Dawa also spoke to Rachel. She, too, was excited to see her relatives, but she explained that Oncaye’s sister-in-law Wina was seriously ill from a poisonous snakebite. In fact, Wina had been left to die in her hammock, but Dawa had been able to give her a shot of serum from her medical kit and pray for her. After listening to the report, Rachel felt that Wina would need more medical care, so she encouraged Dawa and the others to bring Wina back to Tiwaeno.
Wina agreed to let Kimo carry her back over the trail to her upriver relatives. It took seven days of toil to get Wina back to Tiwaeno, but she arrived alive and accompanied by ten other members of Oncaye’s family. The Tiwaeno Christians welcomed Oncaye’s relatives, and before long most of the newcomers had become Christians themselves.
The people still had much concern, though, for the many other splinter groups of downriver people. No one knew exactly how many there were, but in June 1968, Oncaye and her mother set out to find them. This time it was not difficult. Their old downriver enemies were weak from exposure to the flu. Many of the people could hardly walk, and they welcomed an invitation to return to Tiwaeno, where they could get medical help.
Rachel greeted the first small group of flu-ridden downriver people to arrive back with Oncaye and her mother. She radioed the hospital at Shell Mera for advice on how best to treat them. Other small groups of downriver people began straggling into the village.
By the time Rachel could count the influx of people, she realized that ninety-three newcomers were among them. Including the eleven members of Oncaye’s family who had already joined them, the total number of new arrivals at Tiwaeno was 104, exactly matching the population that, in the ten years Rachel had lived there, had grown from 56 to 104 people.
Every resource the community had was stretched as far as it would go. The healthy Tiwaeno men hunted for twice as many people as before, and the women walked farther in search of bananas and overgrown yucca gardens. Rachel was proud of the way the Christians in the community were reaching out to their old enemies, but she was also concerned about what would happen when the downriver men regained their strength. The men were hardened killers who probably thought that feeding an enemy was a sign of weakness.
The Tiwaeno Christians did all they could to make sure their guests knew about their change of heart. “Here we do not kill others,” they announced. “Nor do we take a wife’s sister or any other woman who does not want to be our wife. We obey God’s Carvings. Happily and peacefully we live, believing in the God who made us all.”
On the whole, despite several flare-ups, the downriver people behaved well while they lived in Tiwaeno. As they began to recover their strength after their bout with influenza, several of the men cleared land a few miles away and built their own village.
The next challenge Rachel faced was something more serious than the flu—polio. The first case of the disease, that of a downriver Waorani, was diagnosed on the same day, September 2, 1969, that Rachel learned that her mother had died. Rachel hardly had time to mourn the passing of Katherine Saint. She was too overwhelmed with the nursing task that was quickly overtaking her and the other Christians at Tiwaeno.
The downriver people were still accustomed to thinking that illness and death were the result of curses, and so when they started getting ill, they looked around for someone to blame. Rachel found herself grabbing newly whittled spears and smashing them over her knee, defying anyone to commit a spearing in the village. Her tactics worked, though the toll from the polio virus was devastating. By the time the disease had run its course, fourteen people were dead, and nine others were in critical condition.
The doctors at the hospital in Shell Mera took in the nine polio patients and made manually operated iron lungs to keep them alive. Medical charities from Wheaton College sent crutches and wheelchairs for the disabled, and nurses and physical therapists arrived to help with rehabilitation. Despite their best efforts, two more patients died.
One of the nurses assigned to help with the polio outbreak in Tiwaeno itself was Rosi Jung, from Germany. Rachel loved Rosi’s quiet, efficient manner from the start, and Rosi soon signed on as a permanent helper to Rachel. She joined Catherine, who had now completed her doctorate and was permanently assigned to work among the Waorani tribe.
With three workers, a lot more work was able to get done. Rachel and her two helpers focused their attention on literacy, and soon a believer named Tona began to shine academically. Rachel encouraged him to become a teacher, and Tona took up the challenge of helping his people learn to read and write.
Rachel and the others at Tiwaeno estimated that at least two hundred other Waoranis were living in the jungle. They named one of the bands the “ridge people.”
When word arrived that the oil workers were preparing to clear the ridge, Tona, who thought that his sister Omade lived with the ridge people, felt he had to do something. He asked a helicopter pilot for one of the oil companies to parachute him down onto the ridge. It was a daring plan. Rachel was concerned that it would fail, depriving Tiwaeno of its best reader and teacher. But Tona assured her that God was calling him to take the gospel to the ridge people.
After Tona left on his mission, Rachel kept in touch with him by radio. Much to her relief, everything seemed to be going well. Tona reported that he had found both his sister and his brother and that they had both welcomed him. Each morning Tona relayed his progress to Rachel. The group was listening to his teaching from God’s Carvings, and several people were interested in going back to meet the believers at Tiwaeno.
Then, on June 5, 1970, Tona reported to Rachel that the group was planning a big party nearby. At first Tona thought it would be safer to remove himself from the situation, but after praying all night, he said that he felt he should stay and preach to them all.
One day passed, and then the next. The radio was silent. Catherine and Dawa were flown over the clearing where the party had been held to see if they could spot Tona. All they saw was that the huts in the area had been burned to the ground. No one knew what had happened to Tona, but Rachel was sure that he would find a way to contact her soon if he was alive.
