Mission Of Life Elinor Young’s Dream Of Spreading God’s Word Overseas Couldn’t Be Stopped By Childhood Polio. But A Second Bout With The Disease Finally Forced Her Return Home.

They called her “Bad Legs Woman” and believed she was sent by God.

Elinor Young spent 17 years in the mountains of Irian Jaya, Indonesia, with the Kimyal people. The primitive tribe of 8,000 was her life’s devotion.

She learned their language, translated the Bible and nurtured them as if they were the husband and children she never had.

They loved her back. They shuttled her tiny, weak body from village to village in a canvas sling, performed basic chores for her and kept her company almost every waking moment of every day.

Childhood polio left Young, now 50, with a Lilliputian body that didn’t work quite right. Despite that, she lived out her dreams of becoming a career missionary.

“In my mind, I was there until I retired,” she says.

In 1991, a ghost from her childhood came to life and tore Young away from the Kimyals.

Forty years after her original bout with polio, her body betrayed her a second time. Pain consumed her muscles and bones, which refused to support her weight at all. Her heart raced for hours on end in bizarre rhythms, once stopping all together for a few perilous seconds.

Young, along with 85 percent of polio survivors, has post-polio syndrome. It’s a cruel illness that strikes hardest those who respond to their fragile childhood with vigor, as if making up for lost time.

By living life to the fullest, they wear out their already weak nerve cells. For many polio survivors, the second blow is more devastating than the original disease.

Young returned to her Chattaroy home in 1991, thinking she would get some intensive medical treatment for a couple months, maybe surgery, then resume her missionary life. Doctors told her the syndrome was irreversible. The best they could do was manage her pain. Her career was over.

The Kimyals were suspicious. They thought Young had left because she didn’t like them anymore.

Young was devastated. She had dreamed of being a missionary since junior high.

Young vividly remembers the first day polio visited her life. A 5-year-old, she had been sick with flulike symptoms for a few days. She awoke one morning to pain shooting down her legs. Her head throbbed. She could barely walk.

The rest of her family was downstairs in the farmhouse, eating breakfast. From the top of the stairs she called for help. But her voice disappeared into the din of her four siblings. She fell halfway down the stairs.

She remembers her father wrapping her in a baby blanket and carrying her into the old St. Luke’s Hospital.

“Hurry, Daddy. I can’t breathe,” she cried.

Her next memory is waking up in isolation. Doctors told her parents survival was unlikely.

It was during the seven months in the hospital, when her father, her life’s stronghold, couldn’t fix the problem, that Young felt the presence of another stronger defender - God.

“I really called on God to protect me and help me and be with me,” she says. “And I learned that he did.”

Recovery was slow and never complete. She could not run with other children or jump. Only one leg would push her up the stairs.

“I walked with a definite galumph,” she says.

Until she was a teenager, she was in and out of Shriners Hospital for surgeries that fused her spine and reinforced her skeleton.

But she refused to see herself as a fragile, sickly child. In fact, she was stubborn, to the point of disobedience at times, her mother says.

“Maybe it was because she was sick, but she got away with more than the others,” Rosetta Young says. “I remember her dad pulling over the truck once on the way to town because of the way she was talking to him. He never had to do that with the others.”

Young laughs a raspy chuckle when she remembers her childhood attitude.

“I had a tremendous amount of self-confidence,” she says. “Perhaps I was unrealistic.”

In junior high school she latched onto the idea of becoming a missionary, after meeting some missionaries from her church. Over the years, she became increasingly convinced that was God’s plan, too.

No one around her had the nerve to question her ambitions.

It wasn’t until much later, when the post-polio surfaced, that Young realized her childhood bravado was really a mask - useful at the time, but ultimately a stumbling block.

Reading an entry in her diary from 1961 brought forth a moment of revelation. That overly confident 13-year-old was hoping for a Go Kart for eighth-grade graduation.

“Wish I had something to run around with like the kids do with their bikes,” she wrote.

Speaking the words out loud while reading the entry to a friend decades later unleashed a wave of grief for the little girl who never did ride a bike, never did get a Go Kart, but never cried about it either.

“I knew I was missing out,” she says. “That was a big disappointment because I could see the fun the other kids were having.”

That refusal to entertain self-pity got Young to Indonesia.

After getting degrees from a Bible college and Whitworth College, her first application to a mission board was rejected. With another year of linguistics training under her belt, she applied to a second missionary organization.

During her interview with the board members who would either fund her career or send her packing, they asked how she would deal with rejection.

“I know one thing: If you won’t send me, somebody will,” she told them.

“I don’t know where I got the courage to say that to those august people.” she says.

In 1974, at age 27, she went to Indonesia.

The Kimyals are a small mountain tribe first discovered in 1963. They live in the interior mountains of Indonesia, accessible by a one-hour plane ride from the coast or a five-day hike.

The first missionary to the area was murdered by a neighboring tribe. Young came in the second wave.

She lived in a 600-square-foot wooden house built by her sponsor, World Team.

It was sweater weather up there at 6,000 feet.

Young, who weighed all of 75 pounds, was well-matched to the Kimyals, who are also fairly small people - on average a quarter-inch too tall to be classified as pygmies.

“She was a Goliath,” says Vickie Hershey, a Spokane woman who, with her husband, served as a medical missionary in nearby Papua New Guinea. “In this little broken body, she was doing amazing things.”

