Everyone in San Antonio was glad to see the Townsends again. It was a relief for the Indian church leaders to be able to speak to Cam in Cakchiquel instead of trying to talk with other CAM missionaries in fractured Spanish. The Townsends’ foster daughter, Elena Trejo, was glad to have them back, too. Cam was impressed with how smart she was. She had learned everything the local schoolteachers could teach her, and it seemed a pity that her education should stop after grade school. Cam thought about what to do and then wrote to his parents in California asking if they would take care of Elena and enroll her in an American high school. Cam’s parents wrote back immediately telling Cam they would be delighted to have Elena stay with them and to send her on up.
Cam continued his work among the Cakchiquel Christians and, with the help of his nephew Ron, planned a literacy campaign to teach as many Indians as possible to read and write in their own language. All the while, Cam waited for news that the Cakchiquel New Testaments had arrived in Guatemala City. But no news came.
Finally, in early May 1931, Cam and Trinidad Bac drove the Whippet over the mountains to Guatemala City to find out what had happened to the New Testaments. A worker at the central post office assured Cam he had not seen any package addressed to him. Cam, though, was not satisfied and asked if he could search through the back rooms. The worker shrugged his shoulders and agreed. Sure enough, Cam found a package addressed to him stuffed at the back of a shelf. Inside were the first eighteen copies of the Cakchiquel New Testament. Cam stood in the middle of the post office and thanked God for the book and all of the wonderful things it would do for the Cakchiquel people. He was eager to show it to the Cakchiquel Christians, but there was something he had to do first.
On May 19, 1931, Cameron Townsend, Trinidad Bac, and Mr. Gregory of the Bible Society stood outside the office of the president of Guatemala. At 4:30 p.m. sharp, President Ubico’s secretary opened the door and ushered them in. President Ubico shook hands and greeted everyone warmly. Trinidad Bac then handed the president his own engraved copy of the Cakchiquel New Testament. Cam, Mr. Gregory, and Trinidad all gave short speeches, and then the president responded.
President Ubico congratulated all three of the men for the part they had played in getting the New Testament translated and published in the Cakchiquel language. He then invited Cam to begin work learning and translating the New Testament into another Indian language. The president also agreed to pose for a picture holding the copy of the New Testament, even though he usually avoided having his picture taken. The next morning, a photo of President Ubico holding the Cakchiquel New Testament appeared on the front page of Guatemala’s leading newspaper.
Once the formalities of the official ceremony were completed, Cam was eager to get home to show the New Testament to the Cakchiquel Indians. A crowd quickly gathered when Cam arrived back, and the people broke into loud applause when they saw the New Testament. Several of the local preachers who could read Cakchiquel took turns reading portions of the New Testament to the crowd. The Cakchiquel Indians decided that May 20 would be kept as a special day to commemorate receiving God’s Word in their language.
The next day, Cam set out on an eleven-day mule trek through Cakchiquel territory to put the finishing touches on the plans for the literacy campaign. When he got back to Panajachel, where he and Elvira were staying in Robby Robinson’s old house, he noticed a stranger in town. Cam introduced himself and learned that the man was a visitor from Mexico. Dr. Moisés Sáenz was Mexico’s most famous champion of Indian education. His brother Aarón held a high position in the Mexican government. Cam had heard of both men and asked Dr. Sáenz what he was doing in such a remote village in Guatemala. Dr. Sáenz replied that he was studying the problems of rural Indian education in Central America in the hopes of finding some keys to help Mexican Indians get a better education.
Cam smiled to himself. Dr. Sáenz had come to just the right place! For the rest of the day, Cam showed the doctor around the Robinson Institute. Dr. Sáenz was very impressed to see fifty-three students studying hard. He questioned Cam on how he had managed to motivate these Indians to study. This was just the opening Cam had been waiting for. Cam told Dr. Sáenz how the Indians needed to be taught in their own language first and then in Spanish later, when they were older. By doing things in this order, the Indians could become proud of their heritage. Cam also explained how reading the Bible in their own language could set the Indians free from all the superstitions that had been keeping them ignorant and poor. They could then learn how to enter the mainstream of Guatemalan life on their own terms.
Dr. Sáenz snapped many photos of what he saw and wrote copious notes about what Cam was saying. When it was time to leave, he congratulated Cam on his work and invited him to come to Mexico and work among the Indians there.
When he returned to Mexico, Dr. Sáenz sent a formal letter to Cam inviting him to come and work in Mexico. It was the first of three letters Cam received that week, and it was the only one that contained good news. The second letter was from his sister to inform Cam that his mother had been diagnosed with cancer and was not expected to live long. The third letter arrived from the leaders of Central American Mission. It stated that since Cam and Elvira were the two missionaries who spoke Cakchiquel the best, it was the mission’s recommendation that they stay in Guatemala and continue to work among the Cakchiquel Indians. A lot of time and money had been spent getting the Cakchiquels the New Testament in their own language, and now it was up to the Townsends to see that it was used to full advantage. The letter concluded with permission for Cam to do “occasional exploration into unoccupied fields.”
