Made for the Journey by Elisabeth Elliot

Author:Elisabeth Elliot [Elliot Elisabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Memoir, Colorado Indians (Ecuador)—Mission, Indians of South America—Missions—Ecuador, REL012040, REL045000, BIO026000
ISBN: 9781493434619
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group

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We foreign women were anomalies in every way, but perhaps the thing that aroused more curiosity among our neighbors than anything else about us was that we seemed to have no men. Single women are subjected to rude questions everywhere, and our situation in San Miguel was as indefinable as it is anywhere. Many times we were asked if we were going to get married, were we married, did we not wish to be married? Then, as though in the mind of the questioner there was no connection with the previous questions, we would be asked how many children we had. No children? No, we were unmarried. But—not even one child? Poor señorita!

Only once did we have American tourists visit us, and they were two bachelors who wanted to “see the jungle.” They accompanied me back from Quito, along with a single woman missionary named Edna who had been working in the city and wanted a taste of jungle life. It was certainly the full treatment for them. We rode from Santo Domingo to San Miguel in the heaviest rain I had ever been out in, so that we had to shout to make ourselves heard. I had had to lend my poncho to Edna, and my high boots were soon filled to the tops with water. Saddles, bridles, and reins were sodden, and I had to dismount repeatedly to adjust bridles and tighten cinches for these adventurers who were wishing with all their hearts that the adventure were a little more convenient. The men worried about getting muddied from head to toe, for although the horses could do no more than walk, pulling hoofs laboriously out of the sucking mud and plunging down in again, up to their bellies, the mud flew, painting us all a single color. They worried, too, about being bitten by gnats and mosquitoes, they worried about the water and the food when we finally reached the house in San Miguel. Was it safe? Might they get malaria? Parasites? Diarrhea? They might indeed, but so far as I know, they didn’t. We thought we had done pretty well to turn out a meal of manioc root patties, jungle cabbage, plantain chips, lemonade, and caramel pie. Who could complain at that?

I took them all on a short walk to see a real Indian house, but it seemed a long walk to them, and they came back sore. The roof leaked over their beds. They left San Miguel sooner than they had planned, one of them with a poisonous ant bite, another with swollen ankles. Edna fell from her horse on the way to Santo Domingo and was dragged for a short distance in the mud. It rained all the way into town, and as I bid them good-by when they got on the banana truck for Quito, one of the men said he would be praying for the missionaries in a different way after that.

The people in the clearing had something to talk about for a few days.

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