Rachel Saint: A Star in the Jungle (Christian Heroes: Then and Now)

Rachel Saint is best known as the sister to Nate Saint, one of five missionary martyrs whose lives ended by the spears of those they were attempting to evangelize in the Amazon jungle. Rachel persisted in living with the tribe, learning their language and translating the New Testament into the language. She became friends and traveling companions with one of the Waoroni women, Dayuma, who gave Rachel a new name: “I will call you Nimu. It means star, and it was the name of my little sister…That will make you my sister, and being my sister, you are also their relative. [The Waorani] will not spear their relative.” “In a sense Dayuma became the central missionary to her tribe. She began to explain to the group things about the outside world…she held a church service in Kimo and Dawa's hut .People would lounge in their hammocks or sit on the floor or on a log outside as Dayuma told them Bible stories and about ‘God's Carving’ (the Bible)...One day Akawo asked Rachel, ‘Does God stay in his hammock away up there in the sky?’...Why not think of there being hammocks in the house God is thatching for them up there?” Rachel perceived the Waorani as “her people” and evangelizing them as her life’s mission. When presented with the notion that the Waorani would be better off if she had never gone into the tribe, Rachel replied, "There is no way that the Auca were going to be left alone. That is a lovely fairy story thought up by preservationists. With oilmen and settlers in the jungle, there would have been a bloodbath, and I know who would have come off the worst. Within a decade there would have been no Aucas and no language to preserve. These so-called do-gooders just don't know what they're talking about…They fly in, do a lightning so-called investigation, then fly out, talking nonsense. You have to live in the jungle and live with the day-to-day problems to know what the problems are." Half a century later, however, Nemonte Nenquimo’s We Will Not Be Saved holds up a broken mirror of the biased, colonialist, evangelical notion of salvation and its devastating aftermath on an individual, on a people, and on the environment. If you want to hear both sides of the story, I would recommend pairing Janet and Geoff Benge’s Rachel Saint with Nenquimo’s brilliant memoir.