The Tzutujil and the Butlers: A lesson in orality
SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA – After seven fruitless years, Jim Butler began to think about leaving. Perhaps people in a neighboring town will be more responsive, reasoned the lanky Kentuckian. Perhaps they would accept his translation of the Word of God in their language. But something happened in 1971 that kept him and his wife Judy in San Pedro La Laguna, a picturesque little town on beautiful Lake Atitlán, Guatemala.
Butler began to understand his audience, the Mayan Tzutujils (pronounced Soo-too-heel); and they began to hear his message. Like most of the world’s 6 billion people, the Tzutujils are largely an oral society. They learn best by hearing, not by reading. To his surprise, Butler found the Tzutujils enjoyed listening to the Word of God in their own language.
"After seven years we had one third of the New Testament translated, but relatively no interest in the people to read it," Butler said. All 12 of the town’s evangelical pastors expressed verbal interest in the translation, but none used it in their services, essentially saying, "Thanks but no thanks; we already have the Word of God (in Spanish)." "For me it was a blow," said Pedro Rocché, Butler’s Tzutujil co-translator. "Earlier, we thought the churches were interested."
Then one day, someone suggested recording the translation. Figuring the people’s attention spans might be brief, Butler and Rocché recorded stories from Luke’s Gospel in three-minute segments. Each cassette had 15 minutes per side. Taking a cassette player and tape, Butler set out. "I went house to house and asked the people if they would like to hear the word of God in their own language," he said. "I don’t think I was refused." "That’s how the fields opened," Rocché said. "The people did have a desire to hear the word."
Absent any recording studio, sounds of the town crept into the recordings: chickens, corn grinders, cowbells and church bells. Besides having to overcome the racket, Rocché had to work hard to record the stories correctly. When Judy Butler heard the first recording, she told her husband, "He’s not thinking about what he’s reading." After several disappointing results, Rocché went home to practice by reading the Scriptures to his wife and children in a natural speaking voice. Then, everything clicked and he began reading for meaning. All kinds of people expressed interest in the recorded stories: Catholics, evangelicals and many without any church connection. In many cases, Butler played one side of the tape and was asked to play the next. "Inevitably, they would say, ‘Well, don’t you have any more?’" Butler recalled. "One old gentleman, in his 70s or 80s, setting on his front porch with me -- I can still see him," Butler said. "I was playing the Sermon on the Mount, and as he was listening, he kept shaking his head, ‘That’s just like we are.’ He says, ‘That’s just like we are’."
Orality vs. Literacy
While some Tzutujils were learning about themselves and about God, Butler was learning about orality and literacy. Orality and literacy describe two different ways of sharing information and learning. Oral societies learn best by hearing. Literate societies rely more on reading for knowledge. Virtually everyone learns orally at birth, learning to comprehend and reproduce spoken language. But as a person learns to read and to connect thoughts to printed words, he changes the way he thinks. "Oral communicators observe, process and retain information in totally different ways than do literates," states Jim Slack of the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Conference in his "A Presentation Concerning: Orality, Literacy and The Use of Chronological Bible Storying." Even years of literate schooling cannot guarantee a person’s learning habits have changed. Those who continue to learn best orally – even despite having progressed to the 10th grade – are considered "semi-literates," Slack states. Schools everywhere would classify these students as literate, but, in reality, they prefer to learn orally. Within Guatemala’s evangelical church, easily 69 percent of the people could be considered oral learners or semi-literate in Spanish, according to a study by Servicio Evangelizador para América Latina (SEPAL). Just 5 percent of Guatemalan evangelicals have attended university; 14 percent more have only attended some high school. But 21 percent have not received any schooling, and 48 percent have attended only some elementary school, SEPAL found. Other figures indicate just 5 percent of Guatemala’s more than 6 million indigenous Mayans can read and write in their mother tongue, using their languages almost exclusively in oral situations.
