I wrote this book nearly two decades ago in an effort to fill the huge gender void in missions history. During the modern Protestant era women sometimes numbered more than two thirds the overseas missionary force. Yet, they have been forgotten in the pages of history books.

Some of the most fascinating memoirs I have read are those of missionaries and particularly women missionaries. Many of the biographies of these women turn them into super-saints, but when they are allowed to speak for themselves they are more likely to be themselves and admit their failings.

Yet, it is hard to get into the heart and mind of our missionary sisters a century ago. In many ways they looked and acted so differently than we do today. Here are two of the best known missionary heroines of generations past decked out in full regalia. Imagine packing clothes like this for China and Africa. But that is what they did.


Charlotte "Lottie" Moon, who served for decades in China with the Southern Baptist Convention before she died in 1912 of starvation. That's a story in itself. Stay Tuned.


Mary Slessor, who went to Africa and took up the mantle of David Livingstone in 1875, two years after he died. She was an explorer and evangelist and her legacy lives on in Nigeria today.


MISSIONARY WOMAN’S MEMOIRS BANNED!

Those are the headlines of 40 years ago. Well, maybe there were no such headlines. But there should have been. Many Christians were very upset about a controversial book published in 1966—so controversial that some Christian bookstores refused to carry it. The title: No Graven Image by Elisabeth Elliot. The book was actually fiction, but it was Elliot’s way of telling her experience as a missionary in South America through the life of Margaret Sparhawk.

So shocking were some of the stories Elliot wanted to publish that she dared not write them as an actual memoir. Yet, this memoir stands as a symbol of missionary writing from a feminine perspective.


In many ways, missionary men through the generations have had more professional status invested in their work than have women. Women historically have been sidelined in missions as in other ministries and professions. At various times in history they have outnumbered men and have conducted more evangelistic outreach than their male colleagues. But they have not been the main characters in the written histories and their work has sometimes been marginalized.

Without the “career-investment” that men have, women have had less to lose by telling the story of mission work like it really is. Indeed, a wide survey of missionary memoirs show women offering honest accounts of mission ministry that has otherwise frequently been sanitized by a veneer of God-talk.

These women writers one after another have allowed themselves to be vulnerable in painting a sometimes messy picture of their own character and of their missionary work. These raw memoirs have much to say to us in the 21st century.

Isobel Kuhn sheds light on marriage—especially the struggles of two people in a remote area living together day after day without reprieve. She allows other women to dare share their behind-the-scenes stories—stories that say, Hey, I’m not the only one that struggles in my missionary marriage.

Kuhn tells about a raging disagreement with her husband over employing household help. “Hot with temper,” she writes, “I put on my hat and coat and walked out of the house down through the town and out onto the plain, angry resentment boiling within. I wasn’t going to live in a house where a lazy servant was condoned and given preference over the wife! . . . For hours I walked blind as to direction, not caring what happened to me, but just determined to get away from it all.”

There were other issues as well. Regarding ministry, Kuhn writes: “Part of the heartache of all missionary work is the bright promising convert who turns out to be a mere puffball, crumbling like a macaroon under the least pressure.”

Dorrie Van Stone’s memoirs tell the heartbreaking story of a young boy not adjusting to MK boarding school and the decision to leave the work in Irian Jaya because of that. “Burney still clung to me, and I had to pry him forcibly away,” she wrote. “That was like pulling away a part of my life. Lloyd and I knew that such a decision could not be justified—how could we be separated from our children when they needed us most? . . . Yet paradoxically, we also knew that God had called us to the Baliem Valley.”

Helen Roseveare, missionary doctor to the Congo tells of being taken captive by the Simba rebels. She tells of the terror of rape—and the unexpected awakening to sexual desires. Mabel Francis tells of her desire for marriage—especially when the task seemed way to big for one person: “I thought, ‘Well, now, if I was married, I could follow on with my husband.’” But the Lord spoke to her and “the whole thing passed out of my life like a cloud passing away. . . . The thought of marriage has meant nothing to me since that time—nothing.

Mildred Cable tells of how she and her two partners were ridiculed when word got out that they were requesting to be relocated for ministry in the Gobi Desert. “Some [were] saying in more or less parliamentary language that there were no fools like old fools. . . .To a good many people it had seemed just plain foolishness. Why leave this important and successful school work to go off on some harebrained scheme of roaming over vast deserts looking for a few isolated tent dwellers and remote villages, where there were literally tens of thousands of people near at hand, all needing to hear the Gospel?”

