Rachel flew to Quito, situated on the equator high in the Andes Mountains. From there she caught a bus for the long trip down the eastern side of the Andes to the small community of Shell Mera. As the bus bumped and twisted its way south past Mount Cotopaxi toward Ambato, Rachel chatted in Spanish to the passengers sitting around her.
Every half hour or so the bus would grind to a halt in a cloud of dust, amidst a chorus of excited shouts. Local people clambered either on or off the bus, and the loudness of their shouting depended on how much luggage they stowed on the vehicle’s roof. As each passenger climbed aboard, he or she heaved up onto the bus roof bags, crates, and sacks containing everything from vegetables to bantam hens. It was a lot more difficult, though, to get these things down than it was to toss them up. Sometimes an item of luggage would get stuck at the bottom of the pile and everything had to be unloaded to retrieve it. It seemed to Rachel to take forever to do this, and she, along with everyone else on the bus, craned her neck to see out the window to make sure that all of her belongings were loaded back onto the top of the bus and not left behind.
At every stop the bus made, vendors took advantage of the captive, hungry passengers. Of course, with her milky-white complexion, Rachel stood out from the other passengers. As a result the vendors seemed to steer themselves straight to her, offering to sell her all sorts of tasty goodies, everything from homemade lemonade poured into old beer bottles to whole, roasted guinea pigs, complete with hair, paws, and teeth. Rachel just waved them off.
At lunchtime the bus arrived in Ambato, the so-called gateway to the Oriente. From Ambato the route veered to the east and dropped steeply through the town of Baños and on into the eastern jungle. As the bus descended from the mountains, Rachel watched the scenery outside change. The barren, rocky mountain vistas had now been replaced by lush, green vegetation laced through with masses of orchids that grew right up to the edge of the rutted road.
As they bumped along, the snowcapped peak of the volcano Mount Sangay came into view. Nate had described the mountain to Rachel in one of his letters, and now, with it clearly in sight, Rachel knew that she was getting close to her destination.
Finally the bus navigated one more dogleg bend in the road and rolled along for a half mile before screeching to a halt outside a general store that bore a sign reading “Shell Mera.” Rachel was relieved and delighted that after twelve hours on the bus the arduous journey was finally at an end. She was even more delighted when waiting outside in front of the store was her brother Nate.
“Welcome to Shell Mera,” Nate greeted Rachel, who embraced her brother as best she could, since his whole upper body was still sheathed in a cast. While they waited for Rachel’s bag to be off-loaded from the roof of the bus, Nate explained that the small settlement, which consisted of about thirty buildings in all, had been hacked out from the jungle by the Shell Oil Company, hence its name. The place served as the company’s main base for oil exploration in the Oriente.
Once her bag had been unloaded, Rachel set out with Nate for Shell Merita, the name Nate and Marj had given to their house at the end of the airstrip. Nate led the way, loping along as best he could in his cast. Rachel followed him along the road the bus had just driven down. The road ran parallel to a long, neatly cleared airstrip. At the end of the airstrip on the other side of the road was a tin-roofed house. “That’s home, sweet home,” Nate pointed out.
Soon Rachel was sitting in the lounge of Shell Merita, bouncing her new niece Kathy in her arms and looking out on the wonderful view of Mount Sangay that the room afforded. Although Rachel had not seen Nate for several years, as they laughed and talked together, the years seemed to fall away, and Rachel soon felt the same connection she had always had with her younger brother.
Nate and Marj listened attentively as Rachel told them all about her experiences at the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Oklahoma and at Jungle Camp in Mexico. Rachel also told them about her being assigned to Peru and how excited she was about getting there and beginning her career as a missionary. Then Nate explained to her all about life in the Oriente and how, once his back was healed, he hoped to get a new aircraft and begin flying again to the outlying mission stations. He explained about the various tribes that lived in the Oriente and about the different mission organizations and missionaries who worked among them, some of whom had become his close friends.
“But there’s one tribe no one is working among,” Nate said.
“Who are they, and why has no missionary taken up the challenge of reaching them with the gospel?” Rachel inquired.
“They’re a tribe called the Aucas,” Nate said, “and they have a reputation for killing all strangers who enter their territory. No one has ever been able to live with them.”
Despite the Aucas’ fearsome reputation, Rachel felt goose bumps forming on her arms as her brother spoke. Was this the group she had seen in her vision all those years ago? Were these the people waiting for her to bring them the gospel?
That night as Rachel lay in the tiny guest bedroom of Shell Merita, she thought about the Auca Indians who lived perhaps only a few miles from where she was staying. As she thought about the tribe, she began to feel that these were indeed the people she had seen in her vision. Yet she could not imagine how she was going to reach them. For one thing, Wycliffe Bible Translators and SIL had no mission base in Ecuador, and since the Aucas killed outsiders on contact, she had no idea how to convince them that she wanted to be their friend. Before drifting off to sleep, Rachel prayed that God would somehow bring together the circumstances that would make her dream of reaching them with the gospel a reality.