As Butler found in San Pedro, anyone who tries to communicate without recognizing the audience’s learning preference, risks not being heard. “When there is an improper match, the presenter speaks, but the receiver seldom ‘hears,’ ” Slack states. Oral societies prefer to learn through narrative stories, such as the parables Jesus taught. Expositional preaching, outlines, and teaching through a series of steps are more difficult to process and remember. Until recently, however, many literate Christian communicators have expected their oral audiences to think and learn by literate means, without regard for the audience’s learning preference. “An illiterate living in a primary oral environment has never ‘seen’ a word,” Slack states. “Not being literate, they cannot ‘write anything down’ they want to remember, or ‘look something up’ they want to know. They only ‘know’ what they can recall.” Some went so far as not considering illiterates true converts to Christianity until the person learned to read and write. “Even today among many literate ministers and theologians, it is almost unthinkable to suggest that an illiterate Christian could become a leader, shepherd a church and be ordained as a pastor,” Slack states.
Orality & Memory
Orality wasn’t a subject Butler studied in his linguistics training, but he learned powerful lessons on the subject among the Tzutujils – especially through a woman named Ción. Abandoned as an infant and rescued from a house fire by her brother, Ción was adopted by a Tzutujil family. But her new life was not easy. Guatemalan adoption often confers a second-class status upon the child.
"They more or less raised her as a slave, than as their child," Butler said. Ción owned just one set of clothing. When she needed to wash her clothes, she had to go to the lake to wash and bathe at the same time since she had nothing to change into. She married poorly. Her husband had little ambition and soon they had six children in the home, as well as Ción’s husband’s parents. The one-room home had no windows, a dark place physically and spiritually.
The Butlers first contact with Ción came through their respective children. Ción’s son Juan seemed out of control until Jim offered to teach Bible stories to him and his brother. One day, the boy told his mother, "I was a little lost lamb, and Jesus saved me." Not long after that, lightning struck and knocked over a wall, killing the boy. The event shook Ción, who went to the town’s Catholic church, prostrated herself and promised to serve God with her life. When Judy Butler began offering a Tzutujil literacy class, Ción attended. One day, Ción retold the story of the woman at the well to the Butlers. She had heard it from one of her children. "It wasn’t just rattling off like a parrot, but it was full of meaning and expression," Butler said.
Soon, Ción began teaching Bible stories to neighborhood children. When the Butlers began to distribute the audio Scriptures they gave her the job of circulating and promoting them among townspeople. This gave her more opportunities to hear and memorize the stories. "I think all (the indigenous people) -- have this retention ability," Butler said. "You don’t want to underestimate their intellectual ability." But Ción’s recall was extraordinary. "With her memory, she was just a walking Bible," Butler said.
One day, a Tzutujil man from a coastal town arrived in San Pedro La Laguna. Crippled from birth, José Cruz could only walk with the help of a cane and then awkwardly. Extremely poor and unable to handle "regular" work, Jose lived hand-to-mouth, moving house to house wherever people would have him. As José passed by a home in San Pedro, he heard Ción playing the Tzutujil Scriptures. Afraid to approach at first, he mustered up his courage. Soon, he not only heard the tapes but he became a distributor among his people in and around San Pedro Cutzán in the coastal Chicacao department of Guatemala. Years earlier, Tzutujils had been forced to move there and now number about 30,000.
José was illiterate and uneducated, but he, too, had a great capacity to recall what he heard. "You could tell by talking to him he was intelligent," Butler said. "He was a thinker. He had the New Testament on tape and he had about memorized it. (Soon) he had a steady stream of people to his home for advice." Not long after, José had a small following of seven or eight others who joined him distributing the Tzutujil Scripture recordings. The group met regularly to study the Bible, pray for each other and to share testimonies from their work. "We frequently receive reports of conversions, reconciliations, and healings as a result of people listening to the cassettes," Butler said, noting believers are encouraged and strengthened in their faith as well. Ción and José did not stand out as physical specimens or as natural community leaders. Both were virtually illiterate, oral communicators, but God used them greatly to bless their people. "If you were out looking for somebody to help you, I don’t think they’d be the ones you’d choose," Butler said. "I didn’t really choose them. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if God doesn’t have those kind of people in each one of these people groups."
