Meridian Magazine:: Fields of White: Sean's Story

Forty years ago, three Cakchiquel Indian Mormon converts prepared to go to the temple. Theirs was not just spiritual preparation. Each man — Pablo Choc, Tomas Cujcuj, and Daniel Mich — needed to secure passports and fund his family’s trip from highland Guatemala to Mesa, Arizona. It would take years of saving.

Daniel Mich was the first Cakchiquel convert to the LDS Church in Patzicia, Guatemala. He was baptized in the 1950's, after spending some harrowing time hiding from assassins who thought they had already killed him.

(Daniel was politically active and survived an attempted execution. Unconscious, he was dumped by his would-be killers into a truck already filled with corpses. He escaped into the mountains, where he lived for four years. While there, he had a vision of a white-haired man he later learned was David O. McKay, and was told he would receive further instructions.)

Pablo Choc, also of Patzicia, was intrigued after Daniel Mich converted to Mormonism, but when he saw two tall, Gringo missionaries carrying the coffin of Daniel’s mother, he was unexpectedly touched. He agreed to listen to their message. Though he had been a devoted Catholic, and though his friends and family — even his wife — tried to convince him that he was being fooled, he was baptized.

Thirty kilometers away, Tomas Cujcuj (then the mayor of Patzun) dreamed of two messengers who would bring him an answer to his prayers, and welcomed the missionaries into his home several days later.

All three men brought their wives into the Church, and tried to raise their children in the gospel. They were the pioneers of Highland Guatemala. They worked for years, saved what they needed to, did what they needed to, and finally took their families to the Mesa temple.

I met Daniel Mich fifteen years after his conversion, when he was helping my father (a linguist) translate the Book of Mormon into Cakchiquel. In 1975, I was at Tomas Cujcuj’s deathbed and heard him bear his final testimony. I was very aware of the rush to get temple robes to his village within the twenty-four hours allowed for funeral preparations between death and burial, and I was honored to play the little electric organ at his funeral.

Several months later, I took his wife to Guatemala City to buy her some new garments. (When she had showed me the gray lace under her huipil, I realized she had probably had her garments since that brave trip to Mesa so many years ago.) I met Pablo Choc the year before the great earthquake devastated the town where he served as branch president.

In the summer of 2006, I took my youngest two children to Guatemala. Of those three pioneering men, only Pablo Choc was still alive. The day after our arrival, I took them to meet him, telling them just before we entered his cinderblock home, “I hope you realize who this man is. You are about to meet one of the great souls on this earth.”

Pablo’s daughter opened the door for us. Several hens and a rooster roamed the courtyard, clucking and pecking occasionally. The small bedroom where Hermano Pablo sat was dimly lit and buzzing with lazy flies. On his wall were pictures of his family — including the passport photo they had used years before to get across the border and to the temple.

My children were bothered by the manger-like smells of the place, and they couldn’t understand my conversation with this remarkable Latter-day Saint, but they saw us weeping together and were eager to hear the translation.

We were talking about his son, Daniel — the first Cakchiquel Indian missionary, whose farewell I had attended in 1975. And we were talking about that terrible night in 1976: February 4, a date all of Guatemala remembers.

The earthquake hit just after 3:00 a.m. It started as the familiar tremor so common in Guatemala, and then grew into a thunderous tantrum — 7.5 on the Richter scale. Within minutes, whole cities were leveled, including Patzicia and Patzun. Twenty-three thousand people were dead or dying, most of them Cakchiquel Indians.

Pablo’s adobe house collapsed. His wife, eight months pregnant, was unable to escape. Two of his sons also died under the rubble. Soon he heard that a Mormon missionary (Randall Ellsworth) was trapped by a beam in the chapel. “I didn’t go to him,” he told me. “I was taking the bricks off my wife’s body, so I could get her out.” But Pablo’s son went to Elder Ellsworth, and probably saved his life.

Daniel, serving his mission several cities away, returned to his home with his companion and two other missionaries. He embraced his father and took in the news that his mother and two of his brothers were dead. He and Pablo wept long together, and then Daniel reminded him of that trip they had made to the temple, and challenged him to organize and comfort the Latter-day Saints of the town.

