THE REST OF THE STORY!
(In January 1956, 5 US Missionaries trying to establish
communication with the Auca Indian tribe in Ecuador
were slain...Nate Saint, father of the author of the
following, was one of the five.)
TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH...Timbuktu --
by Stephen Saint, Ocala, Florida
For years I'd thought Timbuktu was just a made-up name for "the ends
of the earth." When I found out it was a real place in Africa, I developed
an inexplicable fascination for it.
It was in 1986 on a fact-finding trip to West Africa for Mission Aviation
Fellowship that this fascination became an irresistible urge. Timbuktu
wasn't on my itinerary, but I knew I had to go there. Once I arrived, I
discovered I was in trouble.
I'd hitched a ride from Bamako, Mali, 500 miles away, on the only seat left
on a Navajo six-seater airplane chartered by UNICEF. Two of their doctors
were in Timbuktu and might fly back on the return flight, which meant I'd
be bumped, but I decided to take the chance.
Now here I was, standing by the plane on the windswept outskirts
of the famous Berber outpost. There was not a spot of true green
anywhere in the desolate brown Saharan landscape. Dust blew
across the sky, blotting out the sun as I squinted in the 110-degree
heat, trying to make out the mud-walled buildings of the village of
20,000.
The pilot approached me as I started for town. He reported that
the doctors were on their way and I'd have to find another ride to
Bamako. "Try the marketplace. Someone there might have a truck.
But be careful," he said. "Westerners don't last long in the desert if
the truck breaks down, which often happens."
The open-air marketplace in the center of town was crowded. Men
and women wore flowing robes and turbans as protection against the
sun. Most of the Berbers' robes were dark blue, with 30 feet of material
in their turbans alone. The men were well-armed with scimitars and
knives. I felt that eyes were watching me suspiciously.
Suspicion was understandable in Timbuktu. Nothing could be trusted
here. These people had once been prosperous and self-sufficient.
Now even their land had turned against them. Drought had turned
rich grasslands to desert. Unrelenting sun and windstorms had
nearly annihilated all animal life. People were dying by the thou-
sands. I went from person to person trying to find someone who
spoke English, until I finally came across a local gendarme who
understood my broken French.
"I need a truck," I said. "I need to go to Bamako." Eyes widened in
his shaded face. "No truck," he shrugged. Then he added, "No
road. Only sand."
By now, my presence was causing a sensation in the marketplace.
I was surrounded by at least a dozen small children, jumping and
dancing, begging for coins and souvenirs. The situation was ex-
treme I knew. I tried to think calmly. What am I to do?
Suddenly I had a powerful desire to talk to my father. Certainly he
had known what it was like to be a foreigner in a strange land. But
my father, Nate Saint, was dead. He was one of five missionary
men killed by Auca Indians in the jungles of Ecuador in 1956. I was
a month shy of my fifth birthday at the time, and my memories of him
were almost like movie clips: a lanky, intense man with a serious
goal and a quick wit. He was a dedicated jungle pilot, flying
missionaries and medical personnel in his Piper Family Cruiser.
For one thing I was new to relief work. But it was more than that. I
needed Dad to help answer my new questions of faith. In Mali, for
the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people who didn't
share my faith, who were, in fact, hostile to the Christian faith, locals
and Western relief workers alike. In a way it was a parallel to the
situation Dad had faced in Ecuador.
How often I'd said the same thing Dad would have said among the
Indians who killed him: "My God is real. He's a personal God who
lives inside me, with whom I have a very special, one-on-one
relationship." And yet the question lingered in my mind: Did my
father have to die?
All my life, people had spoken of Dad with respect; he was a man
willing to die for his faith. But at the same time I couldn't help but
think the murders were capricious, an accident of bad timing. Dad and his
colleagues landed just as a small band of Auca men were in a bad
mood for reasons that had nothing to do with faith or Americans. If
Dad's plane had landed one day later, the massacre may not have
happened. Couldn't there have been another way?
And now, for the first time, I felt threatened because of who I was and
what I believed. "God," I found myself praying as I looked around the
marketplace, "I'm in trouble here. Please keep me safe and show
me a way to get back. Please reveal Yourself and Your love to me
the way you did to my father."
No bolt of lightning came from the blue. But a new thought did come
to mind. Surely there was a telecommunications office here some
where; I could wire Bamako to send another plane. It would be costly,
but I could see no other way of getting out. "Where's the telecom-
munications office?" I asked another gendarme. He gave me
instructions, then said, "Telegraph transmits only if station in
Bamako has machine on, message goes through."
"If not." he shrugged, "no answer ever comes. You only hope
message received."
