june in the office

The month of June is always a quiet month here. The first rains can come as early as April, but they don't really begin to come regularly until June, so that's when everyone deserts the village and goes out to their fields to plant. Some people's fields are over ten miles from the village, so they have huts out there and don't come back to the village except at the weekend. The boys and I went into the village to visit friends on Friday, only to find that all of our friends' houses were shut up and empty!

It is also a quiet month for the translation team, as the translators generally take their annual leave at this point, to work in their fields. The rest of the year, if there is work to be done in the fields it will either be members of their family or else hired workers who will do it. We were in Cotonou for a week at the beginning of June getting the boys' passports renewed and Simon signed up for his next year of distance-schooling, but I will still have spent three weeks on my own in the translation office every weekday morning!

Since we learned to use the new software, I now not only have work to do checking the Monkolé translation against the original text in Hebrew (with help from commentaries etc.), but I have plenty to keep me occupied converting computer files from their old format to the new one. We don't seem to have the most recent version of some files – but we do have obviously-more-recent paper copies – so I have been updating the files once they are in the Paratext software. Those books we have worked on recently I have also been correcting on the computer. This month I have worked on parts of Exodus, Ruth, Zechariah and Proverbs, so quite a mixture!

Writing my doctoral thesis was in some ways good preparation for this work, and not only because my doctorate was in linguistics! I also learnt to plod along day after day aiming for a very distant goal, and to be meticulous in checking details. I also learnt to work alone … but this month's isolation has made me very appreciative of the advantages of working in a team!

Next week Philémon has exams and the pastor has a training course in Parakou from Monday to Wednesday. Since I have to be in Parakou for our missionary Day(s) of Prayer Thursday and Friday, that will make yet another week where we can't work together. The week after that – beginning the 9^th July – we have a week of checking with our translation consultant. We hope to finish checking Exodus – please pray that this will go well!

Driving into a rainstorm on the (very nice!) road between Kandi and Banikoara, not far from where we live.