In the meantime Rachel had plenty to occupy her time. After spending a week with Nate and Marj and baby Kathy, she continued on her way to Peru, where she settled in among the Piro Indians. Soon after her arrival there, Esther Matteson left for the United States on furlough. After Esther’s return from furlough, Rachel decided it was time for a new challenge. She had hoped to go and live among the Murato Indians, a group who had never heard the gospel, and learn their language and translate the Scriptures into it. However, since no other missionary was available to go with Rachel and support her in this new venture, she had to abandon her plan. Although Rachel was deeply disappointed by this outcome, her disappointment soon turned to joy when she learned of an opportunity among the Shapra Indians.
The Shapras were a subgroup of the Candoshi Indian tribe, as were the Muratos, and they spoke a similar dialect of the Candoshi language. The Shapras were headhunters whose territory was located deep in the jungle along the Pushaga River, close to Peru’s border with Ecuador.
In 1950 Doris Cox and Loretta Anderson had settled among the Shapras and begun learning their language. Now they were translating the New Testament into that language. However, since both Doris and Loretta were due to return home on furlough, Rachel volunteered to go and work among the Shapra Indians while first Loretta and then Doris returned home.
As Rachel soon learned, even getting to Shapra territory was no easy feat. The first leg of the journey involved a five-hour trip in a small floatplane that flew over the dense jungle of eastern Peru. Rachel was relieved when the pilot finally circled the plane and brought it down for a landing on the Morona River. She was glad to get out and stretch her legs. But she soon discovered that she was trading one confined space for another for the rest of the journey. She took her place in the middle of a cramped dugout canoe, and soon they were off again. This time they paddled up the Pushaga River for eight hours before finally reaching Shapra territory. Rachel was delighted that the long journey was finally over, and she moved into the small, thatch-roofed house that Doris and Loretta had built. The floor of the house sat on stilts three feet above the ground, and the sides were mostly open.
Rachel enjoyed living and working among the Shapras. In a letter she wrote to friends about six weeks after arriving among the Shapra Indians, she noted,
The Shapras are likeable Indian folk—handsome too, especially when they get their bright feathers out and comb their hair and primp and paint up. We find in them a character that we respect. We find it hard to believe that our Chief has avenged the killing of two of his brothers; that a pretty little young wife choked her first baby to death after her husband died. She wanted to marry again but no one would take her while she had the baby to care for.
This jungle is a dream of nature’s beauty—but a red sunset or rainbow here means certain death for someone, and the call of a certain bird is an ill omen. At night when the men have to be away, the women come with their children and sleep on the floor beside us. They are afraid of the evil spirits. Although we cannot tell them much yet, they know we are not afraid and they feel safe with us.
Rachel particularly liked getting to know Tariri, the chief of the tribe. The chief gave Rachel the Indian name Tiyotari. Rachel and Chief Tariri spent many hours together talking. Tariri boasted to Rachel about how many people he had killed in his lifetime and backed up his claim by showing Rachel the severed heads of his unfortunate victims. Tariri also explained about the Shapras’ beliefs.
“The Candoshi trust in the boa for arotama, the power of a long life, Tiyotari,” Tariri said one day. He then explained how a warrior, when he saw a boa in the jungle, would hit it with a stick and tie a vine around it. Then he would drag the serpent to a clearing and tie the vine to the ground and cover the snake with palm leaves so that it could not escape. Then the warrior would lie down beside the boa and sleep and dream. In his dream the boa would come to him in the form of a man and give him something shiny to swallow—arotama, the power over life and his enemies. “Our ancestors said that the boa does not die; it just goes on living and living. That is why it has the power of arotama, and if you dream with a boa, you, too, will live like he does.” The chief also explained to Rachel how the jaguar and the hawk could also give the power of arotama.
Rachel listened attentively to all Chief Tariri had to tell her. He told how tobacco smoke, along with chants and incantations, was used to overcome the power of the boa, especially when someone was ill or dying.
Over time, as Chief Tariri and Rachel continued to talk together, they became good friends. But one thing puzzled Rachel. Although the chief had allowed Doris and Loretta to live among his tribe, he had little respect for what they said. Why hadn’t he killed them, Rachel wondered, or at least run them off from the village? One day Rachel asked the chief why this was.
“Ah, Tiyotari, if two men had come, I would have killed them both and taken their heads,” Chief Tariri answered. “And if a man and a woman had come, I would have speared him and taken her as a wife. But two women came, calling me “brother.” What could I do but protect them and let them live among us.”
It was a chilling and honest answer that made Rachel glad she was a woman. Yet despite the chief’s comments and the fact that headhunters surrounded her at every turn, Rachel felt strangely safe living among the Shapras. Her twelve years of working with vagrants and alcoholics had taught her to see past a person’s behavior and value the person as a human being. As she did this, it was not long before Chief Tariri began asking questions about God and the outside world. Rachel answered his questions as honestly and simply as she could, always sharing some new point about the gospel in the process.
Following their chief’s lead, other members of the tribe began to pay attention to what the missionary women among them were saying about a God who lived far away in a place that He wanted to take them to when they died.
