Robby, however, believed that God could heal the woman, and he began to encourage Pedro to pray with him. He visited the woman and sat through the night with her. He sang hymns to her and soaked her infected feet in warm water. By morning, the gangrene was receding, and slowly the woman began to recover. Within a week she was well again.
Cam was heartened by the story. “If we will do the possible, God will do the impossible,” he said.
After lunch Robby suggested they go for a swim. It was a still, clear afternoon, and there was hardly a ripple on the surface of the lake. Soon both men were splashing about in the cool, fresh water. They swam out several hundred yards and floated on their backs. As he floated, Cam looked up at the clear, blue sky. He hadn’t felt so relaxed in months. It was good to be back with his old friend, and the Bible conference they were planning was going to be an exciting event.
About halfway to shore, Cam looked back to see how closely Robby was following. He could hardly believe what he saw. Robby was about one hundred yards behind him, but he wasn’t floating along leisurely as he had been. Instead Robby’s arms were flailing, and his head was shaking wildly. Cam swam toward his friend at full speed, thinking of the time he had nearly drowned in the canal in Fresno, California. “Don’t let this happen to Robby. There’s so much work to be done,” he prayed under his breath as he swam.
Within seconds Cam had his forearm locked around his friend’s neck. But Robby was much heavier than he and slipped under the water. Cam stayed with him, struggling to resurface, but instead was pulled down deeper. About nine feet down, Robby went limp. Cam dragged him to the surface. As Cam gasped several deep breaths of air, Robby’s body slipped under the water again. Cam knew he did not have the strength to pull him up, so instead he swam ashore as fast as he could and called for help.
Several fishermen launched their boats and rowed to the spot where Robby had gone under. Cam could see Robby’s motionless body at the bottom of the clear lake. Two of the fishermen dived into the water to retrieve Robby. As soon as Robby was pulled into the boat, Cam began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He kept it up while Robby’s body was carried off the boat and onto the shore. Indeed, he kept it up for as long as he could. But two hours after first seeing Robby go under the water, Cam finally gave up the struggle. He had to face it. William Elbert Robinson, his loyal friend from Occidental College and fellow missionary to the Cakchiquel Indians, was dead.
Cam dreaded sending a telegram to Genevieve, Robby’s wife. The couple had been married for less than three years, and Robby’s death was impossible to explain. Robby was a strong swimmer, and it had been a calm day on the lake.
Three days later, on Tuesday morning, June 27, 1922, the funeral service was held. Genevieve had made it home late the night before. She was as stunned as everyone else was by Robby’s death. The mayor of Panajachel declared it a day of mourning, and the service was held in the school, the only building large enough for the enormous crowd that gathered for the funeral.
Ironically, Robby was buried in the crypt that had been prepared for Pedro’s wife who had made the miraculous recovery from gangrene. On Robby’s gravestone were inscribed the words, “W. E. Robinson, Bearer of Good News.”
As Cam stood beside the grave of his friend, he felt more alone than he ever had before. There was so much work to do, and the two men who had helped him the most, Francisco Díaz and Elbert “Robby” Robinson, had both died unexpectedly.
Chapter 9
A Job Completed
Six months after Robby’s funeral, Cam was attending the Bible conference he had been planning with Robby on the day of his drowning. It had been difficult adjusting to life without his old friend around, but there had been a lot to keep Cam’s mind busy. Cam’s brother Paul and sister-in-law Laura had come to help with the mission work. Paul was as practical and hands-on as ever and immediately took charge of supervising construction of the new buildings the mission was erecting in San Antonio. Mrs. Heim had sent Cam another generous donation, this time four thousand dollars, which he had used to buy building materials. Paul and a crew of Indian men set to work building a proper boarding school. Soon one hundred children from outlying areas were living in the new facility, supervised by three American women missionaries. The children had been sent to the school by their parents to learn to read and write the Cakchiquel language. A medical clinic was also built in the town, and Central American Mission provided a nurse to oversee it. Dr. Ainslie, whom Cam had met while in Los Angeles on furlough, now worked at the Presbyterian hospital in Guatemala City and was on call to handle difficult cases at the clinic.
Paul was a fast worker, and once the school and clinic were built, he began work on an orphanage. Until it was completed, Cam arranged for the needy children to stay with various Christians around the village. He and Elvira took in two such children themselves, Elena Trejo and Joe Chicol. Both were eager students, and the Townsends had high hopes that one day they would carry on the work among the Cakchiquel Indians in the area.
Cam had more plans, too—big plans. He confided in Paul that he wanted San Antonio to become a model Indian town, an example of how, with a little encouragement, Indians could learn to stand on their own two feet. In response to this, a coffee manufacturing company in St. Louis, whose manager had read about Cam in a Christian magazine, sent him a turbine and coffee bean sheller. The equipment allowed the Indians to shell their own coffee beans and so derive more profit for themselves by not having to pay a Ladino to do it.
All this was heartening to Cam, but none of it was as exciting as the arrival of Archer Anderson in February 1923. Archer had just graduated from the Philadelphia School of the Bible, where in an edition of the Central American Mission magazine Bulletin he had read about the work Robby was doing at the time of his death. As a result, Archer decided to come to Guatemala and continue from where Robby had left off.
