One of the most interesting recent additions to Wheaton Archives & Special Collections arrived in 2021 when Janet Wismer gave the Archives a notebook that consisted of a quarter-century of letters, cards, photos, and a variety of ephemera. All were artifacts of her abiding friendship with missionary, author, and teacher Elisabeth Elliot.

Elliot had been a Plymouth Brethren missionary to Ecuador when her husband Jim and four other missionaries were killed by warriors of the Waorani people, a tribe they had hoped to tell about Jesus. Elisabeth wrote an enormously popular book about this, Through Gates of Splendor. Then she and Rachel Saint, sister of another one of the men who was killed, went to live among the Waorani at the tribal people’s invitation. The two began the work of Bible translation and evangelism, alongside the Waorani woman Dayuma, a Christian convert. The whole story has been told most recently and completely in Dr. Kathryn Long’s book, God in the Rainforest: A Tale of Martyrdom and Redemption in Amazonian Ecuador.