As it turned out, the New York World’s Fair was not the financial success Cam had hoped it would be, but in other ways it was very successful. By the end of 1964, a record number of 202 recruits had signed up to do translation work with SIL, bringing the organization’s membership to sixteen hundred. That same year, over three million dollars was raised for the work of SIL, with nearly all of it going directly to missionaries working in tribal areas. Over one million people had stopped in at the pavilion, and two-thirds of them had taken the time to listen to a talk about SIL’s work. Over one hundred newspapers and magazines had run articles that shared the needs of tribal people within the United States and around the world. Cam felt more than ever that the job of reaching every tribe and language with the gospel could be achieved in his lifetime.
Chapter 19
A Growing Organization
The years continued to roll by for Cam and Elaine Townsend. Their oldest daughter Grace married Tom Goreth in 1966. True to form, Cam used the opportunity to remind the 250 wedding guests that there were still two thousand tribes who had never heard the gospel in their own language.
That same year, Cam was awarded an honorary degree from the University of San Marcos in Peru. He had been offered other degrees by several well-known universities in the United States, but he had always turned them down, not wanting people to think a person had to have a degree to be a good translator. However, he decided to accept the degree from the university in Peru as a gesture of respect for the country’s education system. Now, at seventy years of age, he was officially Dr. W. Cameron Townsend, though everybody still called him Uncle Cam.
Even as he got older, Cam never stopped looking for new tribes who needed to have the Bible translated for them. As he looked around, his gaze settled on a place that most Americans considered impossible to reach: the Caucasus region of the Soviet Union, located between the Black and Caspian Seas. Over one hundred separate languages were spoken in the region. The problem was that the people who spoke those languages—along with the people of Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and East Germany—were locked behind the “Iron Curtain.” Not only were they behind the Iron Curtain, but the Soviet Union and the United States were still locked in a Cold War with each other. Indeed, there was so much mistrust between the two countries that it was virtually impossible for an American to get a visa to enter the Soviet Union.
Despite all of the political and ideological hatred and mistrust that existed between the two countries, Cam desperately wanted to find a way to bring the Bible to the millions of ethnic people in the Soviet Union who lived without any knowledge of the gospel. Many people told him it was an impossible dream, but the word impossible was not in Cam’s vocabulary.
In 1967, Cam and Elaine moved to Mexico City, in part so that they could study Russian. They took lessons every day, and each day they prayed that God would open up a way for them to go to the Soviet Union. Cam made friends with many people from the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. He charmed them with stories from his years of adventure translating the Bible into native languages.
Finally, in the summer of 1968, Cam felt the time was right to ask for permission to visit the Soviet Union. He had to have a specific destination where he wanted to go in the country, so he wrote to the Soviet Academy of Science in Moscow, asking whether he could come to compare notes with Russian linguists.
It was September before he got the answer he was waiting for. He had an invitation to visit the academy as soon as he wanted. That was all Cam needed. He swung into action, telling Elaine he would like to be in Moscow within ten days. Thankfully, Elaine was used to her husband’s fast decisions, and she spent all one day and most of the next on the phone informing more than eighty of their friends and supporters that the doors to the Soviet Union were open. They were about to fulfill Cam’s dream of going behind the Iron Curtain.
Promises of prayer and money flowed in, and by the time Cam and Elaine were ready to leave on Wednesday, October 2, 1968, they had everything they needed. It was particularly hard for Elaine to think of leaving their four children, though the children were hardly little anymore. Grace had been married for two years, Joy and Elainadel were attending Columbia Bible College, and Bill was enjoying his time at Ben Lippen, a boarding high school.
Cam and Elaine left New York on a cold, blustery day and arrived in Moscow to an even colder blast of Arctic air. After living in Central America for so long, they found the freezing temperatures to be quite a shock. Even in their hotel room, which overlooked Red Square, the Townsends often kept their coats on for warmth.
Their first task in Moscow was to get a better grasp of the Russian language, so they studied for about six hours a day. The rest of the time they spent exploring Moscow or visiting the new friends they had made in the Mexican and Colombian embassies.
While Cam was in Moscow, he heard the legend that Russians used to explain why there were over one hundred distinct languages in the Caucasus. The legend said that as an angel flew over the area giving out languages, he flew too close to the cliff and ripped open the bottom of his bag on a sharp rock. As a result, languages tumbled out and settled on the valleys below, causing people who lived so closely together to speak so many different languages.
The legend fascinated Cam. He had never heard an explanation quite like it before. It made him want to get out into the countryside and get to know the people who spoke each of the different languages.
By Christmas, Cam and Elaine felt they knew enough Russian to get started with their real purpose for being in the Soviet Union. They took a train to the Caucasus region and began visiting officials and other people there. They stopped at schools and universities, museums and factories, observing the good job the Soviet Union had done in helping to improve literacy in the most remote areas. Cam could see that just about everyone could read. Now the challenge was to find a way to translate the Bible into all of the various languages for people to read.