At first Cam was very upset about the letter. He and Archer Anderson had spent years training Cakchiquel pastors at the Robinson Institute. Cam couldn’t understand why the leaders of CAM thought the local pastors were less able to preach to their own people than he and the other American missionaries.
Cam did not have to decide how to respond to the letter. The decision was taken out of his hands when he went to see Dr. Ainslie complaining of chest pain and a cough that would not go away. The diagnosis was not good: tuberculosis, a lung disease that was often fatal. Dr. Ainslie told Cam his only chance to survive was to head back to the moderate climate of California, where he needed to get lots of rest. Even then, there were no guarantees that Cam would survive.
The Townsends quickly returned to California. They arrived soon after Cam’s mother had died, and Cam and Elvira went to stay with Cam’s sister Lula Griset and her family. The only joy for Cam being home under these circumstances was that he got to see Elena again. His foster daughter was doing well in high school and was living with Cam’s father and sisters.
While the Townsends were staying with Lula, Elvira went for a routine medical checkup. Like Cam, she was feeling worn down and tired all the time. Since everyone assumed she had been working too hard looking after Cam, the diagnosis came as a shock. Elvira had a serious and untreatable heart condition that could kill her at any time. The doctor ordered total bed rest for her; she was not to get out of bed for anything except to go to the bathroom.
When Cam heard the diagnosis, he sat on the front porch of Lula’s house in Santa Ana and wondered what had gone wrong. He had a great vision for reaching all the Indian tribes of Central and South America and giving them a Bible in their own language. But instead of being able to pursue his vision, he was holed up in a tiny house in California with tuberculosis and a wife who had a life-threatening heart condition. At that moment, it was hard for him to hold out much hope for the future.
Chapter 11
Links in a Chain
Lula took good care of her bedridden brother and sister-in-law. She prepared them meals made with farm-fresh vegetables and gave them both large glasses of fresh milk to drink. Slowly Cam’s and Elvira’s health began to improve.
As Cam got better, hope began to seep back into him. Cam started planning and strategizing in his mind again. By letter he communicated with many people, including Leonard “L.L.” Legters, who had recently married a college professor. L.L. kept sending letters to Cam filled with all sorts of facts and information about the Indian tribes who did not have a written language. According to L.L., there were well over one thousand such tribes in the world, with fifty of them located in Mexico alone.
Cam’s mind began to spin. There was no way he could meet the language needs of so many tribes on his own. After all, it had taken him ten years to translate the New Testament into the Cakchiquel language. Using airplanes was a part of the solution, Cam was sure of that, but the bigger part of the solution was people. Thousands of missionaries needed to be trained to do translation work. Cam knew of two universities in the United States that offered courses in linguistics, but they were four-year courses and didn’t address the area of writing down a previously unwritten language. As he thought about it, Cam told himself there was only one solution. Somehow he would have to start a linguistics school to train missionaries and then send them out to work in areas where they would be the most useful.
Cam wrote to L.L. about this, and L.L. wrote back a very encouraging letter. Why not start in Mexico, he suggested. Mexico was close to the United States, and the fifty unwritten languages there would give the missionaries plenty of opportunity to practice their newly acquired linguistics skills.
Cam liked the idea. He had seen how linguists could get into places where normal missionaries were not welcome. He began to imagine what it would be like if every tribe on earth had access to the Bible and other books in their own language.
By the summer of 1933, Cam was feeling much better and was ready to put his plan into action. He was going to train linguists at a camp right in Mexico and then send them out to nearby tribes to learn the various local languages. He even had a name in mind for the group: Wycliffe Bible Translators, named for John Wycliffe, who had translated the Bible from Latin into English so that peasants and workers could read and understand it for themselves. As Cam read about John Wycliffe, he was surprised to discover that English was the thirty-third language the Bible had been translated into. He wondered where the English-speaking world would be without the diligent translation work of John Wycliffe.
While Cam had the vision and name for this new endeavor, there was one problem with the plan. The Mexican government was cracking down on all religious activity in the country. It had been fifteen years since Mexico’s revolution, and one of the goals of the revolution had been to take power away from the Roman Catholic Church. As a result, all religious schools had been taken over by the government, as well as all property belonging to the Catholic Church. Protestant missionaries were also being watched carefully, and no new missionaries were being issued visas to enter Mexico. All in all, Mexico seemed a bleak place in which to start the new program.
When L.L. visited Cam in Santa Ana with his wife, he encouraged Cam not to worry about the situation in Mexico. Somehow, L.L. assured Cam, God would work it all out.
After visiting Cam, the Legterses traveled on to a large Keswick Bible Conference in New Jersey, where L.L. and James Dale, a missionary from Mexico, were the main speakers. On the second day of the conference, James Dale spoke about the problems facing missionaries in Mexico. After he finished speaking, those attending the conference spent the rest of the day praying and fasting for Mexico. Indeed, many people stayed up all night and prayed. The following morning, everyone at the conference urged L.L. to go with Cam to Mexico and help him set up a training camp for Bible translators. They were all sure that God would clear the way for them to enter the country despite being missionaries. One woman even donated a car to L.L. so that he could get to Mexico, and another person gave him gas money.
