Hello and welcome to the witness podcast with me Mike Lanchin.

And today we're going back to January of 1956

when five American missionaries were killed by members of an indigenous tribe

in the Amazon jungle of Ecuador. They'd gone there to try to convert

them to Christianity. I've been hearing from two of the dead men's children. We rest on me, our shield and our defender.

My dad was killed just before my fifth birthday. You know at that age my dad was my

hero. Every day I would watch him fly off into the jungles and then in the afternoon usually I would watch as his plane

would fly back in from the jungles that was really an exciting time.

Steve Saint is the son of Nate Saint, a pilot and an evangelical Christian missionary.

In the late 1940s he took his young family to join other missionaries living on the edge

of the Amazon jungle in Ecuador.

Our house was right at the very end of the road coming down out of the mountains.

Dad had to keep expanding it because we had more and more people coming all living in our house at the same time.

And I enjoyed that.

My father was very focused on God and following his will and what I especially know because of my own

personality was this sense of adventure was very strong in him.

Valerie Shepard's dad, Jim Elliot, and his wife Elizabeth

were also missionaries from the US.

They'd arrived in Ecuador in the early 1950s.

It was a time of intense activity in the region. Foreign oil

companies were beginning to tap into the Amazon's vast oil reserves and foreign

missionaries were arriving to spread Christianity among the jungle's disparate indigenous tribes.

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