Turned her cheek to husband’s killers

Press, 8 September 1982, Page 25

Turned her cheek to husband’s killers

SARONA AI’ONO

If a group of people killed someone you loved your natural reaction would be to seek revenge. But Mrs Elisabeth Elliot, an American missionary ‘ now visiting Christchurch, took a very different course when a tribe of Indians in the Amazon rain forest murdered her husband along with three other American missionaries and a pilot who had flown them in to the area where the tribe lived. She went to live in the jungle with her husband's killers.

Mr and Mrs Elliot, supported by the Plymouth Brethren, left the United States in 1952 to work with three Indian tribes in Equador — the Auca, the Colorado and the Quichua. “The Quichua had been in contact with Europeans for many years; they walk round in T-shirts and blue jeans,” said Mrs Elliot. “But the Auca were stone-age and had had little contact whatsoever with the outside world.” Mr Elliot was 28 when he died, and the couple had a 10 months-old daughter. “I was devastated, as any woman would be when she lost her husband.” said Mrs Elliot. Her husband knew what dangers they would have to face when they first set out, and he died as others V- '

had died before him for missionary work. “We were prepared to give up our lives for what we believed,” she said.

Mrs Elliot surprised the world when she left the Quichua tribe two years and a half after her husband’s death and went to. live' amongst the people who had murdered him. She lived with the Auca people for four years, learning their language and sharing their way of life.

“My daughter played with their children and I came to know the men who had killed my husband and the other men. We stayed there because that’s where God wanted us,” said Mrs Elliot. “The tribe didn’t hate, the men. They killed them for self-protection — they thought they were cannibals,” she said. She learned this while living with the Auca tribe and learning their language. . “Their attitude towards their deaths was that it was a silly mistake.” She and her daughter were not accepted as members of the tribe. "They thought we

were freaks but, we lived as they did and learned from them as they learned from us. It was an interesting experience,” said Mrs Elliot. There were times, she said, when she would gladly have given up. “But any Christian will have his faith attacked and- the devil will test him. Stability lies only in the word of God.” Since her husband's .death, ,Mrs Elliot has remarried twice. She married her present husband, Lars Gren, in 1977. He is her manager and takes care of sales of the books she has written about her Christian beliefs and of her experiences in the Amazon. She writes a column in a magazine and lectures at a theological seminary in her home city of Hamilton, Massachusettes. Mrs Elliot came to NewZealand to speak in Hamilton and in Christchurch at the Anglican. Church Missionary Society spring school held at St Margarets College hall. She also spoke at a Christian women's convention on Friday before leaving for a week of sightseeing around the South Island. Mrs Elliot feels that mission . work is still as alive today as it was 100 years ago.