The mozo system was a complicated situation in which an Indian man would get into a position where he needed to borrow money. More often than not, the money was needed to buy liquor. The only people with money to lend were the owners of large finca, and most often they also owned the local liquor stores. Once an Indian owed money to a finca owner, a vicious cycle was set in motion. The Indian man went to work on the finca to earn money to pay back his debt. Sadly, he was away from his family and had to put in long hours of backbreaking labor. To take his mind off his situation, the man would begin to drink more. Of course, he then had to borrow more money to pay for the alcohol until he eventually owed so much to the finca owner that he was virtually the owner’s slave. Indeed, the owners were free to “sell” their mozo servants to work on other finca, and many men found themselves thirty or forty miles away from home with no way to get out of the situation they had created for themselves. If they tried to escape, they were tracked down and whipped mercilessly. They were trapped, with no hope of ever working their way to freedom.
Cam updated Robby on Tiburcio’s story, and they both agreed that the Christian message was the only way to free the Indians from debt and dependence on alcohol. It had worked for Tiburcio, and Cam was eager to share the same message with others.
That night Cam slept in a real bed for the first time in weeks. He was asleep almost as soon as his head touched the fluffy white pillow. He slept soundly, so soundly, in fact, that it nearly cost him his life.
“Cam, wake up!” Robby screamed in his ear.
Cam opened his eyes and looked around. It was dark, but he could feel Robby grasping his shoulders and shaking him vigorously. “What’s up?” he stammered, still trying to get his bearings.
“An earthquake,” shot back Robby over the sound of a loud crash. “I escaped outside, but I couldn’t see you anywhere. How can you sleep through this? We have to get out of here now!”
Cam was suddenly wide awake. He threw back his sheet and headed for the door. Within seconds, he and Robby were standing in the street outside the mission house.
“Look at that!” exclaimed Robby, grabbing Cam and turning him around.
In the moonlight Cam watched with a mixture of horror and fascination. About half a mile down the street the cobblestone pavement was buckling in huge waves that were surging towards them.
“It looks just like the waves at Long Beach,” blurted Cam, unable to take his eyes off the approaching undulations that raised and then dashed to pieces most of the buildings in their path.
The noise all around was horrendous. By now the nurses at the Presbyterian hospital directly across the street were rushing outside, pushing patients in wheelchairs and carrying others on stretchers. The two missionaries braced themselves as the rolling wave approached. The wave lifted them up and deposited them, a little dazed but unhurt, hard on the ground. They both scrambled to their feet.
“Let’s help the nurses,” suggested Cam, running across the crumbled street towards the hospital, which was miraculously still standing.
For the rest of the night and on into the morning, Cam and Robby ferried patients out of the hospital and helped make them as comfortable as possible in the middle of the street. Everyone in the city was camped out-of-doors. Most of the houses lay in rubble, and those that were still standing were too damaged to go back inside. Besides, nobody wanted to be inside if an aftershock occurred.
It was not until daybreak Christmas day that the full extent of the disaster was apparent. The crumbled remains of collapsed buildings littered the streets, and it seemed as though fires raged uncontrollably on each block.
By midmorning, city officials had set up their offices in the middle of the town square. Cam retrieved a dozen Bibles from the badly damaged mission house and walked to the town square to see whether there was anything he could do to help. As he made his way there, he spotted a man sitting in the gutter drinking whiskey. Cam wondered how many other people would be tempted to sit and drink their troubles away as the day went on. By the time he got to see the mayor in the town square, Cam had a plan. “Sir,” he began, “I would like to present you with a Bible at this very difficult time.”
“Thank you,” replied the mayor, barely looking up.
Cam took a deep breath and spoke again. “I know you’re an extremely busy man right now,” he said, “but I wonder if you have considered what might happen if many of your citizens get drunk today. Surely you would agree there is enough chaos already. I urge you to order that no liquor be sold in the city until the situation is under control.”
The mayor looked up and stared at Cam. Cam felt himself turning red. He wondered what the mayor was thinking about the scrawny, twenty-one-year-old American standing in front of him telling him what to do.
After a few moments of deliberation, the mayor turned to an official and barked, “Order a ban on liquor sales effective immediately.”
“Yes, sir,” responded the official, hurrying off to carry out the order.
Cam could hardly believe the mayor had taken his advice—or that he’d actually had the courage to give it in the first place. His time in Guatemala had certainly given him courage and confidence.
Christmas Day came and went in a blur of pulling screaming people from the rubble, helping dazed children find their parents, and setting up a makeshift tent village to serve as a hospital. It was forty-two hours from the time Cam had been roughly awakened in the middle of the earthquake until he was able to get more sleep. Exhausted, he collapsed onto the hard ground beside Robby in a makeshift tent and went straight to sleep. He didn’t even bother to take off his boots.
The aftershocks continued for a month, with the worst one occurring on January 24, 1918. This quake managed to collapse those buildings that had survived the first jolt. Almost all of Guatemala City was leveled by the earthquake and its aftershocks. Many hundreds of people were killed, and funerals continued for days.