Young spent a year learning the language and devising an alphabet. She also learned the peculiar culture of the Kimyals.

She describes them as a brutally honest, in-your-face, society - hence her nickname. After all, there are 8,000 of them jammed into tiny mountainside villages.

They live with little breathing space. In fact, they consider it rude to leave a person alone - ever.

“I timed it once. It was a very foggy day and I went outside, and I was alone for two minutes,” Young says.

Her only support was the constant prayers of family and friends, who never voiced their own doubts about her risky job.

“I prayed a lot,” says Rosetta Young. “I didn’t think she could run fast enough to get away from those people if they came after her.”

Hershey, whose own missionary work is with a less primitive population, says she was amazed by the tiny wonder.

“It was absolutely incredible that she was able to pull this off,” she says. “They absolutely adored her. And she is single-handedly responsible for so much of their development.”

Various missionary couples joined Young at times during her career. Together they trained people to found and lead Christian churches in the villages.

Through a childhood friend, Young arranged for construction of a mini hydro-electric project to bring electricity to the tribe. She served as the tribe’s advocate when the government or big corporations tried to impose on the tribe in order to harvest the natural resources in the area.

When Young first arrived, the only communication was by radio or sending mail out on the planes delivering supplies. Now, the Kimyals have a radio and a desktop publishing system, tools that would be useless without a written language, which Young also developed.

Hershey first met Young in the late 1970s during a sabbatical back in Chattaroy. After that, they occasionally met in Indonesia while they were working.

“When we were with her, I never considered her polio a health problem,” Hershey says.

And it wasn’t for most of the time Young was in Irian Jaya. But the last two years were a struggle.

Young experienced a variety of health problems that she kept mostly to herself. The worst were heart irregularities that sent her heartbeat into wild rhythms.

One episode lasted 18 hours.

There were no other Westerners in the area and no way to get medical attention.

“I thought, ‘If I die, I hope they do an autopsy and figure out what happened,”’ she says. “And I knew if I died, I had a lot left to do and it would be really upsetting to Mom.”

Young’s mother smiles upon hearing her daughter describe the incident.

“We were prepared for her death,” Rosetta Young says.

Finally, after a day and a half, Young’s heart just stopped. Then, slowly, it began beating again.

For several days she was in immense pain.

But she didn’t consider coming home.

“I had a few things that I wanted to get done,” she says.

Six months later, she awoke too weak to stand, let alone walk.

But even then, she stayed for another four months, using rudimentary crutches when she could. Otherwise, tribe members carried her where she needed to go.

Finally, in August 1991, she came home for medical help.

“My missionary career was over, and that was not my choice,” she says. “That was painful.”

Painful is a bitter understatement, other sufferers of post-polio say. They generally consider themselves survivors of one of the most vicious childhood epidemics in America.

And survivors generally assume they endured the worst and it made them who they are today.

“I was suicidally depressed,” says Sharman Collins, founder of the support group Polio Outreach of Spokane. “The fact that I had four kids was the only thing that kept me from killing myself.”

Young showed up at one of the first meetings of Collins’ support group. Collins, 49, says she was immediately drawn to the missionary.

“She said she had a lot of grief over the things she had lost, and she had a deep sense of joy,” Collins remembers. “That intrigued me, because I had a lot of grief and no joy.”

The two became instant friends.

They drove their scooters into the woods around Chattaroy. When they became mired in the mud, they laughed until they cried.

Collins said Young never once tried to evangelize her.

“I swear it was four months before she even said the word God,” Collins says.

Collins and Young found a common bond in their shared grief and what they had lost. Before post-polio, Collins’ life was one of constant activity, raising four sons, cycling 150 miles a week and running a busy household.

They mourned their losses together, all the while Young was asking of God not “Why?” but “What next?”

“This did not have to mean the end of ministry,” she says. “I knew there was a plan.”

Both women believe God put them together for a mutual purpose.

Through Collins, Young found a new ministry. It’s not nearly as clear-cut and defined as her previous career. But it’s a purpose that gives her life meaning.

She speaks at a variety of churches. She has designed and taught a Bible study for non-Christians.

She maintains the Polio Experience Network Web page (http://polionet.org/pps.htm), and writes a spirituality column for a post-polio newsletter that is mailed to 700 people worldwide.

Mostly she just tries to be Elinor Young - the woman who survived polio, lived with the Kimyals for 17 years and is enduring post-polio, all with the help of God.

It worked for Collins, who one day asked Young to teach her something about the Bible.

Since then, Collins has become a born-again Christian. Her new beliefs provide a foundation from which she addresses the limitations of her crippled body.

“She’s the smallest, tiniest person I’ve ever met,” Collins says. “But she has the biggest spirit.”

Young returned to Irian Jaya on a stretcher a year after she was diagnosed with post-polio. She wanted to say goodbye and explain why she was leaving.

“They are very suspicious people,” she says. “I knew they would think, ‘Aw, she just doesn’t like us anymore.”’

Lying on a cot, she gathered many of the church leaders around her so they could ask questions and see how sick she was. They were confused, and she struggled to find a way to tell them she still believed that God was good.

Then she spotted the bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling.

“You see that light bulb,” she said. “The job of the light bulb is to shine so we can see.

“All it needs to do is to allow a power other than itself - electricity - to flow through it.

“That is our job. And we can do that wherever we are.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos (1 Color); Map of Indonesia