As the visit progressed, Cam was delighted to see that Elvira fitted in easily among the Indians. Elvira visited the sick and even learned a few Cakchiquel phrases. By the time she was scheduled to return to Guatemala City, Cam had come to a conclusion: Elvira would make a wonderful wife. He proposed to her on Valentine’s Day 1919, and two days later she said yes.
Now that Cam was going to be a married man, Mr. Treichler took him aside and asked him how he planned to support a wife. Cam wasn’t too sure, but Mr. Treichler had a solution. Since Cam had stopped selling Bibles, he suggested that Cam join Central American Mission. Such a move would allow Cam to keep working among the Cakchiquel Indians and provide a network through which he could raise the needed monthly support.
Cam and Elvira talked things over and decided that joining Central American Mission would be the wisest thing to do. Their names were submitted to the mission’s board, and in March, four months before they were to be married, Cam and Elvira were officially accepted as CAM missionaries.
The wedding took place on July 9, 1919, Cam’s twenty-third birthday. Cam had wanted to marry on his birthday, just as his father had married on his birthday. Many friends helped make it a special day. Mr. Treichler gave Cam a gold coin that a jeweler crafted into a ring for Elvira. The president of CAM bought Cam a three-piece suit to replace the tattered clothes he wore on his travels around Central America, and a Ladino Christian woman made Elvira a spectacular wedding dress. None of Cam’s family was able to make it to the wedding, but Elvira’s brother Carl, a pastor in Chicago, arrived in time to be best man.
The honeymoon was not a typical one. Cam and his new bride wanted to show Carl as much of the work in Guatemala as possible. The day after the wedding, the three of them set out on an eighty-five-mile trek to visit as many Cakchiquel Indians as possible. An Indian porter went with them, carrying Elvira’s portable organ, while the two men carried the trio’s clothing and other supplies. Elvira rode Pilgrim, Cam’s newly acquired donkey. When the group came to a village, they would set up Elvira’s organ and hold a service and hand out Bible tracts.
Two weeks later, Carl Malmstrom returned to the United States. It was time for Cam and Elvira to make a home together. They decided to settle in Antigua for the first few months and make regular visits to San Antonio to oversee the school Cam had set up. It was the first school for Indians in all of Central America. Overseeing the school from afar proved impractical, however, and when they received a gift of seventy dollars from Moody Church in Chicago, Cam and Elvira used it to build their own single-room cornstalk house in San Antonio.
The couple had plenty of work to do once they settled in. Elvira played her organ at all the church meetings and taught sewing, singing, and organ playing. She also visited the sick. In many ways she was a perfect wife, except for one thing, which Cam was unaware of until after the wedding. Elvira had an awful temper. But it was no ordinary bad temper. Sometimes she would become enraged for no apparent reason and would rant and rave and throw things around. In the meantime, Cam was left to ponder what the problem could be. At first Elvira’s behavior scared him a great deal, but over time he came to accept that she suffered from some kind of mental illness. As a result, regardless of how she behaved towards him, Cam decided he would always try to be kind and helpful to her.
Cam was delighted to have Francisco Díaz working alongside him again. His goal had always been to work himself out of a job, and he felt that Francisco was the perfect man to take over running the school. Francisco was a conscientious man who was well respected by the members of the local church. Much to Cam’s dismay, though, Francisco Díaz came down with malaria and died a few days later. It was a devastating blow to Cam, but he became more determined than ever to fulfill Francisco’s challenge to him and translate the New Testament into the Cakchiquel language.
The work was painfully slow. First Cam had to develop an ear for the language so that he could imitate its sounds. The language was not at all like English; so many words sounded the same but had very different meanings. The Cakchiquel words for red, stingy, black, and flea all sounded the same except for subtle differences in the “k” sound at the end of each word. The first word had an English-sounding k. The second word had a k that was made while coughing, while the third word had a little popping sound after the k. In the fourth word, the k was a kind of choking sound that could be made only when the Adam’s apple was at the bottom of the throat. Cam, who’d had no training in writing down a language, was baffled as to how to record these four different “k” sounds.
Recording the sounds, though, was not his worst problem. In English, most verbs like “skip” or “play” or “eat” have a certain number of forms, or beginnings and endings that can be added to change their meaning a little. Skip can become skipping, play can become replayed, or eat can become eaten. Adding “ed” to a verb puts the action into the past tense, adding “ing” means the action is happening in the present, and adding “re” at the beginning means to repeat the action. But when Cam came to the use of verbs in the Cakchiquel language, he could find no pattern at all. The verbs were all very long words, and he could not understand how they possibly made sense. He wrote page after page of notes and listened to Cakchiquel Indians speaking for days, but the verbs remained a mystery to him. The more he tried to understand the verb forms, the more stuck he seemed to become. He needed help if he was to be successful in his translation efforts.
