For 11 days in November last year, John Allen Chau lived mostly in darkness. While a cyclone thrashed the Bay of Bengal, Chau quarantined himself inside a safe house in the tropical backwater of Port Blair, the capital of India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, never stepping outside. The 26-year-old American missionary hoped to rid his body of any lingering infections so he wouldn’t sicken the Sentinelese, a hunter-gatherer tribe he dreamed of converting to Christianity. Isolated on their remote island, they had never developed modern antibodies. The common cold could devastate them.
During this retreat, Chau kept fit with triangle push-ups, leg tucks and bodyweight squats. But it was primarily his soul that he fortified, with prayer and by reading a history of the tribulations faced by pioneering American missionaries in Southeast Asia, who were an inspiration to him.