"Over the past years my work experience has had a wide variation. After college and while in seminary a challenge came that changed my life’s direction; the need for dedicated people to work with language groups [cultures] who live in isolated parts of the earth and who have a perfectly good spoken language but had not developed or received a written ‘alphabet’ to put their language into writing and print. This challenged peaked my interest and I was drawn to this work with a desire to translate the New Testament into their previously unwritten language.

With this challenge in mind I attended two summers of linguistic training at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. The training involved the study of the many sounds [phones] that humans use in speech and how these sounds are varied in different speech environments. These studies were to facilitate the development of an alphabet where each letter or tone mark would indicate the same sound each time it appeared in writing or print.

We were assigned to take over an existing language project in the deep jungle in eastern Peru close to the Brazilian border. In June of 1969 my wife and I started living with and learning the language of the Kashinawa, an indigenous people of Peru and Brazil. We did not use Spanish to communicate with them because we did not know the range of meanings of the Spanish that they used to communicate with the river-traders who bought their rubber and animal skins and provided them with material goods. By suffering together with them by always speaking in their language we slowly learned the meanings of words and phrases in various contexts. That first year we also started the one literate man in the government program to become the first school teacher among the Kashinawa and began writing school books.

While working on stories, I came to the realization that their culture filled in information in the stories when the grammar was vague. Before they had schools for the children I had started teaching a few of the matu" less...