My family’s connection to Ecuador goes back a long way. It was about five years ago that my uncle, after sorting through piles of old Christmas decorations in my grandmother’s basement, emerged from the furnace room with a dusty journal full of photos, maps, and pasted-in, type-written pages.
This wasn’t any ordinary tally of the day’s events. This journal has proved to be one of my most valued documents. The entry dates range from May to October of 1927, when Norman Minogue and his wife Anna (née Erickson) returned home from almost five years of missionary work in and around Latacunga, Ecuador.
The journal belonged to Anna, my great-grandmother, who was a kind of journalist in her day. She wrote for the Christian and Missionary Alliance newsletter, informing the greater world about the good work being done in God’s name.
Yes, they were Evangelicals. In a nutshell, the story goes like this: Norman and Anna met at Nyack Missionary College (now just ‘Nyack College’) in upstate New York sometime around 1920. This church registry card (pictured below) is dated 1916, when Anna first joined the Moody Church there. I don’t know the particulars of her relationship with Norman at that time, but I know that Anna left for Ecuador without marrying him.
It would take almost a year before Norman would make his way south to find the woman he fell in love with in Nyack, New York. In the interim, he travelled to Seattle and studied Spanish there before convincing a youth group to help raise money for his voyage.
My Great-Grandmother's Church Registry Card
Soon after his arrival in Quito, Anna gave birth to my grandfather, then my great-uncle (possibly the other way around). The newly-weds remained faithful to the cause in Ecuador until 1927, when they began a long and – thanks to Anna – well-documented journey home to Canada.
I’ve read and re-read the details of this journal over and over again. There are amazing tales about small town “natives” (as Anna described them) living in poverty in Ecuador in the ’20s. One woman was gored in the eye by her own bull, yet distrusted the mission’s doctors so much that she waited until all other medical options had been exhausted before she went to see Norman and Anna’s friends for help. Anna noted that this woman regained the ability to see from this eye, though she’d have to lift the nerve-damaged eyelid to make use of it.
I’m extremely grateful to the generous help I’ve received from folks at the Christian and Missionary Alliance. They’ve been instrumental in my mission to learn about what life was really like back then for young Norman and Anna. I’m making plans to visit Latacunga and see how the work that they and many others travelled so far to do has manifested in modern day Ecuador.
For now, my goal is to digest all the information that I can about Ecuador, 1920s missionary life, and Norman and Anna’s motives for dedicating their lives to this cause. I’m always open to new leads, so if you’ve got anything you think might interest me, please send it along!
