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A TV Interview with the founder of Wycliffe Bible Translators, Uncle Cam Townsend
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"Uncle Cam" Townsend TV Interview
The sketch requires an interviewer and older male actor to portray Uncle Cam.
I: [Introduce self] Our guest tonight is William Cameron Townsend, one of the most daring and innovative Christian leaders of the 20th century. Let’s welcome don Guillermo known to many also as Uncle Cam. Sir, how would you like to be called, don Guillermo or Uncle Cam?
T: I usually go by Uncle Cam, but for this audience, I'm don Guillermo. When I first arrived in Guatemala in 1917, I learned that my middle name, Cameron, which I go by in the U.S., was easily confused with the Spanish word for shrimp. Because at 130 lbs, I had often been teased about being skinny, I preferred my first name over Cameron; thus, my Latino friends called me don Guillermo.
I: Don Guillermo, your work in linguistics has been honored by five Latin American governments. How did you come to learn Spanish? By growing up in Southern CA?
T: No, I grew up in a poor tenant farm family, but we didn't ever think of ourselves as poor because of the rich Christian faith in our home. No, my linguistic work has been among the "hidden" minority language groups of Latin America. It was because the indios, the indigenous peoples of Central America, did not speak Spanish that Wycliffe Bible Translators was founded.
I: Oh, don Guillermo, don't be so modest. We all know that you founded Wycliffe Bible Translators. Tell us how it all began.
T: While attending Occidental College in Los Angeles, I expressed my interest in joining the Student Volunteer Band, a foreign missions club. When asked why I wanted to join, I couldn't articulate a reason and murmured, "I'm not sure why." Soon thereafter, Mr. John R. Mott, the leader of the Student Volunteer Movement, spoke to our school about the urgency for world evangelization. I was fascinated by his telling the story of Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission. I thought, if God would lead me into mission work, I wanted to be like this man. The next thing I knew, I joined not the SVM, but the Army National Guard!
I: (surprised) What? Wait a minute, you joined the military during WWI?
T: Yes, a recruiter visited the campus and convinced me and my best friend, Carroll Byram, to join. If the U.S. entered the war in Europe, we would be drafted anyway.
I: So how did you get involved with missions?
The Bible House of Los Angeles wanted to know to know if any students would take a year off to distribute Bibles in Central America. Only me, and the President of the College YMCA, Robbie Robinson, who was 10 years older than me, showed any interest. A missionary on furlough from Guatemala, Miss Zimmerman, challenged us both with "When will you boys be going?"
Congress had just declared war on Germany. "My National Guard unit will be shipping out," I said. Robbie exclaimed that it was his patriotic duty to join up. I was not at all prepared for what happened next; we were shamed into going.
I: You, as Christians, were shamed into going to war?
T: No, Miss Zimmerman shamed us into going to Guatemala. In fact, she exploded: She called us cowards and said "a million other men are going off to war and leaving us women to do the Lord's work alone. You are both needed in Central America."
Robbie committed to going to Guatemala. But how could I do so? I had a commitment to my National Guard unit. Robbie said, let's pray that you get out of it. So, I asked a professor to help write a letter explaining why I wanted a deferment. I stood at attention before my Commander as he read the letter. He looked up at me----and said: Go! You can do a lot more good distributing Bibles in Central America than shooting Germans in France.
I: So, you and Robbie made it to Catholic Guatemala. How were Bibles received from Protestant missionaries like yourselves?
T: There was opposition. But I quickly learned to befriend the government officials and land owners and get their permission first. I was paired with an Indian believer named Francisco. Frisco, as I called him, introduced me to the Indian culture and their needs.
First, their spiritual needs were doubly great due to a kind of Cristo-paganism. The indios were both superstitious and religious with witch doctors telling them that the sun was their father and the moon their grandmother. The Catholic clergy only showed up in their villages when there was money to be made from performing a baptism, marriage, or funeral. They spoke in Spanish, a language that the people could not understand.
Their physical needs were heart-wrenching: they lived in perpetual poverty induced by the mozo labor system. The saloon keepers collaborated with the land owners to keep the indios plied with alcohol on credit. They could never get out of debt and remained stuck in this forced labor system.
Now, my father also farmed other peoples land. He owed a debt, but he never had to sell himself into slavery. Frisco said his people had no hope. But there is always hope in Christ. So off I went offering Bibles in Spanish to the indios when an illiterate Cakchiquel man challenged me with a question that baffled me, the college boy.
He asked: If your God is so smart, why can't He speak my language?
I: And that's how Wycliffe Bible Translators was born?
T: Exactly, with my friend Frisco, and a pack mule named Peregrina or Pilgrim, we walked a thousand trails all over Central America. I became convinced that the Bible is the Indian peasant's only liberator. The Cakchiquel must have the Word of God in their own language, meaning that I would stay well beyond my original one-year commitment.
