Cam kept busy at translating the New Testament, despite the fact that other things constantly vied for his attention: A race had to be built to carry water from the river to the turbine to run the coffee sheller, a chief became ill and had to be accompanied to the hospital in Guatemala City, and pastors needed to be trained. By the spring of 1928, Cam was close to finishing translating the New Testament, although he didn’t seem to be able to find the time he needed for one last push to finish the project. In desperation, he hit on a new plan. He and Elvira would leave Guatemala and all its distractions and finish the translation work at his parents’ home in California. He took two Cakchiquel speakers—his foster son Joe Chicol and Trinidad Bac, a local preacher—with him to the United States.
The plan worked flawlessly. With no interruptions, Cam and his two helpers were able to finish translating the New Testament and double-check their work. Finally, on October 15, 1928, the massive job was complete.
Always ready to hold some kind of service or celebration, Cam invited his friends and relatives to a Thanksgiving service before the manuscript was sent away for typesetting and printing. At the service he invited his parents to the front, where he had them write in the last two words of the book of Revelation. Cam thanked everyone for supporting him through the ten long years it had taken to translate the New Testament into Cakchiquel. He also told them stories of how the small portions of Scripture that had already been printed and distributed had changed many lives in San Antonio and how the Cakchiquel Indians who had seen the pamphlets marveled that God also spoke their language.
It was a wonderful evening. The following morning Cam wrapped the pages of the New Testament in brown paper, tied them with string, and mailed them off to the American Bible Society in New York, where the type would be set. After the typesetting was done, a set of page proofs would be sent back to Cam for him to double-check for accuracy. Cam had been told to expect the proofs in about six months.
While he waited, Cam was not a man to sit around doing nothing. He had enough ideas rolling around in his head to keep ten men busy, but in 1929 one idea seemed more important than all the others. Over his years in Guatemala, he had thought about reaching the hundreds of other Indian tribes in Central and South America with the gospel. Indeed, once work on translating the Bible into Cakchiquel was complete, Cam intended to move on to work among another tribe. Many of these tribes, like the Cakchiquel, lived within easy walking distance of trains or buses and other forms of transportation. They lived in areas that were well mapped and documented. However, there were other tribes who didn’t live in such accessible areas. Cam had recently learned how most of the Amazon Basin’s two and a half million square miles of land was mostly unmapped and unexplored. No one could say for sure how many tribal groups lived there, but it was estimated that over five hundred different languages were spoken by people living in the Amazon jungle.
One of the great hindrances to reaching these tribes with the gospel was how long it took to get in and out of the area. Indeed, there were only a handful of missionaries working in the Amazon Basin, and these missionaries reported that it could take a week of hard slog through the jungle just to cover ten miles. At that pace, missionaries on foot would never cover the millions of square miles that needed to be covered to make contact with all the tribes living there.
This may have seemed an insurmountable problem to some, but to Cameron Townsend it was a new challenge. There had to be some way to efficiently reach these people, and Cam intended to find it. As he thought about the situation, there seemed only one possible answer: airplanes. If missionaries could fly in and out of remote areas, the work of reaching the Amazonian Indian tribes with the gospel could be accomplished much faster.
Cam wrote to Major Dargue, a U.S. navy pilot he had met in Guatemala, and asked him to estimate what would be needed to begin a flying program over the Amazon Basin. Major Dargue’s reply was thorough. In his opinion, flying missionaries in and out of the Amazon region would need a minimum of three amphibious airplanes, plus pilots, mechanics, radio operators, hangars for housing and repairing the airplanes, fuel tanks, spare parts, and insurance. All in all, Major Dargue estimated the cost for such an operation to be about forty-five thousand dollars a year.
At first Cam was very excited about it all. While forty-five thousand dollars was a lot of money, he was sure American Christians would see the need for getting missionaries in and out of remote areas quickly and safely. Cam may have been right, and the money may well have been raised, except for one thing: October 29, 1929. On that day—Black Tuesday as it came to be known—the decade of prosperity that followed World War I came to a screeching halt. The stock market crashed, causing many Americans to lose their jobs. The Great Depression that would stretch on through the 1930s had begun.
Everyone in the United States was affected in some way by the Depression. Many of those who didn’t lose their jobs were forced to take massive pay cuts. Of course, churches soon began to feel the effects of the Depression, too. Offerings plunged, and missionaries were told not to expect financial support anymore. Indeed, many missionaries were called home by their sponsoring denomination or mission. It was Cam’s worst nightmare. At a time when he wanted to ask Christians to stretch their budgets to support airplanes for missionaries, most people no longer had enough money to cover their own basic needs.
To make matters worse, a missionary whom Cam greatly respected visited him. When he heard that Cam was thinking of eventually leaving the Cakchiquel Indians and going to work among a tribe in the Amazon who needed to learn to read and write, he was appalled. “But you’re just beginning to reach these people!” he exclaimed. “It would be like abandoning newborn babies; you give them the Bible and then you leave them. What would they think?”
