A Chance to Die Elisabeth Elliot (electronic reader .txt) 📖

a teenaged girl escaped from her Hindu home and joined them, Amy had a talk with her about jewels. The child, with very bad grace, tore off two foot jewels. No, said Amy, Jesus was now her jewel—would she not give Him all? The girl took off all but one ring. She looked at the members of the Band, jewelless, singing “Jesus is my jewel.” Off came the ring.

Years later the oddity appeared as an eminently practical thing when a watchman of the robber caste said, “If those girls, those hundreds of girls, wore jewels according to custom, not all the money in the world could hire a watchman to guard the place.”

Financial provision for the Band came as it had come when Amy needed money for the Welcome Hall in Belfast. It was prayed for. Her own personal needs ever since she had left for Japan had been fully underwritten by Mr. Wilson, but money for the needs of the Band and for travel expenses (hundreds of rupees per month) came from other sources. The Church of England Zenana gave twenty-five rupees per month to hire a pair of bullocks, and readers of the Scrap letters sent money, which Amy called “the sinews of war.” But she was scrupulous in her adherence to the principles learned in Ireland. She would not mention a need to any but God until it had been met. Even that had its hazards. “The mere telling of how a need was met is often like telling of a need, which is asking crookedly instead of straight out,” she wrote in Scraps. “But this much I will say—with every fresh need has come a fresh supply.” The Band women learned the lesson, and sometimes a little pile of change would appear on Amy’s table with a note to say that it had not been needed.

They sought opportunities to speak to little children, coolies, educated men, women whose caste dictated that they must help with bricklaying, anyone at all who seemed the least inclined to hear, and often those who were not in the least inclined. The “punkah wallah” was a skinny old man who sat on a rattan stool and patiently pulled the rope which activated the huge ceiling fan. In the dead calm of midday heat it is not surprising that he sometimes fell asleep (Amy stitched into one of her Scraps a photo of him with eyes closed, his turbaned head leaning against a mat). Hoping to do the poor old soul some good Amy asked, “How do you pray?”

“Our Father who art in heaven.”

“What does that mean?”

“How should I know? Am I a parson that I should understand?”

One day Amy stopped a Christian wedding procession to ask why they had idols on the corners of the wedding car. They were not idols, she was told, they were nothing but dolls. Indeed they were heathen idols, she protested, and had no place in anything that called itself Christian. There was a great argument but in the end she succeeded in trading some tracts and English-made dolls for the idols, which she took home for firewood.

Most of all the Band longed for contact with Brahman women, who were virtually unreachable and showed no interest whatever. One day some of them were sitting on a verandah, looking bored and weary. Amy asked if she and her helpers might sing to them. Yes, they said. A group gathered. They heard perhaps twenty minutes’ worth of “plain Message-giving, illustrated with pictures. Amy stood on the bottom step of the verandah and begged the women to allow her to come nearer. They were horrified and refused. Men began to gather, hundreds of them, so she turned and asked them please to go away, for they could hear anytime. It was the women the missionaries had come for. But the men drew nearer and the women moved away. Finally Amy spoke to the men, as straight as ever I could,” trying to put things simply enough for the women to understand while at the same time holding the men quiet.

“You haven’t an idea how hard it is to get a real chance with Brahman women. They never let us into their houses in these old Hindu towns. It is next to impossible to get any quiet in the street even if they will let us speak there, which they seldom will. Brahman women are as out of reach as if they lived in Central Africa, more so sometimes.’’

The Band visited the Village of Vishnu’s Heaven where there was a fort which no woman had ever been allowed to leave. Men went in and out, as did a few Untouchable servant-women, but the women of the fort were prisoners. Once, it was said, a little girl of four had had the audacity to look out the door in the high mud wall. She was killed at once. Amy and her Indian sisters went to “view the wall” and to pray that it might somehow be breached. Along came a man who offered to escort them inside. They were given a few minutes to speak to the women of one of the houses. What hope had such women?

“No words of mine can give you any idea of the awful difficulty surrounding any Hindu or Mohammedan girl or woman who dares to take a stand. It is terrible for the men and boys, but infinitely more so for the women. Things no pen could write—at least mine could not—go on behind those prison walls. They are utterly in the power of ruthless relatives. Nothing but a miracle can bring them out.” A girl who had shown an interest in Christianity was murdered; a boy was drugged, his intellect ruined for life. Because of bribery the police were often on the side of the family in whatever measures they chose to take. Anyone who wanted to follow Christ had to leave all in order to do so.

“Why the dreadful wrench of coming out