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by Marion Frank-Wilson, mfrankwi@indiana.edu
Eleanor Vandevort donated her field notes and other materials to Indiana University in 2000. Since Edward Miner and I have started working on the project I have had several telephone conversations with her to keep her up-dated on the project’s progress, and to discuss its various aspects. Between June and August 2003, Ms. Vandevort kindly agreed to a series of interviews/conversations via e-mail and telephone where with remarkable candor she answered questions about her work as a missionary, the relevance of missionary work, issues related to translating the Bible, and, related to it all, about Kuac, who is the subject of her 1968 book, A Leopard Tamed, and his life as a Nuer pastor among Western missionaries. She does in fact discuss these subjects in her book which she wrote shortly after her return from Nasir. Reflecting on her life in Nasir more than 30 years later, in 2003 her views have hardly changed. Rather, they are an extension of what she expressed in A Leopard Tamed.
The following is an attempt to summarize those 2003 conversations. In order to give as much room as possible to Vandevort’s own voice, there are lengthy quotations from our e-mail conversations. Since an electronic version of A Leopard Tamed is part of this project, quotations from the book are kept at a minimum.
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