After lunch, Doreen took Betty and Dorothy on a tour of San Miguel. There wasn’t really much to see, and the tour was over in a few minutes. The tour ended at Barbara Edwards’ house, which was made of split bamboo and had a thatched roof. But the house was only a single story and sat precariously off the ground on bamboo poles. The women climbed the ladderlike staircase that led into the house. Immediately Betty noticed the contrast between Barbara’s and Doreen’s houses. Barbara had a bed and a bench for sitting, and the only other furniture was the fogón in the small kitchen area. It appeared to Betty, judging by the interior of the house, that comfort was not particularly important to Barbara.
“And of course, that’s where you two will live,” Doreen announced, gesturing toward one of the big barnlike structures that Betty and Doreen had first seen upon their arrival.
Soon Betty and Dorothy were settled in, as much as a person with two saddlebags and a few boxes filled with belongings could be. The school occupied the first floor, while upstairs a large room ran the length of the building, with a kitchen at the back. Three bedrooms opened off the large room. Dorothy occupied the front bedroom; Marta, a nineteen-year-old Ecuadorian woman who taught in the school, occupied the middle bedroom; and Betty was in the back bedroom. Her bedroom was surprisingly large—too big to be made cozy with the few personal items she had brought with her.
As she arranged the small, red fireman’s lantern she had brought from the United States and hung a plastic clothes bag to serve as a makeshift closet, Betty thought about what lay ahead for her. Her first task was to find an informant, someone who knew the Colorados’ language well and was willing to sit with her and help her untangle its meaning.
Such a job was a labor of love for most informants. From her time attending the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Oklahoma, Betty knew that the task was tedious. The informant would say a word over and over again while she would attempt to discern the particular sounds that made up the word and would then write them down. Sometimes she would have to sit for a long time and watch the informant’s mouth and lips as he or she formed and repeated the word several times. This would give her some understanding of how the word should be said and a clearer understanding of its sound. The process could be long and torturous, but it was the first stage in getting a Bible in the language of the Colorados into their hands. First the language had to be understood and reduced to writing. Then the translation of the various books of the Bible into that language could begin. And just as important, the Colorados would have to be encouraged to learn to read their own language so that they could make use of the translated Bible.
Betty had a long and arduous task ahead of her. Often it took a team of people—like links in a chain—to accomplish the task. One person would begin the process, find a reliable informant, and begin writing the language down. A second person would then review and refine what the first person had accomplished, and so on, until a Bible had been translated and finally printed in the language.
Although she knew that she would be the first link in the chain, Betty did not know how long she was going to be stationed at San Miguel de los Colorados. She secretly hoped that Jim would propose to her and the two of them would marry and begin working together, though she had no idea whether or not this would happen. As she folded her clothes and stacked them in the kerosene box shelves in her bedroom, Betty resolved to leave that matter to God. For now she had a big enough challenge ahead of her.
And what a challenge finding an informant turned out to be. It was three days before Betty even saw her first Colorado Indian. She was hanging her bedsheets to dry on the clothesline at the back of the house when a Colorado man emerged from the jungle, riding a pony. The first thing she noticed about him was the tight red helmet he wore on his head. As the man rode closer, Betty could see that his body was painted a vivid red with black horizontal stripes beginning at his forehead and going all the way to his feet. The man also wore a black and white shirt that stopped just below his hips and was adorned with a brilliant yellow and turquoise scarf. The Colorado man rode over to Doreen’s house, dismounted, and tied his pony to the fence. Betty quickly followed. When she got there, Doreen was talking to the man in Spanish. The man replied to her questions in halting Spanish. Betty surmised that he had come to get medicine from Doreen.
Betty studied the Indian up close as Doreen introduced her to him. She smiled, and he smiled back. His teeth, tongue, and lips were stained a bluish-black color. Betty’s heart beat fast. Could this be the informant she had been praying for? She asked Doreen to offer him the job in Spanish, and Betty understood his reply. It was yes! Although he had to go home just then, he said he would surely return and help Betty next week.
As the Colorado mounted his pony and rode off back into the jungle, Betty asked Doreen about the man’s helmet. “Why on earth does an Indian need to wear a helmet in the jungle?”
A bemused smile settled across Doreen’s face. “A helmet?” she said. “Why, that’s his hair!”
Betty felt her cheeks blush.
“Colorado men plaster their hair down with a mixture of Vaseline and achiote—a red dye they get from the seed pods of a certain tree. It may look like a helmet to the untrained eye, but I can assure you, it really is his hair,” Doreen explained with a giggle.
The Indian man never returned to help Betty as he said he would. Betty soon learned that Doreen had been right when she said that the Colorados were indifferent to white people. Every Colorado Indian that Doreen or Barbara asked about being an informant for Betty agreed to come back and help out, but not one of them ever did. Even offering them money for their time did not make a bit of difference.
