Chapter 11
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.
“Señorita! Señorita!” came a voice.
Betty awoke from a deep sleep, grabbed her robe, and headed for the top of the stairs. “What is it?” she called down.
“It is señor Quiñones. Maruja is in trouble. I think she is dying. Come and help,” came the reply.
Knowing that señor Quiñones’s wife was pregnant, Betty frowned. This was not the job for a linguist! “Go and wake señorita Barbara,” she yelled back. “She can help you better than I.” Barbara Johnson had, in fact, been a midwife back in England.
“I have already spoken to her. She is coming, but she told me to come and get you to help her,” came the voice in the darkness.
“Wait one minute,” Betty said as she turned to hurry to her room and get dressed.
Soon Betty was downstairs, flashlight in hand, walking briskly to the Quiñoneses’ house on the other side of the clearing, ready to do whatever she could to assist Barbara. She prayed as she walked. Maruja Quiñones was having her tenth or twelfth baby; she had lost count. Betty knew that Barbara had delivered Maruja’s last baby, and things had gone very wrong. The baby had died, and Barbara had made it clear to Maruja and her husband that she would not deliver any more of their babies. Maruja needed to go to a hospital in Quito where they had doctors and equipment to help safely deliver another child. But it was evident that the Quiñoneses had not followed the missionary’s advice.
Betty braced herself for what she might find inside. She had helped Barbara out at two previous births, but they had both gone more or less smoothly. She hoped that this one would have a happy ending.
Betty and Barbara were led to a small upstairs room. An oil lamp cast a dull orange glow over the room so that Betty had to strain her eyes to see. Betty was not prepared for what she saw. On a split bamboo bed lay Maruja, crying and wailing. Betty heard a sickly wail behind her and turned to see a baby lying on a pile of rags on the other bed in the room. She walked over to the child, whose chest was barely rising and falling. It did not seem likely to Betty that the baby would survive. But would the mother? Maruja writhed on the bed in agony, making it hard for Barbara to examine her. Her husband tried to comfort her and then broke down in deep sobs and ran from the room. “She’s dying!” Betty heard him wail.
“He’s right about that,” Barbara said calmly and matter-of-factly to Betty in English. “She has a prolapsed uterus. She’s in terrible pain and very weak.”
“Help me! Please help me!” Maruja screamed. “I can’t stand the pain. Please help me!”
Barbara told Betty to warm some plantains in the ashes of the fogón. When Betty had done this, she placed them around Maruja’s neck to act as a sort of hot-water bottle, and then they elevated her feet.
“I warned them numerous times that something like this could happen and they should go to a hospital for the delivery. There is little I can do for her here. Her husband will have to take her to the small Catholic hospital in Santo Domingo. Perhaps she will hold onto life until they get there. The jungle women are strong and seem to have a way of holding onto life in the face of the most dire situations.”
Betty nodded. She had already noticed that about the women of the jungle.
“I will go and explain the situation to her husband. You stay here and comfort her,” Barbara said as she slipped out of the room.
By now Maruja’s wails had turned to whimpers. Betty stood close by the bed and tried to comfort her. Then she heard Maruja begin to mumble. Betty leaned in to hear what she was saying.
“Goodbye. Goodbye to all my friends. Goodbye to my family, whom I love. Goodbye to my newborn son, whom God gives and takes away his mother. I commend him to all of you to care for him. I am going now. I bid you all goodbye.”
At that moment Maruja’s husband entered the room to gather up his wife for the trip to the hospital. He took one look at her and began to wail. “She is already dead! She is already dead!” Tears poured down his cheeks, and he beat the wall with the sides of his fists.
Betty looked down at Maruja. The mouth that only moments before had uttered words was no longer moving. Maruja’s jaw was fixed and silent. This was the first dead person Betty had ever seen, and she turned her head away in sadness.
Betty and Barbara slipped out of the Quiñoneses house on the far side of the clearing and made their way to their respective houses. Weary and defeated, Betty paused outside by a bucket of water to wash her hands before going back to bed.
No matter how hard Betty tried, sleep would not come for her. In its place were the hideous scenes of dying mothers, screaming babies, and grown men beating on the walls. The question came to her over and over again: why had God allowed Maruja Quiñones to die? Wouldn’t it have been a much better witness if He had miraculously reached down and saved her life, leaving the little baby boy and the dozen or so other children in the house with their mother?
Betty turned over and tried to find a comfortable position. Tears rolled down her cheeks and onto her pillow. In the distance she could hear wailing coming from the direction of the Quiñoneses house as relatives and friends grieved Maruja’s death. She could also hear the sound of hammering. A coffin was being constructed for the dead woman.
“So this is missionary life, real missionary life,” Betty said to herself under her breath, “with all its frustrations and disappointments, all those feelings of not being able to do enough, to bring enough changes—to really communicate God’s love to the people who need it the most.
“Thank God I have my work with Don Macario. At least God answered my prayers and brought me one good person to help me with the task of translation,” Betty thought as she finally drifted off into a fitful sleep.