I struggled to analyze the grammar of this unwritten language because I was thinking in the Latin mold. Of course, each language has its own pattern. Get to the Cakchiquel viewpoint, and you will find a regular and logical development of their language.
I: I'm not following you; can you offer some examples?
T: Why sure. Cakquiquel is an agglutinative tongue, with prefixes and suffixes added to the root word. A single Cakchiquel verb can indicate time, any number of subjects, objects, locatives, and many aspects of action. Thousands of conjugations are possible, whereas English has but five.
I: Whoa, that sounds so terribly difficult. How long did it take you to translate the Bible?
T: I began with the Gospel of Mark and 12 years later completed the New Testament. Importantly, with an alphabet similar to Spanish, we developed a written language with which we also started the first indigenous language school in all of Latin America.
I: You and your friends must have been so gratified. Now the truths of scripture could meet the peoples' needs.
T: I wish they could have shared my joy. But Frisco had died of malaria. I had wanted my college buddy, Carroll, to join our work now that the war was over, but learned he had been killed in France. And then Robbie, [sob]. Robbie, who had traveled back to the USA to get married returned only to drown while swimming with me.
[wipe away tears] But I found joy in the midst of sadness when a Mayan Indian believer exclaimed at Robbie's funeral, "he gave us the Good News and helped us turn from superstition and fear to love the true God. You say that Robinson is dead. That is not true! He is alive; he lives right now in Heaven with God." At that moment I was convinced that a people-movement to Christ had taken place.
About this time I also met and married a first-term missionary from Chicago, Elvira, who shared my heart for mission to the Indians. Only after Robbie's death did she confide to me that Robbie had proposed marriage to her by letter 3 days before I proposed in person. With Elvira as my helpmate we persevered, and many Latin American leaders came to see the wonder of our linguistic work with the Cakchiquel.
I: Is this how Wycliffe branched out into other Latin American countries?
T: Yes, I was invited to Mexico to conduct similar linguistic work among that nation's 50 minority language groups. But how can one man, even with a supportive wife, be spread so thin?
We needed help and, in 1934, with one Cakchiquel youth, and three students sitting on nail kegs, we began our second venture, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, in an abandoned Arkansas farmhouse. The next year we had 5 students. Elvira and I took each SIL class to Mexico after their summer training
I: The famous SIL, now with 5000 workers, started during the Great Depression?
T: We were anything but depressed about what was happening. The President of Mexico, Lazaro Cardenas, gave us reason to be optimistic about our work among the Aztec peoples. He made sure our linguistic methods were used throughout the schools there. The work continued until Elvira suffered heart problems. She passed away in 1944.
I: I am so sorry, Uncle Cam, I mean don Guillermo. I read that you and President Cardenas were very close, that you even wrote the only English language biography of the General. I noted that you know 42 heads of state, scores of Cabinet members, scientists, and educators; that you loved and served everyone in Latin America: the wealthy, the poor, Catholics, Evangelicals, even Communists!
T: Yes, even communists. That is the law of Christ. Many North and South American universities were by now applauding our linguistic work and using our methods in their classrooms. And the work continued. I had met and married my second wife, an educator from, again, Chicago. With Elaine's help, we pushed our work into the vast Amazon basin. But the travel logistics in such remote areas, with narrow rivers and towering mountains, required short takeoff and landing aircraft, something that our donors were not understanding.
I: You are going to tell us about the third venture you started, JAARS?
That's right, airplanes and radios just don't make translation easier; they make it possible. Thus, I founded Jungle Aviation and Radio Service or JAARS in 1948. But it took a tragedy to make JAARS a reality. The year before, Elaine and I and the first of our 4 children, then only 6 weeks old, crashed landed in an airplane that was unsuitable for our purposes. It was 12 days before we could get to a hospital for my broken leg and Elaine's dislocated ankle. Little Grace was unharmed, thank God.
At the crash scene, I called to my young assistant, Dale Kietzman, who later started our work in Brazil, to take photographs of the wreckage. People needed to see that we need safe aviation for pioneering in the jungle.
I: Our time is about up, and I wish we had more because I could listen to you for hours. Could you recap all the places you have lived and ministered via Bible translation.
T: Well, it's a lot. As you know, Guatemala from 1917-34; Mexico from 1935 to 46; Peru from 1946 to 1963, and Colombia from 1963-68.
I: Is that when you retired?
T: One doesn't retire from the Lord's work. In our senior years, Elaine and I accepted invitations from the Kremlin and traveled eleven times to the Soviet Union to examine minority languages of the Caucasus Mountains. Surprised? I told you that we love communists.
I: I am not surprised. Last Question, Sir. Can I call you Uncle Cam after all? It's much more endearing for a man like you.
T: Of course you may.
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