One day while Cam was in Antigua buying supplies he heard a man speaking in English. He hurried over to introduce himself and discovered the man was the well-known American archaeologist Dr. Gates. Dr. Gates was as happy to see a fellow American as Cam was to see him. The two of them sat down together at a nearby cafe. Over coffee they had an interesting conversation. Dr. Gates told Cam all about his efforts to locate ancient manuscripts in the area, and Cam told Dr. Gates about his frustration deciphering the Cakchiquel language. “It’s the verbs,” Cam said. “I can’t find any patterns in the verbs. I know if I could, that would help me unlock the language.”
Dr. Gates rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I’m not very familiar with the Cakchiquel language, but I’d have a good guess at where you are going wrong,” he began. “I suspect you’re starting with the way we speak English and other languages that come from Latin and you are trying to fit Cakchiquel into that pattern. I have heard Dr. Sapir, the linguist at the University of Chicago, speak, and he suggests doing just the opposite in a situation like yours. Forget about the English way of putting words together and comparing Cakchiquel words to English words. Instead, start learning the most basic Cakchiquel words until you become familiar with them and begin to see the unique pattern within the Cakchiquel language.”
“Of course, that makes perfect sense!” exclaimed Cam. “Every language has its own pattern of usage, and I will find that pattern much faster if I stop trying to compare Cakchiquel to English.”
“Exactly,” said Dr. Gates, clapping Cam on the shoulder. “I’m sure you will find the language has its own logic.”
Cam’s excitement was growing by the minute. “I don’t know why I couldn’t see it before. It’s like the number system. It took me a long time to work it out. But once I did, the logic was plain and simple. The Cakchiquel Indians counted one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, like we would, but when they got to ten, it was ‘one man,’ and then one man one, one man two, one man three, and so on up to twenty, which they called two men.”
Cam took a sip of his hot, sweet coffee before continuing. “I couldn’t imagine why ten would be one man and twenty would be two men, until an Indian boy showed me. One man has ten fingers, two men have twenty fingers, and so on. It was as simple as that. I was so used to our number system that at first I didn’t see the inner logic of the Cakchiquel system.”
Dr. Gates laughed. “Tell me more about your work in San Antonio. It sounds very interesting.”
Later in the afternoon, after the two men had parted company, Cam could hardly wait to get back to San Antonio. Thanks to a chance meeting with an American archaeologist, he knew he now had an important key to use in unlocking the Cakchiquel language. As he led his donkey, laden with supplies, Cam thought about how much faster the process of deciphering the language would be if he just knew more about language acquisition and translation. What other suggestions could someone with the knowledge of Dr. Sapir give him?
The next day he went straight to work taking more notes and listening to the Indians chatter to each other. Within days, Cam began to see how the language worked. It was no wonder he could not work out the verb forms—there were thousands of them. A single verb like “walk” could have up to one hundred thousand different beginnings and endings that added to or changed its meaning. Many of these beginnings and endings could be bundled up together, making extremely long and complicated words. Things could also be added to “walk” to tell the listener who was walking, where they were walking, in what direction they were walking—how many they were walking with, how fast they were walking, at what time they were walking, and the list could go on and on. And all of this could be found in a single word!
Within a few months, Cam had a basic grasp of the Cakchiquel language. However, before he could begin translating, he had to devise a method for writing the language. He decided to use the Spanish alphabet, using one letter to stand for a particular Cakchiquel sound. This way he could build complex Cakchiquel words using only four or five letters.
Once he had an alphabet, Cam was ready to begin his translation work. He chose to start translating the Gospel of Mark. Although he knew he would make many mistakes, he hoped his translation would make enough sense to tell the Cakchiquel Indians about God. An Indian man from the nearby village of Comalapa helped him with the task.
Elvira helped, too. After Cam was satisfied with his translation of a passage, she typed up the manuscript. Finally, when Cam was satisfied he had a good “temporary” draft of the first four chapters of Mark, he took them to Antigua to have them printed.
It was not an easy task finding a printer, but eventually Cam tracked one down in the mayor’s office. Cam was standing in the office talking to the printer about some of the punctuation marks when the mayor walked in. “What’s going on?” the mayor asked, surveying the pile of papers in Cam’s hand.
“I’ve been translating the Gospel of Mark into Cakchiquel, and now I have the first four chapters ready for printing,” Cam answered with a touch of pride.
The mayor frowned. “What a waste of time!” he exploded. “We’re trying to civilize the Indians and teach them Spanish ways, and you want them to learn to read in their own backward language. Don’t you understand, we are trying to get rid of these languages for good.”
Cam gulped nervously. What should he say? One wrong word and the printer would be forbidden to print the precious pages. He prayed a quick prayer for inspiration. A moment later he had it. “But mayor,” he said respectfully, “look how it is written.” He held a page up for the mayor to see. “There is Cakchiquel on one side of the page, but the other side is written in Spanish. This way the Indians can learn to read in their own language and in Spanish all in one book.”
The mayor studied the page. “Hum. I suppose it will be all right then. You can print it,” he said to the printer as he strolled out of the office.
Cam let out a sigh of relief. The printer took some more notes on what Cam wanted done and promised to have the printed pages ready within a month. He even gave Cam a discount, since the mayor had now approved the project.