Missionary memoirs are not just fascinating reading. They challenge us as we struggle with issues in our own lives—and they also challenge us to write our own open and honest stories about family and ministry in faraway places.



THE CHINA TRIO

Mildred Cable (1878-1952), pictured
Eva French (1869-1960)
Francesca French (1871-1960)

These three women worked together for many years. They were wonderful missionaries with an inspiring story of their dedication for Christ and His great commission.

From an early age Mildred wanted to be a missionary in India. However in 1902 she went to China . Eva French was already there, she had joined the China Inland Mission before the Boxer rising of 1900 in which many Christians were killed. Her sister, Francesca joined them later on.

The three women worked in China for nearly twenty years, setting up schools and a rehabilitation centre for opium abusers. But they began to feel the need to take the Gospel to new areas where the missionaries had not been to.

In 1923 the three women went to Kanchow, travelling on the Silk Road and evangelizing as they went. There they trained Christians and travelled throughout the region holding tent meetings. But they knew that their destination would be the Gobi desert, a most inhospitable place with few inhabitants who were scattered throughout the area.

In 1926 they returned to England and their story caught the public imagination. Less than two years later they returned to the Gobi desert and stayed until they were forced to leave in 1936 during a time of political uprising. They had survived in a hostile environment and successfully proclaimed the Gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the region.

The three women returned to England after 36 years in China and worked for the British and Foreign Bible society for the rest of their lives. SEE source.


March 22, 1928
The China Trio, Return to Share the Gospel in the Gobi.

Christian History Institute.

In 1923, the China Trio, three English women, veteran missionaries, all of them, headed for Gansu Province in Central Asia, carrying with them a cartload of Bibles and literature. Their aim was to visit every city of the Gansu Province located beyond the Great Wall. They knew that other women missionaries were in the hands of bandits, but went anyway. Before their adventure was over, they would endure hunger, thirst, pain and sleeplessness; they would be robbed, arrested by a warlord and stoned. They would live lives of gruelling adventure and make journeys that no other European woman had made.

The China Trio. Used by permission of OMF.

Evangeline French was the oldest of the three women. In her youth she had both daring, rebellious and angry. One day she had exploded to her amiable sister Francesca, "If I could take upon myself the world's misery, I would--and jump into the sea with it."

"Eva, there is no need to do that. It was done long ago, on the cross," responded Francesca.

Her sister's reply sobered Eva. Two weeks later, she slipped into a chapel, sought Christ and began to change.

Mildred was the daughter of a draper. As a young woman she had heard a missionary speaker tell of China's spiritual need, and become eager to serve as a missionary. She studied nursing and chemistry, sure that healing hands and practical skills would open doors of witness for her. The young man she was to marry dumped her when she stayed true to her determination to go to China.

Francesca was last of the trio. Although she was the quietest of the three, she once debated the witty Catholic journalist G.K. Chesterton, who joked that she ought to be burnt as a heretic for opposing him. Trained as a nurse, she was sensitive and sympathetic.

They traveled slowly, visiting China's people in their markets and homes, speaking to as they could, turning every conversation to Christ and "gossiping the gospel." They cooked over camel dung.

The three women had been in Gansu for only a few days when Dr. Kao, a Chinese Christian who had moved to Gandjou so that he could act as a witness in that pagan city, sent them a letter pleading for their help. Years before, they had heard him speak and decided to honor his invitation.

After great hardship they arrived. Dr. Kao and the Gandjou Christians had begun praying for weeks that the Lord would send experienced Christians to them. Now three had arrived. Dr. Kao made the Trio an offer. If they would stay and teach the Christians of Gandjou, the Christians would send a band of men and women with them to spread the gospel in the surrounding region. The Trio agreed.

Thus began one of the most extraordinary gospel adventures in history. Five or six times over the next thirteen years, the three women visited every oasis town and village that lay outside the Great Wall in the province of Gansu. Everywhere they went they saw the terrible effects of opium and proclaimed that God could deliver people from the drug. They gave lessons in the phonetic alphabet, treated diseases and astonished everyone by rescuing babies who had been thrown away.

Returning to England in 1926 for a vacation, they traveled down the old silk road. On this day, March 22, 1928, the trio returned to China and settled again in Sudjou. But in 1936, all foreigners were ordered out of the city. Tired and old, the three admitted that their work in China was over. They said their final farewells and returned to England, rejoicing that this time they were able to travel part of the way by air. Over the years, Mildred and Francesca had recorded their adventures in books--twenty altogether.