A month afterwards, as Daniel and other missionaries worked to reconstruct Patzun, a wall he was standing on began to give way in an aftershock. One missionary yelled, “Hey you guys! It’s going to go! Get off of there!”

The wall fell in and crushed his head. He did not die instantly, but was dead before they could get him to the hospital.

The missionaries, still in shock themselves, then had the ominous duty of taking Daniel Choc’s body to his father.

Pablo opened the door to see two missionaries weeping. One said, “We don’t want to bring you this news. Hermano, Daniel is dead. Your son is dead. A wall fell, and he was killed.”

Pablo went to the truck with two of his daughters. He removed the sheet over Daniel’s body. One daughter sobbed, “He’s not dead! He’s not!” Pablo simply looked at his son’s body.

Within hours, the mission president, Robert Arnold, was at his door, embracing him and offering comfort. “Brother,” he said, “the Church pays funeral expenses when a missionary dies. Can you choose a coffin for your son?”

Pablo nodded, then spoke the words he had feared to utter: “Why is God punishing me?”

President Arnold’s eyes filled. “Oh no. God is not punishing you. You must not believe that.”

“Brother Choc, this is a trial of your faith. It’s the hardest trial I can imagine. But God loves you. I promise you that. He is with you, and He will carry you through this. Think of those thousands of people who died last month — so many of them Cakchiqueles. Don’t they need a missionary who understands their lives, who speaks the language they spoke on this earth, and who knows the gospel? Don’t they need Daniel?”

  Daniel Choc
  El primer misionero Cakchiquel de la Iglesia de JesuCristo de los   Santos de los Ultimos Dias
  “Cuando os halleis al servicio de vuestros semejantes, solo estais   al servicio de vuestro Dios”

  Daniel Choc
  The first Cakchiquel missionary of The Church of Jesus Christ of   Latter-day Saints
  “When ye are in the service of your fellow beings, ye are only in the   service of your God.”

Such was the conversation I had with Pablo Choc, which my children couldn’t understand. The next day, I took them to the cemetery to find Daniel’s grave. Much had changed in thirty years since I had visited his burial spot, and we couldn’t find it.

I took them the following week, and again we failed — though we did find the grave of Daniel Mich.

Cemetery in Patzicia

On the third try, my son pulled a few weeds beside a tomb and yelled, “Mom! I found it!”

The engraving had faded but was still visible. I translated for my children: “When ye are in the service of your fellow beings, ye are only in the service of your God.”

Daniel’s grave

My husband, Bruce, joined us in Guatemala for ten days, and we interviewed Pablo Choc on our little video camera. He told the story again, pointing to the very spot where his wife had perished, and to where his children had died. He described the looks on the missionaries’ faces when they told him his own missionary son had been killed.

He remembered the trial of his faith, but he also related how he had first come to join the Church. He told about the trip he, Tomas Cucuj, and Daniel Mich had made with their families to the temple. Pablo Choc, so old, so poor, and so good, said finally, “I never forgot my promises. I never forgot them.”

We also interviewed members of one Patzicia ward (there are now four, with two more in the aldeas) and asked if they had served missions. Most of the men and many of the women had. Several of the older members spoke of their sons or daughters currently on missions.

We asked their names, and heard three familiar ones over and over: Mich, Choc, Cujcuj.

“Are you related to Daniel Mich?” I would ask.

“Oh yes,” would come the answer, and then the relationship. “He was my uncle.” Or father, or grandfather, or great-grandfather.

“Are you related to Pablo Choc?”

“He’s my father.”

“Did you know Tomas Cucuj?”

“He’s my grandfather.”

So lives the legacy of three brave men who kept their promises through almost unthinkable trials, and whose generations of descendants now honor them. These descendants don’t have to go to Mesa, Arizona anymore; there’s a temple in Guatemala City. But they remember the faith which started that long and difficult journey, and promised a glorious conclusion.

These descendants are part of the conclusion. They are also the commencement of new promises, and the fulfillment and continuation of eternal possibilities.

Lake Atitlan, Guatemala — thought by some to be the Waters of Mormon