Betty had other frustrations as well. She had read countless books on missionaries and had met a number of missionaries over the course of her life. Still she was astonished at how much time and energy was taken up as a missionary just doing what was necessary to stay alive. The house had no running water, and water had to be carried in buckets from a river three hundred yards away. Then the water that was to be used for drinking needed to be boiled, as did the milk they drank. All of this took time and energy. As Betty soon learned, milk had to be watched constantly while it was being heated or it would boil over and make a mess.
Lighting the fire and keeping it lit in the stove was also a continual source of stress. Piles of wood had to be gathered and then laid out to dry—not an easy task in the rainy season. And although a thirteen-year-old girl came and did their laundry, scrubbing the clothes clean on a washboard in a tub of water perched over a fire, they still had lots of food preparation to take care of. Every meal they ate had to be made from scratch from what was locally available and cooked over the fogón. And then there was bread to make, which also needed constant watching while it cooked. Betty found it all quite exhausting.
At night the women had limited light to read and write by. The house was lighted by two kerosene lanterns and whatever candles they lit. The trouble was, the light also attracted bugs—lots of them—and the bugs swarmed around the lanterns and candles and whoever happened to be sitting nearby trying to read or write a letter home. All in all, the daily routine of missionary life was a far bigger challenge than Betty had imagined it would be. Sometimes at night she had vivid dreams about visiting a five-and-dime store back home. What a thrill it was to see all those useful items for sale and purchase them in her sleep!
All the while, Betty continued to pray for a Colorado informant to help her in the process of writing down the language. Her prayer was finally answered, but not quite in the way Betty had imagined it might be. She did not find a Colorado Indian to help her. Instead she found a man who spoke the Colorado language fluently and was willing to help as her informant.
Don Macario was a middle-aged Ecuadorian man whom Betty had seen a number of times at the worship service on Sunday mornings. He told Betty that he had been raised on a hacienda (a large plantation) right alongside Colorado children. He had played with them, and in the process he had learned to speak and understand their language fluently. A devout Christian, he was presently unemployed, and he explained that he would be happy to serve as Betty’s informant.
Betty was ecstatic when she learned this. God had answered her prayers and sent her possibly the only person in the world who was fluent in both the language of the Colorados and Spanish, which she could speak and understand, making the whole process of communication so much easier for her. She could hardly wait to get to work on the project.
Chapter 11
Unraveling the Language
Betty sat at a long split-bamboo table, her index cards on her left, paper in front of her, and Don Macario on her right. She was making a neat chart of sounds and syllables in the language of the Colorados. One of the first things she had learned from her informant was that the Colorados called the language they spoke Tsahfihki—meaning “the language of the people.”
Betty and Don Macario soon established a pattern that worked for both of them. They would meet for one hour in the morning, which gave Betty enough material to analyze and categorize for five or six more hours. By then it was time to do the evening chores and set things up for their meeting the next morning.
After a month of meeting regularly each morning with Don Macario, Betty found the work of writing down the language of the Colorados to be progressing slowly but steadily. Her first task was to identify all the various sounds that made up the Tsahfihki language and then reduce them to the least number of symbols, with each symbol representing a particular sound. In this way she was able to produce an alphabet that would one day allow those reading and writing the language to string the various sound symbols together to create words, with which the person could deliver or receive meaning. The words themselves were her next big challenge.
At SIL, Betty had learned that speakers of an unwritten language tend to speak in phrases rather than words and have very little sense of individual words—when words start and when they end. The same was true for Don Macario, who, although he spoke fluent Spanish and was completely familiar with the concept of individual words in Spanish, was hard-pressed to identify individual words in Tsahfihki. He had never seen the language written down and so had never focused on individual words. Like the Colorados, he had learned to speak the language as a series of phrases strung together. It was left to Betty to work through the phrases her informant had spoken and she had written down, searching for what might be the beginning and ending of individual words. Often words have suffixes and prefixes added to them, and Betty looked for repeating patterns in the sounds that might indicate a prefix or a suffix and thus mark the beginning or ending of an individual word. Then she had to work out what those individual nouns and verbs meant in different situations.
Betty kept at the task. She was content with the way things were progressing. From her training at the Summer Institute of Linguistics, she knew that the work of writing down a new language was tedious and often took many detours, but things were moving forward.
Don Macario turned out to be a very patient man, willing to repeat the same sequence over and over until Betty had reduced it to writing. Betty was grateful for his patience with her. She couldn’t imagine how difficult it would have been to work with someone impatient or bad-tempered.
Although Betty’s main focus was on writing down the language of the Colorados, she was also interested in anything her fellow women missionaries were up to. Sometimes she accompanied Doreen on her jungle missions of mercy or offered to help out in the clinic. So it was not a big surprise when someone banged on Betty’s front door late one night.