Mildred was the first to die in 1952. Eva lived to be ninety, and during her last illness, Francesca slept on the floor beside her to care for her. Scolded for sleeping on the floor, Francesca replied, "I've been sleeping on floors all my life." She outlived her older sister by only three weeks.
Resources:

1. Anderson, Gerald H., ed. Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions. (New York: Macmillan Reference USA; London: Simon & Schuster and Prentice Hall International, 1998).
2. Cable, Mildred and Francesca French. Through Jade Gate and Central Asia: An Account of Journeys in Kansu, Turkestan and the Gobi Desert. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1939).
3. Deen, Edith. Great Women of the Christian Faith. (New York: Harper, 1956).
4. Gordon, Ernest. A Book of Protestant Saints. (Chicago: Moody Press, 1946).
5. "Missionary and Feminist Icon." (www.christianityandrenewal.com/archdec2001d.htm)
6. Platt, W.J. Three Women: Mildred Cable, Francesca French, Evangeline French. (London: Hodder and Stroughton, 1964).

October 23, 2006
Mildred Cable's Northwest China

"The Gobi Desert" — written by English missionary Mildred Cable and first published in 1942 — is an account of travels in northwest China during a very different era. The book, which describes Cable's journeys through Gansu and Xinjiang (then still called Turkestan) between 1923 and 1936 is filled with descriptions of the Turki (Uyghur), Mongol, Tungan (Hui), Kirghiz (Kyrgyz), Uzbek, Tibetan, Russian, and Qazaq (Kazakh) people who each ethnically dominated their own small region before the post-liberation hyper-influx of Han migrants. The book is a fun read, both for its humorous descriptions of local peoples and for its politically incorrect "heathens-just-don't-understand" moral tone. Here, for example, is an excellent description of Xinjiang's Uyghur donkey drivers:

For local journeys, or when, owing to the perishable nature of the cargo time is of great importance, the Turki with his drove of little donkeys is the man. He is met on every road of Turkestan, always hustling his beasts through a cloud of dust and lashing them right and left to keep them up to speed. He is a great burly fellow, dressed in loose clothes which increase his bulk, and his baggy trousers are stuffed into high leather boots. His chapan (coat) is tied in with a thick belt, and he wears a round hat with a sheepskin border which mixes with his loose hair to form a shaggy frame to the weather-beaten face.

He mainly conveys melons, early vegetables and fruit — apricots, peaches, grapes and pears according to the season.... He knows no organization of travel life, but pushes on from stage to stage with restless energy. When the donkeys must be fed he drives them to an inn-court, tosses the panniers from their backs, carelessly throws fodder into the manger, pulls some hard cakes of bread from his own food-bag and sits down to a meal of bread soaked in tea. Being a Moslem, he will buy nothing from a kaper (infidel), so himself carries what he will need to eat on the road.

The donkeys are small and cheap, so he is careless of life and sacrifices them in large numbers to his passion for speed and his reckless output of strength. He will use dangerous short-cuts over which no other class of transport-man will venture, and in bad weather many beasts die by the roadside. This does not trouble him... He will normally do five full stages in three days and nothing may stand in his way, but when the goods are handed over and he can lodge in a Moslem inn he enjoys twenty-four hours of sheer luxury. There is hot, greasy pilau to eat, women to wait on him, and long carefree hours of sleep to enjoy before he starts again on the hectic return journey.

I'm not really sure that all that much has changed during the past eighty years, although donkeys are probably more expensive. Uyghur womens' contempt in general for Uyghur men — which has been conveyed to me on numerous occasions — was already quite evident in the 1930s:

The foundation of the Turki home is undisguised gratification of sensuous pleasures. The man comes home to sleep, and all the relationships of the home centre on his use of those hours of darkness. On that score he is master, and tyrannical in his use of power, for the male creation has unquestioned right of dictatorship in the Turki world. He has too many children to be deeply attached to any one of them, and when a child dies its death brings him little sorrow. As to a sick wife, the sooner she goes the better. Family relationships bring him so little of the chastening which refines and purifies character that is is not suprising that men of the Turki race remain, as their wives always declare them to be, "mere animals."

What I most want to share with you, however, are some of the pictures reproduced in "The Gobi Desert". There aren't many historical photographs of Xinjiang and northwest China available online, so I though I'd do my part here:

The original photo captions, from left to right and top to bottom are: A Turki girl; The tower of Sirkip; The inn courtyard (showing Mildred Cable); A Mongol woman at her tent door; The great facade was pierced with innumerable openings (showing Cable at the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang); The worst of the desert stages were over; The horns of an ovis poli (Marco Polo sheep); One of the Khan's men; A family of Qazaqs; The city gate at Tunhwang.