Now what? The sun was crossing toward the horizon. If I didn't
have arrangements made by nightfall, what would happen to me?
Then I remembered that just before I'd started for Timbuktu, a fellow
worker had said, "There's a famous mosque in Timbuktu. It was
built from mud in the 1500's. Many Islamic pilgrims visit it every
year. But there's also a tiny Christian church, which virtually no one
visits. Look it up if you get the chance."
I asked the children, "Where is l'Eglise Evangelique Chretienne?"
The youngsters were willing to help, though they were obviously
confused about what I was looking for. Several times elderly men
and women scolded them harshly as we passed, but they per-
sisted. Finally we arrived, not at the church, but at the open door
way of a tiny mud-brick house.
No one was home, but on the wall opposite the door was a poster
showing a cross covered by wounded hands. The French subscript
said, "and by His stripes we are healed."
Within minutes, my army of waifs pointed out a young man
approaching us in the dirt alleyway. Then the children melted back
into the labyrinth of the walled alleys and compounds of Timbuktu.
The young man was handsome, with dark skin and flowing robes.
But there was something inexplicably different about him. His name
was Nouh Ag Infa Yatara; that much I understood. Nouh signaled
he knew someone who could translate for us. He led me to a
compound on the edge of town where an American missionary
lived. I was glad to meet the missionary, but from the moment I'd
seen Nouh I'd had the feeling that we shared something in
common.
"How did you come to have faith?" I asked him.
The missionary translated as Nouh answered. "This compound
has always had a beautiful garden. One day when I was a small
boy, a friend and I decided to steal some carrots. It was a dan-
gerous task. We'd been told that Toubabs [white men] eat
nomadic children. Despite our agility and considerable ex-
perience, I was caught by the former missionary here. Mr. Marshall
didn't eat me; instead he gave me the carrots and some cards that
had God's promises from the Bible written on them. He said if I learned them, he'd give me an ink pen!"
"You learned them?" I asked.
"Oh, yes! Only government men and the headmaster of the school
had a Bic pen! But when I showed off my pen at school, the teacher
knew I must have spoken with a Toubab, which is strictly forbidden.
He severely beat me."
When Nouh's parents found out he had portions of such a despised
book defiling their house, they threw him out and forbade anyone to
take him in; nor was he allowed in school. But something had hap-
pened: Nouh had come to believed that what the Bible said was
true. Nouh's mother became desperate. Her own standing, as well
as her family's, was in jeopardy.
Finally she decided to kill her son. She obtained poison from a
sorcerer and poisoned Nouh's food at a family feast. Nouh ate
the food and wasn't affected. His brother, who unwittingly stole a
morsel of meat from the deadly dish, violently ill and remains
partially paralyzed. Seeing God's intervention, the family and the
townspeople were afraid to make further attempts on his life, but
condemned him as an outcast.
After sitting a moment, I asked Nouh the question that only hours
earlier I'd wanted to ask my father: "Why is your faith so important
to you that you're willing to give up everything, perhaps even your
life?" "I know God loves me and I'll live with Him forever. I know it!
Now I have peace where used to be full of fear and uncertainty.
Who wouldn't want to give up everything for this peace and security?"
"It couldn't have been easy for you as a teenager to take a stand
that made you despised by the whole community," I said. "Where
did your courage come from?"
"Mr. Marshall couldn't take me in without putting my life in jeopardy.
So he gave me some books about other Christians who'd suffered
for their faith. My favorite was about five young men who willingly risked
their lives to take God's good news to stone age Indians in the jungles
of South America." His eyes widened. "I've lived all my life in the desert.
How frightening the jungle must be! The book said these men let
themselves be speared to death, even though they had guns
and could have killed their attackers!"
The missionary translator said, "I remember the story. As a matter
of fact, one of those men had your last name."
"Yes," I said quietly, "the pilot was my father."
"Your father?" Nouh cried. "The story is true!"
"Yes," I said, "it's true."
The missionary and Nouh and I talked through the afternoon. When
they accompanied me back to the airfield that night, we found that
the doctors weren't able to leave Timbuktu after all, and there was
room for me on the UNICEF plane. As Nouh and I hugged each other,
it seemed incredible that God loved us so much that He'd arranged
for us to meet "at the ends of the earth."
Nouh and I had gifts for each other that no one else could give. I gave
him the assurance that the story which had given him courage was true.
He, in turn, gave me the assurance that God had used Dad's death for
good. Dad, by dying, had helped give Nouh a faith worth dying for. And
Nouh, in return, had helped give Dad's faith back to me.
CHAPEL SPECIAL August 22, 1998
the setting for a young American's strangest adventure
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