Cam said nothing, and the missionary went on. “When you go to a new tribe, you become spiritually responsible for them,” he lectured. “Think how long it would take another missionary to learn as much about the tribe as you know. Don’t waste all you know by moving on to another language. Stay and work where God has put you.”
When the missionary left, Cam told Elvira he didn’t want any dinner. Instead, he went into the bedroom and shut the door behind him. His mind was in turmoil. What was he thinking! Here he wanted to ask American Christians to provide money for airplanes and pilots to push ahead his plan of reaching other Indian tribes in the region with the gospel when the Christians at home were having trouble buying food for their children. Perhaps his missionary visitor had been right. Perhaps he should just stay working among the Cakchiquel Indians. After all, the school was expanding, the medical clinic was busy every day, and many Indians had become Christian converts.
Thinking about the problem didn’t seem to help Cam. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more confused he became. In the end he decided on a desperate course of action, one he had never taken before. He prayed and asked God to show him through the Bible what to do. He then reached over, picked up his Bible, and flipped it open. He closed his eyes and pointed to a spot on the page. He opened his eyes again and began to read. His finger had fallen on Luke 15:4: “What man amongst you, having a hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?”
Cam sat for a long time staring at the verse. One hundred sheep, ninety-nine of them safe in the fold and one lost, he thought. And the shepherd didn’t stay in the safe place with the ninety-nine. Instead, he left the safe and secure place and went after a single lost sheep. Cam asked himself what this could mean for him. Was the verse indicating that he should leave the Cakchiquel Indians with the New Testament in their language and move on to look for another tribe who had not yet heard the gospel? And when he had given them the gospel in their language, did it mean he should move on to find another tribe, and then another after that? Cam felt that was what the verse was showing him, but he would have to think about it some more to make sure.
Chapter 10
The New Testament at Last
The more Cam thought about the verse from Luke, the more he believed that God was urging him to forge ahead with his plans. He decided that as soon as he and Elvira had read the proof sheets of the Cakchiquel New Testament they would find another tribe to work with. In the meantime, Cam thought more about the airplane project. As he did so, he met a man named Lynn Van Sickle, who could fly a little and who became interested in the idea of using airplanes to help missionaries do their jobs more effectively. Lynn Van Sickle had just graduated from Moody Bible Institute, and Cam urged him to join Central American Mission. Maybe one day, he told Lynn, CAM would have an air division of its own.
Finally the page proofs for the Cakchiquel New Testament arrived for checking. By now Trinidad Bac and Joe Chicol had returned to San Antonio, and Cam could settle down to weeks of scrutinizing every letter of every word. He knew that a single mistake could change the meaning of an entire passage and he wanted the translation to be as accurate as possible.
By November the job was complete, and Cam sent the manuscript to New York for printing and binding. It was time for him and Elvira to head back to Guatemala. On the way back to Guatemala, Cam decided to visit the Central American Mission leaders at their headquarters in Dallas, Texas. Cam and Elvira drove to Dallas in a Whippet motorcar that Leonard “L.L.” Legters had given them. Cam’s nephew Ron White went with them. He was interested in helping his Uncle Cam set up a campaign to teach as many Cakchiquel Indians as possible to read.
In Dallas, the Townsends met up with Lynn Van Sickle, since Cam had decided to present his idea for using airplanes to the mission leadership. The meeting did not go well. The leaders of Central American Mission were aghast when they learned the price tag for the project. The country was in the middle of a depression, they argued. Besides, Cam was talking about the Amazon Basin in South America, but their mission was to Central America, and Central America only.
Eventually, Cam managed to persuade the mission leaders to let him pursue the possibility of using an airplane. However, Cam could do this only on one condition: He would have to raise all of the money needed to buy and maintain an airplane.
Undaunted, Cam forged ahead. He knew the host of a Christian radio show in Dallas and asked if he could present the need for missionary airplanes to the show’s audience. Cam was excited to be talking to so many Christians at one time on the air, and he did his best to explain why airplanes were needed. He felt sure that the recent deaths of two missionaries, a baby, and three Indian guides at the hands of a hostile tribe would help the public understand the need to get in and out of a remote area quickly. At the close of the broadcast, Cam invited the listeners to contribute towards a missionary airplane.
Over the next few days, Cam waited anxiously for a response. Finally, an envelope arrived in the mail. Cam ripped it open, and a single dollar fluttered out. Cam was a little discouraged by the response but was not yet ready to give up the idea.
Finally, Cam and Elvira, accompanied by Ron White and Lynn Van Sickle, set out for Guatemala in the Whippet. After an interesting drive through Mexico, they arrived in Guatemala City two days before Christmas 1930. They spent Christmas in the city with Cam’s brother Paul and his wife and then headed with Ron for San Antonio. Lynn Van Sickle stayed behind in the city for his orientation into CAM missionary life.