The funniest aspect of Cable's narration is her frequent reference to her activities as a Christian missionary. Once can only imagine the gratitude of the desert woman in the quote below:

We were once asked to share the meal of an isolated family whose only water-supply oozed through the sand and collected at the bottom of a deep pit. For grain they were reduced to a ration of bran... steaming it carefully over a fire the desert woman made a palatable meal, which she generously shared with us. We in our turn taught her how to thank God for daily food.

Cable also can't help but remind us that the terrible plight of so many Turkis, Tungans, and even Han Chinese could easily be relieved by acceptance of Jesus Christ. Here, she describes a Uyghur fasting ritual:

For forty long days the only occupation of the fasting man was to say his ritual prayers and to enumerate the ninety-nine attributes of Allah.... I stood there awhile and let my imagination picture the stones falling ceaselessly through forty long days from the weakening fingers of this man who knew all the ninety-nine names for God but had never learnt the one which would have changed everything for him — God is love.

Ah, missionaries. You've got to give them an A for effort, but an F for cultural sensitivity. Anyway, enjoy the photos.


The Trio and Topsy

Penge, South London, February 5, 1998...

The funeral of an elderly woman, daughter of a Mongolian Chief father and a Tibetan mother. An unusual event in itself, even for our cosmopolitan capital. Her story was, by any account, a remarkable one.

No one knows exactly when Topsy was born, but at just three weeks old, she was taken from the Tibetan foothills and sold to a childless Chinese couple living in Suchow, at the far western end of the Great Wall of China. She seemed a good buy, until it became clear that she was deaf and consequently dumb. Then, when a natural son was born to the couple, Gwa-Gwa (Little Lonely) was turned out to beg.

It was this beggar girl, "with rags tied round her anyhow" who came knocking at the door of three missionaries some time in 1925. She was about seven years old, and her legs were badly bitten by roaming dogs. In her silent world, she did not hear them bark, as other children did, so could not escape.

As she was to reflect afterwards through mime, this was the first time in her life that she had received kindness. For the first time in her life, someone said "Come!" and not "Go!"

The Trio

Mildred Cable and Evangeline and Francesca French had an itinerant ministry in Bible teaching and evangelism in towns strewn across the Gobi Desert. Gwa-Gwa would forlornly follow their cart for as long as she could keep up with it when they went on their trips, and visit their courtyard daily while they were away, glad of the soup provided for her at the missionaries’ request, and longing for their return.

"The Trio" as these women became known, were concerned for her, as her adoptive mother, an opium addict, would beat her hard. With help and advice from local Christian friends, they eventually offered to purchase her for ten cents. This was a massive undertaking with lifelong implications. But for now she had clothes to wear, a bed to sleep in, and "three mamas" to look after her.

Gwa-Gwa was no longer "Little Lonely" and the Trio called her Ai-Lien (Love Bond). However, this was difficult for her to lip-read, so it was shortened to "Topsy." In due course, she would need a British passport, and UK citizenship. This was eventually procured for her under the name Eileen Guy, the nearest equivalent sound to her Chinese name. She would also need to adopt a new culture when the missionaries came home, and to learn to lip-read in a new, different, and difficult language. Each of these aspects of Topsy’s life could be a story in itself.

"PC missionaries"?

The Trio were spirited women; spurred on by passion and conviction... "PC" missionaries! Their deep devotion to Christ comes out clearly in their spiritual autobiography Something Happened (Hodder and Stoughton, 1933).

Eva French had been an outrageous child, so frequently courting death that the family had carefully, if painfully, resolved that it would be better for no one to risk their own life in saving her. She was to describe herself later as "the fervid nihilist, the incipient communist, the embryonic Bolshevist, known to her world as Evangeline French."

When finally despairing with herself and with the world, she confided in her sister, Francesca, "I wish I could take everyone’s misery onto myself, and throw myself in the sea." As her sister pointed out, there was no need, as Christ had already done that. It stunned the family when Eva became a Christian, and soon afterwards expressed her desire to serve Christ in China.

During the selection process, there was some doubt as to whether she should be allowed to sail on health grounds, and Hudson Taylor intervened, accepting personal responsibility for her to go to North China, where the climate would be less exacting. She arrived in Shansi in 1893, seven years before the Boxer Uprising, and nine years ahead of Mildred Cable.

