When she returned home for Christmas 1942, Rachel learned that her brother Nate, now nineteen years old, had enlisted in the army and was about to head off to Camp Luna in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Nate had been based at La Guardia Field in New York City, working as an aircraft mechanic for American Airlines, for whom their older brother Sam was now a pilot. During his spare time, Nate had taken flying lessons, and he hoped to transfer to the Army Air Corps after basic training and become a pilot. Rachel kept up to date on Nate’s progress by letter and was pleased for her brother when he was indeed accepted into the Army Air Corps, where he was undergoing pilot training. Then disaster struck. When he was fourteen, Nate had suffered from osteomyelitis, and during pilot training, this old illness flared up again, forcing him to withdraw from the program and precluding him from being posted overseas. Still, Rachel was proud of the way her younger brother handled the disappointment. Nate kept his spirits up and trusted God and continued to serve his country as best he could. Instead of becoming a pilot, Nate was assigned to be an aircraft mechanic, working on C-47 cargo planes and other aircraft at various army bases around the United States.
In the meantime Rachel’s older brother Phil, an evangelist who traveled and spoke around the United States, had decided to become a missionary to Argentina. Rachel could not help but feel a little envious when she heard the news. She kept in touch with Phil by letter and was particularly interested in hearing of his exploits in South America. She wondered whether “her people” were somewhere on that continent.
The years of working at the Keswick Colony of Mercy rolled by, first five, then ten, then twelve. Rachel was thirty-four years old, and most of her friends predicted that she would work for the halfway house until she retired. But something was stirring within her. Rachel had just read a series of articles on a visionary man named Cameron Townsend and his new program, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, held at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. Rachel had known about Townsend’s work for some time, but as she read the articles about him, she was impressed with the way his ministry was starting to take off. Townsend actually had three separate ministries under him—the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), Wycliffe Bible Translators, and the fledgling Jungle Aviation and Radio Services (JAARS). All three organizations had separate roles to fulfill but worked together to bring the gospel to groups of people who had never heard it before.
At the same time, in 1948 Rachel received a letter from Nate saying that he was now serving with a missionary organization called Missionary Aviation Fellowship (MAF). The letter stated that Nate and his new wife, Marj, would soon be moving to Ecuador to start an operations base for the organization across the Andes Mountains in the Amazon jungle in the east of the country. From there they planned to use airplanes to serve the various isolated mission stations dotted across the region.
Suddenly, with one brother already serving as a missionary in South America and another brother about to head there, once again the whole question of missionary service loomed before Rachel. And after reading the articles about Cameron Townsend, Rachel found the idea of studying to decipher and learn unknown languages greatly appealing. Ever since seeing the vision of the brown-skinned people in the jungle sixteen years before on the ship returning from Great Britain, Rachel had been convinced that she would one day take the gospel to a group of people who had never heard it before. And that meant that the group probably did not speak a language that those in the outside world could recognize. Now Rachel was beginning to feel that the time was right to pursue becoming a missionary and fulfilling the vision. She was encouraged by a verse from Paul’s letter to the Romans: “Those who have never been told of Him shall see, and those who have never heard shall understand” (Romans 15:21).
Rachel took the plunge and applied to attend the Summer Institute of Linguistics. She was delighted when word came that she had been accepted for the course.
Those who had thought Rachel would stay working at the Keswick Colony of Mercy until she retired were surprised when they received an invitation to her farewell. Many people—family, friends, coworkers, and those she had helped over the years—came to wish Rachel well in her new venture. Rachel was touched by the tributes of the people who attended the farewell. And while she was sad to be leaving behind both people and a place she had grown to love and appreciate, she was excited about what lay ahead.
The 1948 Summer Institute of Linguistics was every bit as interesting and challenging as described in the articles Rachel had read about the school. Rachel was impressed with the teachers, particularly Ken Pike, and the breadth of their linguistic knowledge. Ken had attended the second Summer Institute of Linguistics held in 1935. He had gone on to earn a doctorate in linguistics and now served as the president of Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL).
Rachel enjoyed every single day of the eleven-week course as she came to grips with the basics of how to listen to and then learn a native language. She had many practical things to learn. Classes were divided into three topics. The first topic was phonetics, which taught the students how to listen to the different sounds of a language and write them down. Sometimes this was difficult to do because some languages had gulping, humming, and clicking sounds that were not easy to write down using the English alphabet. Regardless, this was an important skill to master. The second topic was morphology, which taught the students how to find out what words were related to each other in a foreign language. While the English language used prefixes and suffixes to slightly change the meaning of a word, other languages did not, so it was important to know how to discover what words were linked to each other. The final topic was syntax, which taught the students how to discover the way a sentence was put together in the foreign language.
