The year after Gilead-trained missionaries began to serve on Belau, Jack and Aurelia Watson arrived at Yap. Two more missionaries came the following year.

Merle Lowmaster had done some witnessing here in 1964, but Jack and Aurelia Watson hoped to be able to stay. However, it was not easy for them to learn the Yapese language. The only written material to be found consisted of a few government-regulation booklets and a Catholic catechism. The Watsons would listen to the people and try to imitate what they heard. By the following year, a young Yapese man who was showing interest in the truth also proved willing to give language lessons. The missionaries spent the first month trying to help him understand the English that they spoke so that he could tell them how to speak Yapese.

The priest also used his influence to get the missionaries evicted from their home, and finding a new home seemed impossible. The priest had already warned landowners not to rent to the missionaries, so the brothers moved their wives into the hotel temporarily while they stayed in a shack that was 12 by 14 feet [3.5 x 4 m] and that had a collapsed floor.

And the brothers found that it was valuable in other ways as well. When they lost their missionary home, meetings were held for a while under a large tree where stone money was displayed. Since pieces of stone money at this village “bank” stood in an upright position, these made convenient backrests for the people in the audience, while a nearby 50-gallon [190 L] drum served as lectern.

Still, they had not found a place to live. “It looked as if the work would come to an end,” Watson notes. “But Jehovah came to our rescue.” The night before the missionaries were to leave to attend an assembly in Guam, a man asked if they would like to rent a house. It was perhaps the most ideal structure on Yap—a typhoon-proof concrete building with sufficient space both for meetings and for living accommodations.

Giving Evidence of Their Faith

Two more missionaries from Hawaii, Placido and Marsha Ballesteros, arrived in 1970. Progress was slow. “There were many times when just the four of us missionaries attended the meetings, held in our living room,” Placido recalled.

“From a human standpoint, Yap is just a speck of land on the globe, and the few thousand people who live here are insignificant compared with the billions of mankind,” Placido Ballesteros once said. “And yet Jehovah has these people in mind. When I first arrived, I did not dream that there would be a day when a monthly issue of The Watchtower would be published in Yapese and that we would be distributing books from door to door in the Yapese language.”

An amusing experience illustrates how thoroughly Jehovah’s name is being made known. One day, Placido met a tourist sitting by a river, miles from the nearest tourist spots and even a long walk from where the road ended. Asked if he was lost, the man replied: “No, I just wanted to get as far away as I could to find a peaceful place to think.” When the tourist asked why he was there, Placido explained that he was a missionary, one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. “Oh, no!” the tourist cried. “I’m from Brooklyn, not too far from your headquarters. I can’t get away from you people!”