Mildred Cable was an adventurer from childhood, though family and teachers tried to repress this spirit in her, so she could give all she had to her academic studies. In her early teens, a mission was held in Guildford, and she went to the first meeting. However, with fears that "anything might happen" she wasn’t allowed to go back, until her pastor made a special request to her parents that she be permitted to attend the closing meeting that Sunday afternoon. Here she was converted.

A year or two later she was on vacation when a message arrived from this same pastor to say that a missionary was coming to town and would be speaking on the work of the China Inland Mission. Something inside made her return early, to be there. The missionary wore a text embroidered on her collar, which Mildred felt was rather embarrassing for the south of England, and she told her so!

A year later, Mildred announced her decision to serve in China, and visited the mission’s Candidate Department while still at school. She went on to study human sciences at London University. As she was nearing the end of her course, the Boxer Uprising brought terrible news of the slaughter of "foreign devils," including 58 missionaries and 20 children from the China Inland Mission. The missionary who had visited Guildford, now a friend, had been the first to die.

Then the man to whom Mildred was engaged, and who had been as committed to China as she, wrote to say that he would not marry her unless she decided not to go there. This almost broke her. Her final exam was the following day; she didn’t sit it. Instead she shrank into a period of isolation. But as news crept through that the mission was now sending people to China again, as the Uprising had subsided, she sailed in 1901, letting "the curtain fall upon the past."

Francesca, four years younger than her sister, loved music and the arts, read widely, and had the skill of persuasion in discussions. Their eldest sister married shortly before Eva left for missionary training, and the very day after she left, their father died. So the family of five at home was quickly reduced to two, and Francesca went to live with the mother. The girls had been schooled in Geneva, and their move to England had been difficult for them.

Francesca and her mother moved to Richmond, Surrey, and began to attend an evangelical church for the first time. That summer, Francesca went to the Keswick Convention, returning a week later with a new grasp of spiritual things. She loved the Sunday sermons: "Every time he [Evan Hopkins] came into his pulpit, his heart was indicting some great matter. There was never anything slovenly, commonplace or trivial about his preaching."

Francesca was made missionary treasurer, but this was not considered a success, as she actively dissuaded people from giving unless they really wanted to. "Missionary subscriptions fell off appallingly." When her mother died, Francesca took herself away for a few months to consider what she should do next. Her sister was shortly due home for furlough, together with Mildred. They asked her to join them.

When Mildred had first worked with Eva, senior people expressed concern that the partnership could not work. Both were too strong-willed. Too individualistic. They would be like the immovable object and the irresistible force. And now it may have seemed that their friendship was too close to admit a third party, but this was not so, and together this threesome became the legendary Trio, the "threefold cord which could not easily be broken." They first returned to the school Mildred and Eva had run in Hwochow, now with 200 pupils. Then in 1923, four years before Chiang Kai-shek became China’s leader, they began their nomadic mission to the tribes of the Gobi. Brave women for an all-demanding task. They were the first missionaries to go to the region since the Nestorians in the sixth century.

Writers and influencers

There have been an unusual number of gifted writers in OMF's history. Mildred Cable and Francesca French were among the best known in their day. They were shrewd in their observations of trends and of human nature, drawing out spiritual lessons, and using them to illustrate scripture.

Their best-known children’s book, The Story of Topsy, was not without its didactic note, affectionately put:

"She really was very happy, and life would have been perfect, she thought, if only she could always have her own way about everything. But that could not be, for now she had to find her place in a picture where there was a background of home, and while the solitary Topsy had looked quite all right as an isolated beggar-maid, the great big TOPSY in the pretty picture looked very ugly."

The missionaries continued their writing after they returned to Britain, while working for the Bible Society. They completed 20 books, for adults and children, many going into eight or nine editions within the first five years. (Virago Press, the feminist publishing house, reissued The Gobi Desert in 1984.) Their fluency, imagination, and sheer authority commanded a wide readership. Biography, history, apologetics - all came across with a sense of warmth. These women loved Christ, and wanted to grow a deeper love for him in their readers.

Oliver Barclay in his book Evangelicalism in Britain 1935-1995 (IVP) comments on the "continuing source of spiritual challenge and encouragement" brought by OMF's books and magazine in and around the war years. No doubt the names of Cable and French were among those in his mind.