The learning was challenging, but as the school progressed, Rachel became convinced that she was moving toward her destiny. By the time the Summer Institute of Linguistics was finally over, she knew that the next step was to become a competent Bible translator. When Rachel had accomplished this feat, it would then be time for her to set out and find the brown-skinned people she had seen in her vision. Rachel was certain that they were somewhere in the jungles of South America waiting for her.
Chapter 4
Were These the People?
The next step on the road to Rachel’s becoming a competent Bible translator and missionary involved attending the three-month-long Jungle Camp. As its name implied, Jungle Camp was located in the jungle near El Real in the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico. Rachel had first heard of the place in letters from her brother Nate. Two years before, in 1946, a small airplane that serviced Jungle Camp had crashed upon landing at the jungle airstrip, and Nate had been sent to El Real to rebuild the damaged aircraft. In his letters to Rachel, Nate had described the rustic nature of Jungle Camp. When Rachel finally arrived there, she discovered that her brother had not exaggerated his description of the place.
Jungle Camp consisted of a group of mud huts situated among the trees beside a river. The jungle, Rachel learned, spread all the way east to Mexico’s border with Guatemala and beyond. Rachel shared one of the small mud huts with another woman, while a second mud hut nearby had a single stove in it and served as the camp kitchen.
The daily schedule was demanding. Every morning Rachel was up at six. Breakfast was served at seven, followed by linguistics study from eight till ten. Then it was time for two hours of work in the garden, hoeing the damp jungle floor in an attempt to grow vegetables to eat. Lunch was served at twelve thirty, followed by another hour of linguistics study. The rest of the afternoon was then taken up with other tasks as well as more linguistics study.
Jungle Camp was unlike anything Rachel had ever experienced. It was one long test of survival. And that was the point. The camp was designed to be a sort of boot camp where prospective missionaries were taught how to survive and live and work in rugged, remote, and primitive locations. So, as well as studying linguistics and doing chores, Rachel found herself paddling a heavily laden canoe through white-water rapids, hiking over rough mountain passes, hunting for food amid the jungle foliage, constructing a makeshift hut without tools, and learning how to treat snakebites and use penicillin, the newest drug on the market. She and the other students also completed a nine-day hike through the jungle to observe the work of Phil and Mary Baer. The Baers were Wycliffe missionaries serving among the Lacandón Indians situated near the Guatemalan border. Rachel was impressed with the work the Baers were doing with the Lacandóns and hoped that when her turn came she, too, would be an effective and fruitful missionary. The nine-day hike was followed by a four-day solo experience in the jungle, where Rachel got to put all the survival skills she had learned to work.
Each day at Jungle Camp seemed to bring some new adjustment or challenge for Rachel. Most had to do with the local animals. Rats scurried around the wooden beams in the kitchen, and wild burros (donkeys) sneaked into the compound at night and ate any laundry accidentally left on the clothesline. To make matters worse, poisonous snakes seemed to lie in ambush at every turn, and the mosquitoes were ubiquitous, swarming around and biting Rachel everywhere she went.
Despite the hardships, Rachel was not deterred. As hard as the experience of Jungle Camp might be, she knew it was preparing her for what she believed was her destiny for the rest of life. She was also grateful for her childhood. All the hiking, swimming, and boisterous games she had played with her brothers had helped to prepare her for the rigors of jungle life.
As Jungle Camp progressed, Rachel gleaned all the information she could from visiting SIL and Wycliffe workers. She learned that the organization’s main focus at present had moved from the Indians of Mexico to the Indians of Peru and that Wycliffe missionaries were also now working in New Guinea and moving out from there into the remote islands of the Pacific.
When Jungle Camp finally ended, Rachel received her assignment: she was being sent to Peru to work among the Piro Indians in the northeastern part of the country. There she would relieve Esther Matteson, an SIL missionary who was about to return home on furlough. Rachel was excited about her new assignment, especially since she would have the opportunity to stop off in Ecuador on the way and visit Nate and his wife, Marj, who were both now serving there with Missionary Aviation Fellowship.
From a small, remote airstrip in the jungle at Shell Mera, Nate was using an airplane to fly out and service the various mission stations dotted throughout the Oriente, as the jungle region of Ecuador east of the Andes Mountains was called. The Oriente formed the western reaches of the Amazon Basin. For two thousand miles the jungle ran eastward from Ecuador all the way across South America to the Atlantic coast of Brazil.
In truth, Rachel’s brother wasn’t flying anywhere at present because of an unfortunate accident. A severe downdraft had caught his Stinson aircraft as he took off from Quito, Ecuador’s capital, causing the plane to crash. Nate had survived the ordeal but had to wear a cast that encompassed his upper body while a compression fracture of one of the vertebrae in his back healed. Nate had written to Rachel and told her all about the accident, noting that the recovery from his injury would be long and slow. As a result Rachel was eager to go to Ecuador and encourage her little brother. She was also eager to see her new niece, to whom Marj had recently given birth.
