sober. “A very big man threw spears at the plane,” she reported.
Even so, finding the exact location of a downriver group was enough to spur the Tiwaeno Waorani into action. Within a few days, Dyuwi, Tona, Oncaye, and her sister Boika set out on foot for the settlement. They carried a few supplies with them and a radio to keep in contact with Rachel and Don. The plan was for Don to keep an eye on the settlement and guide the four Waorani missionaries to it if they strayed off course.
Several days later the four came bursting back into Tiwaeno, shaken to the core. Rachel listened as Oncaye recounted what happened.
“We had walked for several days,” she said, “when we saw some footprints. They belonged to my family, and we followed them. As we walked, we noticed dark stains on the ground beside the footprints. It was nearly dark when we came to a small hut. The smell was very bad, and the hut was filled with buzzards. We crept forward, and inside we found the body of my mother with spears protruding from her. I screamed, and we ran. We ran for a long time, and it was very dark before we stopped and lit a fire. Dyuwi and Tona were tired, and so they slept while Boika and I prepared some food. But soon we both knew there were spies in the jungle watching us. I looked at Boika, and we both began to talk about Father God. Then I heard the quiet whistle from the jungle, the signal of my people to attack. I called to the men in the jungle and said, ‘You plan to kill me, too? Very well, go ahead and try. You cannot hurt me. You will just kill my body. My soul will go to be with Father God.’ By then Dyuwi and Tona were awake, and we began to run as fast as we could through the jungle toward Tiwaeno. But the downriver men were following our footprints. So I prayed, ‘God, make it rain. Hurry!’ And soon it began to pour and wash away our footprints so that the men could not follow us.”
Rachel breathed deeply. It was a harrowing story, and the four had been lucky to escape. Rachel also felt deep compassion for Oncaye’s having to see the speared, decaying body of her dead mother. Things may have changed among the upriver people at Tiwaeno, but not so for the downriver Waorani. Yet God had opened the way with Dayuma’s clan, and Rachel was sure that He would do the same with the downriver people.
As Rachel worked on at Tiwaeno, the world outside was commemorating the ten-year anniversary of the deaths of the five missionaries at Palm Beach. The government of Ecuador issued postage stamps, each with a likeness of one of the five murdered men, and Dr. Edman wrote a series of articles for Christian magazines. The Billy Graham organization distributed over one hundred thousand copies of a pamphlet Rachel had written called Ten Years After the Massacre. All of the attention on the deaths of the men renewed interest in the Waorani, and in mid-1966 Cameron Townsend contacted Rachel on the radio. He had one request—bring two Waorani Christians and come to the World Congress of Evangelism in Berlin, Germany, in November.
Rachel was reluctant to leave the jungle, but once again she deferred to Uncle Cam’s judgment. She picked Kimo and Dayuma’s husband, Komi, to accompany her to Berlin. The first leg of their journey took them to Huntingdon Valley to visit Rachel’s aging mother. It was the first time Kimo and Komi had ever left the jungle, and their reaction to the outside world provided Rachel with many humorous moments. When they got off the airplane in Quito to catch their plane to the United States, Kimo saw a truck. “Look, there is an airplane walking!” he exclaimed.
In Huntingdon Valley Rachel outfitted the two Waorani men in suitable winter attire. And when Kimo and Komi emerged wearing suits, overcoats, dress shoes, scarves, and hats, she found it hard to hold back the laughter. The two men who had spent most of their lives going naked looked so different. Of course, getting dress shoes to fit their wide feet had not been easy, and it had taken them both a little while to get used to wearing the heavy shoes. After Kimo and Komi had received some dental work, they set out with Rachel for Berlin.
In Berlin the two Waorani men were most impressed with the cave (hotel) they stayed in. They found it hard to believe that such a big building for people to sleep in existed. However, both of them were perturbed when Rachel took them to a park and they could not find one monkey in the trees. After considering the situation for some time, Kimo explained, “It is because the trees are too short and too far apart for monkeys to jump from one treetop to the next.”
The number of people attending the World Congress of Evangelism also impressed the men. “We did not know God’s believing family was so big,” they told Rachel.
Kimo and Komi were a huge hit at the congress. Wherever they went, crowds gathered around them to finally catch a glimpse of one of the Aucas they had heard so much about.
On the second-to-last day of the congress, Kimo and Komi got to stand before the gathered crowd and speak while Rachel translated for them. To help the flow of their presentation, George Cowan, one of the Wycliffe leaders, asked a number of questions. His final question to Kimo was “Do you have a message for the believers here who come from all over the world?”
Staring out across the nearly twelve hundred people gathered in the hall, Kimo replied, “I say to you, take God’s Carving to all the people in your land. We will go home and take God’s message to our downriver enemies. We will say to them, ‘Believing in God and His Son Jesus, we live well. We have stopped spearing and choking babies. We live happily with our families.’ This we will say and invite them to believe in God and live in peace with us.”
When Rachel had finished interpreting his words, the crowd broke out into a huge round of applause.
Following the close of the World Congress of Evangelism in Berlin, Rachel, Kimo, and Komi toured several European cities. One of the cities they visited was London. It was an emotional moment for Rachel as she arrived there. Rachel had not visited London since she was eighteen years old, when she had come with Mrs. Parmalee. It was on that trip, aboard the ship returning to the United States from London, that Rachel had had the vision of a group of people in the jungle beckoning to her to come to them. They were “her” people, the people she felt certain God was leading her to. And now, all these years later, she was in London again with two members of that very tribe.
Finally, after six weeks away, the three of them arrived back at Tiwaeno. Everyone was anxious to hear about all that Kimo and Komi had seen and done. To Rachel’s surprise, it was not the tall buildings, ribbons of highways, ships, or large airplanes the men had seen that impressed them but rather the sheer number of people they had encountered.
“Look at all the trees around us,” Kimo told those who had gathered to hear about the trip. “Look as far as you can see. Beyond the hills and mountains there are more trees. Think of all the leaves on all those trees. That is how many foreigners there are.”
Rachel had barely settled back into the routine of jungle life when news came of another Waorani killing, this time of a Quichua man on the Napo River. Again the need to reach the downriver people loomed, but no one was sure how to go about it. Then at Christmas Don Smith suggested to Rachel that they use Nate’s spiral-line method to lower a radio receiver and transmitter to the group. That way Oncaye could talk to them and prepare them to receive upriver guests.
Everything was meticulously prepared. A transmitter was placed in the bottom of a basket, and Don and Oncaye flew off to deliver it. While they were gone, Rachel and Gikita led a prayer meeting in Tiwaeno. They prayed fervently that this time the mission would be successful.
When the airplane finally touched down again at the settlement, Oncaye jumped out. “I talked to my brother Tyaento!” she shouted. “He is going to meet me at Moipa’s field in two days. He wants me to bring an ax.”
Everyone at Tiwaeno—and no one more than Rachel Saint—hoped that Oncaye was not walking into a trap.
Chapter 16
The Years Go By
Oncaye, Dawa, Kimo, and Dyuwi set off down the trail to go and meet Oncaye’s family. Rachel waited anxiously by the radio for any reports on how the four were getting on. Finally, three days after they had set out, the radio crackled to life. It was Oncaye, and her report brought tears to Rachel’s eyes. Excitedly Oncaye reported how her mother had welcomed the group. Apparently the badly decayed body they had discovered on their previous trip turned out to be that of Oncaye’s cousin and not her mother. Soon other members of Oncaye’s family filtered into the clearing in the jungle to see their long-lost relatives.