Cam did what he could to help with the aftermath of the disaster, but he was eager to get back on the trail selling Bibles again. Once enough relief workers were in place to deal with the crisis, he felt it was time for him to leave the earthquake-ravaged city. Once again Francisco Díaz accompanied him on his travels. Together they embarked on an eleven-month tour that would take them through Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. It would have been a grueling trip for anyone to make, but it was made even more grueling when both Cam and Francisco came down with influenza. They were both ill for days, but they recovered, unlike millions of people around the world who died from the epidemic in 1918.
The more time Cam spent with Francisco Díaz, the more he came to admire the man’s intelligence and determination. Francisco picked up new ideas quickly, and he soaked up Cam’s Bible teaching like a sponge. Cam knew the Ladinos thought the Indians were slow and stupid, but that was because the Indians always had to speak to them in Spanish, a foreign language to them. Cam became convinced that the answer was to teach the Indians to read and write their own language, but their languages were not written down. The people had no dictionaries, no beginning readers, no pamphlets on how to grow better crops or how to treat simple illnesses. They had nothing written in their language. No wonder they lived with such dark superstitions—they had no access to scientific knowledge.
The path out of superstition and into the twentieth century was clear to Cam. It involved writing a tribe’s language down, providing reading material in that language, and translating the Bible into it so that people would have the opportunity to embrace its truth. Of course, the path was easy to map out. It was quite another thing to actually carry it out.
Cam and Francisco were traveling along a jungle trail near the Nicaraguan border about nine months into their challenging trip when they sat down one evening around a smoky campfire. They were roasting a monkey Francisco had been given at the last village. As they sat waiting for the monkey to cook, they talked.
“Why doesn’t someone start schools for Indian children?” asked Cam.
“Who do you have in mind, don Guillermo?” asked Francisco Díaz. “The Ladinos think it’s beneath them to talk to an Indian, and the missionaries all learn Spanish and then spend their years trying to train the Indians to speak it, too.”
“But surely there must be someone who could start schools to teach people in the local languages. What about a person like you? You can read and write,” Cam suggested to Francisco.
“That is true,” said Francisco, turning the stick the monkey was roasting on. “But what would be the point? I only know how to read Spanish. Most Indians work twelve hours a day. They don’t have the time to learn a foreign language from the missionaries, much less from another Indian like me.”
Cam sat staring at the fire for a long time. Someone needed to teach the Indians to read and write in their own language, but who?
Francisco Díaz interrupted his thoughts. “And what about you, don Guillermo? Why don’t you stay and start a school for the Cakchiquel people? You could translate the Bible for us and teach us how to read it.”
Cam glanced at his companion to see whether he was really serious. Francisco certainly looked it. “I don’t think so,” Cam finally spluttered, thinking of how impossible it would be. He hadn’t even finished college yet, he’d never taken a course in language translation, Cakchiquel was one of the weirdest languages he’d ever heard, and once he stopped selling Bibles, he would have no income.
Cam wanted to tell Francisco it would be impossible for him to stay and do what he had suggested, but something inside him rebelled against the word impossible. Was it impossible to learn another language? Was it impossible to translate the Bible into that language? Was it impossible to start a school to teach Indians in that language? Was it impossible to find the money to live in Guatemala for a few more years?
With a sudden burst of clarity, Cam knew nothing was impossible with God. Not only were all these things possible, but he, William Cameron Townsend, was going to stay and do them!
Chapter 7
The Logic of Language
By Christmas 1918, Cam was back in Guatemala City. He had hoped to meet up with Robby again, but Robby had been drafted into the army and had returned to the United States shortly before the war in Europe ended in November.
In Guatemala City, Cam stayed with a Presbyterian missionary couple. As he walked about the city, he was impressed by the rebuilding effort going on all around. When Cam had left Guatemala City eleven months before, it was nothing but a pile of rubble. Now the rubble was gone, and new buildings were sprouting up everywhere. Within a few more months, he figured, there would be virtually no sign left of the devastating earthquake that had leveled the city the previous Christmas.
While he was thankful for the hospitality of the missionary couple, Cam found it lonely without Robby around to talk to and share his experiences with. That is, until he met a single missionary woman from Chicago. Elvira Malmstrom was twenty-six years old, four years older than Cam. The two of them liked each other right away. Elvira spoke perfect Spanish, and she laughed at all Cam’s jokes. She played the organ for the Christmas carol singing and helped Cam organize his letter writing so he didn’t miss anyone. Indeed, Cam soon found himself relying on Elvira more and more. She liked working with children and was as eager to get out into the Indian villages as he was. Cam invited Elvira to visit him in San Antonio, where he was headed after Christmas.
In February, Elvira and the Treichlers, a couple working with Central American Mission, arrived in San Antonio to visit. Cam was not as far along in his efforts to set up a school as he would have liked since he had suffered a bout of malaria and was still not feeling well. However, he was glad to show the three missionaries around San Antonio.