In the meantime Rachel received word that Wycliffe Associates, a group of Wycliffe supporters, wanted her to go on a tour of the United States to raise awareness of Wycliffe’s mission. The Wycliffe supporters suggested that she bring several of the Waorani Christians with her. As was usually the case, Rachel did not want to go. She was worried about Tona and the unreached Waoranis wandering the ridge country. But Wycliffe Associates was very persistent, and eventually Rachel agreed to take Kimo, Dawa, Gikita, and Dayuma’s son Sam with her. When they left in the spring of 1971, they still had no news of Tona.
The Auca Update Rallies held across the United States were far more popular and exhausting than Rachel could ever have imagined. For two months the group was flown from city to city. Rachel or Sam, who was now a well-educated young man, interpreted for the others in the many crusades they spoke at and the television shows they appeared on. At times it seemed to Rachel that everyone in America knew who they were, and although she did her best to shield the others from overexposure to the media, it was almost impossible.
At one stage Dawa became ill, and Rachel questioned whether or not it was all worth it. The only reason she continued with the tour to the end was that many people commented to her and other Wycliffe workers that the testimonies of the Waorani Christians had challenged them to go out as missionaries.
By the time the group arrived back in the Oriente, Rachel, who was fifty-seven years old by now, was on the verge of a nervous collapse. It did not take much for Catherine and Rosi to convince her that she needed to take a break. For the first time in many years, Rachel returned to the United States alone.
While in the United States, Rachel received a letter from Catherine with the sad news that Tona had been speared by his relatives. The relatives had told Dyuwi that Tona’s last words were, “You may kill me, but I am not afraid. I will only go to heaven.”
As she received the news, Rachel was sure that this first Waorani martyr was in heaven with her brother and her parents.
While in the United States, Rachel had to face the fact that she was having problems seeing. Her eyes had developed cataracts, and something had to be done about them. Rachel underwent successful surgery on her right eye to remove the cataract. However, she did not stay home long enough to have the left eye operated on. Rachel felt that she did not have the time to wait for the second operation. She had to get back to her people, who needed her now more than ever.
About ten years earlier, the oil companies and the government of Ecuador had gotten together and decided to draw a line around Waorani lands. They called it a protectorate, but it reminded Rachel of the Indian reservations in the United States. The protectorate consisted of forty thousand acres of land, one tenth of the traditional Waorani territory, and it conferred on the Waorani no mineral rights to the oil that was under their land. The size of the protectorate was far too small for the Waoranis to roam so that they could hunt, fish, and gather enough fruit and vegetables to live on. At first the small amount of land had not been a problem, because the oil companies did not patrol the borders of the protectorate and the Waoranis wandered far outside it to hunt. But now things were changing. The land itself was changing too. Settlers on the edges of the protectorate hunted with guns and fished with commercial nets, dramatically reducing the number of animals and fish. Worse still, many of the oil companies were using dynamite and DDT in the area. Soon some streams and rivers had no fish left in them at all.
All of this was new and unbelievable to the Waorani. For as long as the people could remember, the jungle had always produced enough game and plants for them to eat and use to make their huts. But now, right before their eyes, the things they needed to keep their culture alive were disappearing, and no one on the outside seemed to care.
Rachel returned to the Oriente to do whatever she could about the situation. When she arrived at Tiwaeno, she found Patricia Kelly, a new Wycliffe worker, living there. Patricia had been assigned to build a better literacy program. This was the job Rachel had been training Tona to do, but now that Tona was dead, someone had to help the people learn to read and write.
Rachel saw other changes in the area as well. The Plymouth Brethren Church had sent in a missionary who had started a school and church for Quichua Indians right on the edge of the protectorate. Many of the Waorani believers began attending the school, breaking up the close-knit complexity of the Christian community that had thrived in Tiwaeno.
Rachel reeled at all the changes. Whether she liked it or not, life would not be the same. The next change came when Wycliffe sent another couple into the area: Dr. Jim Yost and his wife, Kathie. The Yosts were assigned to undertake an anthropological survey, a study of how the Waoranis lived. What they found confirmed what Rachel had always known—before Christianity came, the Waoranis had lived violent and short lives.
Jim Yost interviewed the people. In asking them questions that spanned six generations, he discovered that 61 percent of Waoranis had died from being speared, 13 percent had been shot by outsiders, 12 percent had died from illness, 4 percent had died from snakebites, 4 percent were babies and children who had been buried alive, and 6 percent had died of unknown causes.
In 1976 a team of six scientists from Duke University joined in the survey. It seemed to Rachel as if the whole world suddenly wanted to know how a Stone-Age jungle tribe was adjusting to the encroaching modern world. The scientists found that the Waorani had contracted some new diseases, including scabies and various lung diseases brought in from the outside. Some of the transfer of the diseases into the tribe was occurring because Waorani men were seeking employment in the oil fields. In 1977 ten Waorani men worked for oil companies; a year later there were thirty Waorani workers. The influx of money into the Waorani villages changed the people even more. Now the Waorani had to learn how to work for cash and spend it wisely. They were often taken advantage of because they could not count to high numbers and did not know how much an item was worth.