Archer Anderson turned out to be quite a whirlwind. Cam was amazed at how quickly he adjusted to the Cakchiquel way of life. Within six weeks of his arrival, Archer had fixed up the building Robby had bought to serve as a Bible school. In no time at all, the Robinson Bible Institute, named in honor of Robby, was up and running. Fifteen students from three surrounding villages were enrolled in the school.
The Townsends went to stay in Robby’s old house so that Cam could serve as translator for Archer Anderson when he taught class. However, Cam could see he wouldn’t be needed for long. Archer was picking up the Cakchiquel language at an amazing pace. Indeed, he was soon fluent in the language and had no need for Cam to be his translator.
By the end of 1923, everything was going well for Cameron Townsend and the group of missionaries who worked with him. Indeed, things were going so well it actually created problems for Cam. Other missionaries began complaining about Cam’s work among the Cakchiquel Indians. Whatever Cam did, someone would criticize it. He would invite Indians into his home and was criticized for being too informal. He was criticized because he spoke to the Indians in Cakchiquel instead of requiring them to learn Spanish, when everyone knew that Cakchiquel was a dead-end language. He was criticized because he had no formal Bible training and yet he ran a Bible institute. He was also criticized for treating the Indians as a separate group of people from the Ladinos. By doing so, people said he was encouraging competition between the two groups. The list of things people complained about went on and on.
Finally, Central American Mission sent Dr. Lewis Sperry Chafer, the mission’s executive secretary, from his office in Dallas, Texas, to Guatemala to investigate the work Cam was doing and the complaints against him. Cam had recently broken his ankle and was hobbling around when Dr. Chafer arrived. Despite his injury, he borrowed Paul’s Model T Ford and spent the next fourteen days driving Dr. Chafer around the Indian villages in the area and then down the rutted, muddy roads through the Guatemalan countryside and across the border into El Salvador. As they drove, Dr. Chafer grilled Cam on every aspect of his mission work. His main concern was why Cam felt it more important to do translation work than “normal” missionary work.
By the time the tour was over, Dr. Chafer was convinced that the Indians had a right to read the Bible in their own language and that translating the Bible into a local language was a worthwhile activity for a missionary to undertake. This was good news to Cam, but there was some bad news, too. Dr. Chafer was only one of eight men who would have to vote on the issue of Bible translation at the 1925 council meeting of Central American Mission, which was to be held in Chicago. Cam groaned. He knew he would have to go to Chicago to meet the other seven members of the council, even though it meant taking precious time out from his translation work.
In 1925, the Townsends visited California again and then traveled on to Chicago. The Central American Mission council meeting was held at Moody Church, Elvira’s home church. Cam met with the council members in the morning and answered their questions. Then, during lunch break, he walked along North Avenue with Mr. Smith, the man on the council who seemed the most opposed to the idea of Central American Mission’s supporting Bible translation. By now Cam was very frustrated with the whole situation. Even though Dr. Chafer had given a stirring speech commending the work Cam was doing in Guatemala, Mr. Smith was not convinced.
Cam tried to talk to him some more about his work in Guatemala, but Mr. Smith would not listen. Finally, in a rare show of temper, Cam snapped, “It doesn’t matter whether you like it or not, Mr. Smith, the Cakchiquel New Testament is going to be translated!” With that he turned and walked briskly back to the church alone.
Later that afternoon, a vote was taken as to whether Cam should be allowed to continue his work. Six men voted for him to continue, and two, including Mr. Smith, voted for him to stop his Bible translation and do routine missionary work.
Six to two was enough to win the vote, and Cam felt very pleased with the result. Now, he told himself, nothing could keep him from his translating work. He was eager to get back to Guatemala and continue. However, while he was away, Paul and Laura Townsend had found a new calling. Paul had been offered a job teaching at Presbyterian Industrial College in Guatemala City. While Cam was delighted to see his brother using his talents to teach others, Paul had left quite a gap to fill, and Cam found himself busier than ever.
A year after he returned to Guatemala from Chicago, Cam counted up the number of days he had been able to spend working on translating the New Testament into Cakchiquel. It added up to a paltry twelve days. As Cam thought about it, he remembered the conversation he’d had with Mr. Smith. He had been rude to Mr. Smith, and even though he had won the vote, his Bible translation was at a virtual standstill. As he thought about it, Cam decided it was time to apologize for his behavior. He took out a sheet of paper and wrote, “Dear Mr. Smith, Please forgive my anger. I’ve found that unless the Lord undertakes, I will never finish the work of the Cakchiquel translation.”
Cam felt much better after he had mailed the letter. He seemed to have more energy, too. Suddenly his translation work began to fall into place. By 1926, he had completed writing a forty-nine page grammar of the Cakchiquel language. He sent a copy of the grammar to Dr. Sapir at the University of Chicago for his comments. Dr. Sapir wrote back an encouraging letter. Cam breathed a sigh of relief. While he thought he was on the right track in his understanding of the Cakchiquel language, it was very encouraging to have such a noted linguist as Dr. Sapir endorse his work.
