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The Elliotts faced stony opposition for two years. Then, one day, there was an explosion in a storehouse for firecrackers, which the Ixil tribesmen used to get the attention of gods to whom they offered sacrifices. Two boys were horribly burned. By the time Helen arrived on the scene, neighbors had already plastered the burns with a mixture of lime, wood ash and motor oil.
Helen, who had had no medical training, gave the boys morphine and antibiotic injections, picked off the goo and seared flesh, wrapped the victims in sheets sterilized in a pressure cooker, and forced them to drink eggnog through straws (all the water was contaminated). When Helen returned after putting her own children to bed, she discovered that a witch doctor had ripped off the bandages and was rubbing hot pepper on the wounds, invoking Christian saints and Mayan deities, all the while drinking rum. In a scene reminiscent of Elijah confronting the prophets of Baal, Helen told the parents that they must choose between her treatment and the witch doctor's.
The parents chose Helen. As the boys hovered near death, she prayed as never before. "This was a chance for people to experience the living Gospel," she recalls. But, she adds, "my family's lives were at stake." The boys survived and Helen was so besieged by the sick that she soon became the village's practical nurse, delivering hundreds of babies, suturing hundreds of wounds. The Ixils began to accept the Elliotts as prophets of a loving god.
The crisis also produced a breakthrough in Ray's torturous translation struggle. An Indian woman, marveling at Helen's treatment of the boys, used a word they had never heard: shum, which means giving without receiving anything in return. This was the word Ray needed to translate "love" into Ixil.
The Elliotts suffered through typhoid fever, malaria and amoebic dysentery. But their most wrenching experience was the loss last year of their home. Left-wing guerrilla activity around Nebaj got so heavy, says Ray, that "our presence was endangering our friends." Along with all Catholic missionaries, they had to pull out of the war zone.
Operating from a house trailer in Guatemala City, the Elliotts now work to get shipments of roofing, food, blankets, clean water and medical supplies for their village. Every few days the Elliotts board a cargo flight to Nebaj, where 10,000 refugees, many burned out of their homes, huddle in camps. The planes land, amid bursts of guerrilla fire, and are immediately surrounded by the Elliotts' Ixil friends. Helen's eyes mist over. "Nebaj is the home of our children," she says. "Now most of the people understand the word of God because of Ray's work." Latin America has been nominally Catholic for centuries, and most of its nations won their independence in the 19th century. Both Christianity and statehood, however, are relatively new to black Africa.
Protestant and Catholic mission schools were responsible for training many leaders of the 38 new nations on the continent that have gained their independence since 1956. For missionaries in what is now Zimbabwe, the civil war that ended in 1979 brought death and harassment from both sides.
Father Mark Hackett, 46, a Catholic priest from Britain, recalls that black guerrillas