Orality & Comprehension
Certain churches received the Tzutujil Scriptures more enthusiastically than others. In the early 1970s, the Catholic Church sent a Basque Spaniard to serve as the priest in San Pedro La Laguna. One day, the priest approached Butler. "I understand you have some Scripture translations. Well, we want to use them," Butler recalled the priest saying. Once the Tzutujil New Testament was published in 1981, the priest purchased 600 copies. These sold within a week, and he returned for 600 more.
Catholic believers began approaching the Butlers for lessons how to read in their language. So with the priest’s blessing, the Butlers offered literacy classes to 200 people in the church in nine separate one-hour sessions. They were not a "roaring success," said Judy Butler. But in an oral society, it’s not uncommon for specialists to surface as storytellers or readers. The Spaniard later selected the best readers from this group to read aloud during the masses.
"The Catholic people were hearing the Scriptures in their own language," said Jim Butler. He observed Catholic believers carrying their Tzutujil Scripture pamphlets to church. "Oh, it’s so wonderful to know what the Lord Jesus did when he was here on earth," they told him. "They had heard Latin and Spanish coming out their ears and they’re weren’t getting it. They weren’t understanding it."
But it was different with the Tzutujil translation. At the priest’s request, the Butlers later translated the Catholic mass into Tzutujil. "That’s when the women stopped sleeping because it was something they could understand," Judy Butler said. Some of these Catholic women later asked to learn more. About 80 of them began a Bible study and memory class, meeting an hour a day, six days a week. Those who could read would read aloud to the others. Then they would discuss what they had heard, repeating the passage. Within three and a half years, the women (some of them illiterate) had memorized the Gospel of Luke. They continued the class for 12 years, memorizing half of the New Testament. The Catholic Church continues to offer Tzutujil literacy courses to its members with between 40 and 100 attending separate sessions for youths and adults.
The Catholics’ warm reception of the Scriptures helped dismantle a wall of distrust between Catholics and evangelicals, Rocché said. "There’s a trust between us," he said. "It’s another miracle of God."
Radio teaching well-received.
When the tape-distribution program began to fade, Rocché developed a well-received radio ministry of preaching and teaching the Tzutujil Scriptures. His preaching steers away from church doctrines from particular denominations, emphasizing the centrality of Jesus Christ. "He cut through the ‘religion,’ " Butler said. Catholics and evangelicals alike listen to Rocché’s radio Bible teaching, partly because of his teaching and because he speaks in the native tongue. Evidence of the community’s appreciation for oral teaching is the longevity of Rocché’s broadcasts.
Since 1984, Rocché has continued this faith ministry. Once when he ran out of money to pay for the broadcasts, his wife offered her sewing earnings to pay for one month’s broadcast. Then a man crossing the lake in a boat with Pedro expressed his appreciation and paid for another month. Since then, it has continued nonstop, the money always arriving when needed to keep Rocché on the air. As with many such services, the program is broadcast live. For more than 12 years, he traveled virtually all day Sundays to and from Quetzaltenango, Guatemala’s second-largest city, to offer his expositional preaching. Now he preaches from "Radio Amistad" in San Pedro and from "Estereo Lago," across the lake in Panajachel.
Interest among the Tzutujils in reading the printed Scriptures for themselves remains low. But New Testament sales continue to trickle in. Believers, mostly Catholics, still come to Rocché to purchase their own copies of the Tzutujil New Testament. In early May 2003, he had just 48 copies left of 3,000 printed. Rocché hopes for another printing sometime soon. "I have hope and faith in the Lord that one day the people will use the (printed) Tzutujil New Testament," Rocché said. Some pastors expressed interest in receiving the audio and printed Tzutujil Scriptures, saying the problem hasn’t been a lack of interest but a lack of promotion.
Butler no longer places such emphasis on getting Tzutujils to read the Scriptures. For him, the method of communicating isn’t as important as making sure the message is communicated -- by radio, tape, printed page or preaching. "Whether they read it or not," he says, "at least this generation is going to hear it."
For further reading: Word Alive
Jim Butler passed away May 29, 2005, following a long illness. His wife Judy lives in Dallas at Wycliffe's retirement center.