Realists

The Trio were well-known and admired, and huge crowds would gather to hear them at public meetings on their furloughs. By 1935 the situation in Central Asia was worsening, and they resolved to return, though they knew it may be a fairly brief last tour. Kingsway Hall in Central London was jammed full. An account of that meeting in China’s Millions, August 1935, tells its own story.

"With no sense of incongruity, humour and gravity blended together, the Lord being Lord of all. ...Miss Eva French, having thanked friends for their overflowing love, centred her remarks around a question she had been frequently asked, namely 'Are you not thrilled to be going back?' Picturing conditions of the Gobi, its stony floor, the filth of its inns, the hard bread and unappetizing food, the uncertainties of life, the rumours, the brigands, etc., these things, she said, made poor thrills. But contacts with needy souls, the evidences that kind deeds did bear fruit, were thrills worthwhile. But the only true thrill was to be able to say, as the Master did, 'I delight to do thy will.'

"People had asked if Topsy was thrilled at going back to her native land, but Topsy’s bitter experiences in the land of her birth were poor preparations for being thrilled at the prospect of return. But there were a few things that Topsy wanted to say, and though she had been born deaf and was consequently dumb, she had been taught to know about 500 words. At Miss French’s invitation, Topsy then rose and said 'goodbye' and 'forget-me-not,' waving her hand as she did so. Topsy will not be forgotten, and the memory of her will speak for her people.

"Miss Cable immediately transported us to the realities of the Central Asian roads. In spirit she had been there while her companions had been speaking. She almost felt the desert grit. At home, all was for speed, but the ancient roads, with their three miles per hour, were better suited for the great business of preaching the gospel. Christ had joined himself to two discouraged disciples on the road, and the talk had been about great things. The great question of the road was 'Whence do you come, and whither are you going?' Think what you lose by your speed, she said. You can’t talk of these great and everlasting subjects when speed is the passion."

The reporter then added,

"What a traveller puts in his hand-luggage could not fail to be a revelation, and Bunyan was her choice."

The Trio were returning to the most inhospitable desert in the world. They had already crossed it four times, and were under no romantic delusions of excitement. They would once more pack and repack their ramshackle cart, the Flying Turki, to get in as many scripture booklets as it could hold, along with their bare living essentials. They knew what it was to face terrors from brigands and threats of death from the fearful General Ma, the 19-year-old "Baby General" who had assumed power in many places, and they had seen friends executed. They knew what it was to be shrivelled by thirst, taunted by mirages, and blown senseless in windstorms.

The Trio’s suffering is reminiscent of the apostle Paul’s and as reluctantly recounted. They shared in the fellowship of Christ’s suffering in a way which is given to few of us. Mildred Cable died in 1952, and the French sisters within a month of each other in 1960. Now Topsy is reunited with her "three mamas."

Julia Cameron © OMF International (UK)

ELISABETH ELLIOT

My parents were missionaries in Belgium where I was born. When I was a few months old, we came to the U.S. and lived in Germantown, not far from Philadelphia, where my father became an editor of the Sunday School Times. Some of my contemporaries may remember the publication which was used by hundreds of churches for their weekly unified Sunday School teaching materials.

Our family continued to live in Philadelphia and then in New Jersey until I left home to attend Wheaton College. By that time, the family had increased to four brothers and one sister. My studies in classical Greek would one day enable me to work in the area of unwritten languages to develop a form of writing.

A year after I went to Ecuador, Jim Elliot, whom I had met at Wheaton, also entered tribal areas with the Quichua Indians. In nineteen fifty three we were married in the city of Quito and continued our work together. Jim had always hoped to have the opportunity to enter the territory of an unreached tribe. The Aucas were in that category -- a fierce group whom no one had succeeded in meeting without being killed. After the discovery of their whereabouts, Jim and four other missionaries entered Auca territory. After a friendly contact with three of the tribe, they were speared to death.

Our daughter Valerie was 10 months old when Jim was killed. I continued working with the Quichua Indians when, through a remarkable providence, I met two Auca women who lived with me for one year. They were the key to my going in to live with the tribe that had killed the five missionaries. I remained there for two years.

After having worked for two years with the Aucas, I returned to the Quichua work and remained there until 1963 when Valerie and I returned to the U.S.

Since then, my life has been one of writing and speaking. It also included, in 1969, a marriage to Addison Leitch, professor of theology at Gordon Conwell Seminary in Massachusetts. He died in 1973. After his death I had two lodgers in my home. One of them married my daughter, the other one, Lars Gren, married me. Since then we have worked together. See

THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS. MORE COMING SOON.