SHELL, Ecuador - The pungent aroma of antiseptic and latex is all too familiar. So are the small squeaks escaping from the flattened crank bed that's pinned to his stomach.

Torso arched backwards. Elbows burrowed into the mattress. Brows furrowed in a book. Humberto Tankamash wouldn't say he's comfortable - but he's too busy working to notice. A boom-box idles. A folded wheelchair rests in the corner.

Humberto doesn't take translation work lying down. Not figuratively, anyway. His Shuar tribe now has 50 of the Bible's 66 books in its own language, and nine others are urgently awaiting revision. Without new translation team members - missionaries and educated Shuar - he won't see a finished Bible in his lifetime.

"This project is not the missionary's work, but for our own people," Humberto says.

His window frames a postcard of exotic jungle palms, but Voz Andes Hospital is not exactly a tourist stop. For Humberto, it's a makeshift office while his crippled body recuperates from recurring ailments. Scribbled on Humberto's scratch pad is a freshly-translated Shuar verse from Ecclesiastes: There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven ...

Solomon's despondence makes Ecclesiastes an arduous book to read from an Amazon hospital bed, where questions about life's meaning come rushing like a tropical storm, and there's nowhere to run ... That is, if Humberto could run.

The Shuar Indian was paralyzed 30 years ago in a near-fatal accident, several years after Avant missionaries had led him to Christ. Relatives pulled the fallen uwi palm tree off his broken back and ferried him several hours by dugout canoe, to a spot where a Mission Aviation Fellowship plane could pick him up. The uwi palm bears a favorite fruit of the Shuar - but it hardly compares to the fruit of Humberto's translation work. It's a life calling he'd never imagined before hearing the "snap" of timber overhead.

Mother and mentor

His body bound to a wheelchair, Humberto discovered a heart-passion for translation. Now in his 50s, he's carrying on a work chartered by his mentor, Avant missionary Dottie Walker, who devoted 50 years to Shuar Bible translation.

"Sanchu," as the Shuar call Dottie, arrived in Ecuador in 1948 as a 25-year-old single woman with basic linguistic training. After adapting to Shuar language and culture, Dottie typed the entire Shuar New Testament more that six times before its publication in the early 1970s - she had the calluses on her fingertips to prove it.

But the Old Testament's translation, Dottie realized, would have to be the undertaking of a growing Shuar Church. So she hung a "Help Wanted" sign, and began training six men in 1980. Among them was Humberto, who'd been paralyzed only a few years earlier.

Humberto's new teacher was also well-versed in jungle hardships. Dottie had joined the massive relief efforts after a 1949 earthquake buried the town of Pelileo. And while living in Makuma with Avant missionaries Keith and Doris Austin, Dottie nearly died from hepatitis in the early 1950s.

"There were times when I said, ‘I wonder where I'll bury her,'" recalls Doris, who now lives in Tennessee. "Then one day she said, ‘Doris, bring me some of that burnt toast in the kitchen.' And she started getting better."

Early on, Dottie's translation class was not exactly a gathering of saints. She was their teacher and cook and mother, and at times the complaints about the food and other petty matters reduced her to tears. "We are translators and we deserve the best!" some would gripe. Over time, their work on the Word produced not only Shuar verse, but a corresponding work in their headhunter minds.

Today, you can literally hear the transformation as these men faithfully pray for Dottie in Florida, where she retired in 1990 at age 69. She continued to visit the translation team for almost a decade. Juan, Raul, Humberto and others still meet monthly in Makuma to polish translated text for a week. Using Shuar verses, Dottie taught them to compose worship songs that are still sung in churches. 

One recent morning, Humberto prayed, "Lord, where are those men who started out this work but aren't here today? Reach into their hearts and change them, as we need them to finish. Thank you for sending Sanchu to work with us all these years ..."

Soul food

"I might have been distracted from a close walk with God if I was whole in body. I learned to depend on Him," Humberto says.

His wheelchair hardly slows him down, even while making house calls as the village's health coordinator. Swimming and canoeing are as close as a piggyback ride to the river. He started a small garden last year outside his two-room house. A neighbor found Humberto at dawn, hacking weeds with a machete. But the sweat-work only aggravated an infected sore, and he landed in the hospital again.

"When I am hungry, talking with God fills me up better than food," Humberto says. His prolific translation of the uplifting Psalms has nurtured him through a broken back, the death of two wives, various infections, and the isolation of life in wheelchair.

After intense sessions, translators let their work "cool off," Humberto says, before reviewing it again. Raul, a Shuar university student and teacher, doesn't hesitate to ask for Humberto's advice on wording, overlooking his 6th-grade education. Nekas tame, Raul usually tells him - "you are right."

However, time is short and the obstacles unpredictable. Jungle lightning strikes have damaged computer equipment twice in the past year. And with retirement looming for missionaries and volunteers, summaries of the unfinished text are being prepared as a temporary solution - a two-year project itself. But the team has bigger dreams, which would require additional translators.

It's a translation legacy with some chapters yet untold.

"Do you have any three-ring notebooks?" Humberto once asked. "I want to put all my manuscripts in them, so my children and grandchildren will remember my work when I'm gone."