At first a number of officials were not pleased with Cam’s plan and ideas. They pointed out that the Soviet Union, which was an atheist state, had no place for God. Cam found a way around the problem, however. One linguist Cam met with told him he would not be allowed to translate any part of the Bible into a local language. After thinking about it for a moment, though, the linguist then corrected himself. “We are allowed to write down ancient traditional stories, and Bible stories would fall into that category.”
Cam nodded in agreement. He had found that there was always some way to translate the Bible, even in so-called closed countries. When Cam and Elaine returned to Moscow in February 1969, an official invitation was extended to SIL to come to the Soviet Union to work with the languages of the Caucasus region. Thanks to Cam’s diplomacy and track record working in other countries, SIL was one of the few foreign organizations ever invited to work in the Soviet Union.
Of course, when the Townsends got back to the United States, everyone was eager to hear about the open door into the Soviet Union. Elaine set off on a thirty-day tour that took her from the East Coast to the West Coast, with forty-eight stops along the way. While she did this, Cam flew to Mexico City for the dedication of SIL’s new regional headquarters building. SIL had outgrown “The Kettle,” and so a new building had been erected to replace it. The building housed offices, a computer room, a library, an auditorium, and a small museum displaying tribal artifacts. The rooms were named after the various officials who had helped SIL during its thirty-two years of work in Mexico.
The biennial conference of SIL was held in the new facility. When it was over, Cam headed back to Charlotte, North Carolina, where he and Elaine had agreed to build a permanent home, or as permanent as any home the Townsends had lived in. Soon after his arrival in Charlotte, Cam announced plans to return to the Soviet Union. He wanted to write a book about how bilingual education had improved the life of people in the Caucasus. He also thought he might visit some of the SIL workers in Asia and the Pacific region. Although Cam prayed each day for the Wycliffe Bible translators spread around the world, he had not seen many of the places where they worked.
By the beginning of October 1969, everything was set. Cam and Elaine, accompanied by sixteen-year-old Bill, boarded an airplane bound for the Soviet Union. Cam intended to spend a month there collecting photographs and information for his book.
In Moscow, Cam received a hearty welcome. The Soviet leaders were right behind his idea for a book, and they assigned a government photographer to accompany him to the Caucasus. The month flew by as Cam visited schools and universities throughout the region. Everywhere he went he asked officials how they had managed to increase literacy among the poorest people.
When the month was up, it was time for the Townsends to fly on to New Delhi, India, and then to Nepal, where Cam was greatly impressed by the work he saw. Fifteen SIL workers from six different nations were working on translating twelve local languages. Students from Nepal’s only university were working alongside them. This was exactly what Cam had wanted SIL to be thirty-six years before when he had founded the organization. He wanted it to be an organization made up of people from many countries who fanned out across the globe, translating the Bible and cooperating with government officials wherever they could.
The Philippines was the next port of call. Here, once again, Cam was greatly moved by the dedication of the Wycliffe workers. One hundred fifty-six of them were working with forty-two native languages. There was nothing Cam would have liked more than to roll up his sleeves and join the workers, but he had to get back to the United States and focus on his Soviet studies.
From the Philippines, Cam and Elaine went to Papua New Guinea. SIL was working hard in this forgotten corner of the world. Over three hundred translators were in the country working on translating the Bible into eighty-seven tribal languages. They had also followed the example Cam had set in Tetelcingo, Mexico, more than thirty years before. There Cam had helped the people of the village improve their daily lives by showing them how to irrigate and grow new crops. Al Pence, the director of SIL in Papua New Guinea, proudly showed Cam how native men were now running a print shop and a lumber mill. Not only that, but many of the young men had been trained in a variety of technical skills.
From Papua New Guinea, the Townsends visited Australia and New Zealand before heading back to the United States via Hawaii.
When they got back to North Carolina, Elaine made an appointment for Cam to see a doctor. Once or twice towards the end of their trip, Cam had noticed that he was short of breath. Elaine was worried that it might be something serious, but Cam pointed out that he was now seventy-three years old and had been traveling through time zones at a rapid rate, speaking and visiting with people everywhere he went. That was enough to take the breath away from a man half his age!
Still Elaine got her way, and the doctor frowned when Cam described his shortness of breath and chest pains. An appointment was made with a heart specialist. Sure enough, the specialist told Cam he had heart problems. He also said the best treatment for the ailment was for Cam to slow down.
For the first time ever, Cam took a doctor’s advice seriously. He tried hard not to be too busy, but there was a new yard to tend and hundreds of people all over the world to keep in touch with. And then there was the book about Soviet bilingual education to write. Slowing down was not easy for Cam, but by now he had accepted that it was time to leave most of his SIL work in the capable hands of the next generation.
