fiat lux(ury)

We finally took the plunge and decided to buy some new batteries for our solar power system. Mains electricity didn't seem to be getting any nearer, and with hot season easing in, our fridge was conking out earlier and earlier in the day, meaning it was only running about 6 hours in 24.

Now our fridge is managing between 8 or 9 hours a day (don't worry, we still don't keep meat in it!) and the most exciting thing is that we can put our lights on in the evening. It feels so liberating to be able to move about the house without a lamp in my hand! And easier to work … when you are in semi-darkness you tend to feel far more like nodding off than getting anything productive done!

But please don't feel you have to stop praying for mains electricity to get here...!

a tree in the house?

Our carpenter finally showed up yesterday to fix the metal frame of our built-in cupboards into the wall. Considering he'd originally said "end of January", we were quite astonished when he and his friends turned up at last ... and at ten past five on a Saturday afternoon! They were here until 9ish, and I was slightly surprised at one point to see the carpenter carrying a large branch of a tree through the house. But here you can see that it is very efficiently holding the frame in place while the concrete dries!


It'll be great when it's finished, but we aren't holding our breath ...

the tyranny of the urgent

(Warning: Long blog post!)

There is a book by the above name. I have to confess that I have never read it (I expect I had more urgent things to do!) but I have heard an explanation of the main idea. The author apparently says that often we are sidetracked from doing important things by other things which seem more urgent, perhaps because they come with pressing deadlines or other people are putting pressure on us to do them.

If it hadn't been too long a title, I would have liked to call this blog post “The tyranny of the urgent and what that means for a longterm task”. Bible translation, seen globally, is often considered an urgent task. Figures are notoriously difficult to establish or verify, but a recent Bible Society magazine (“The Bible in Transmission”, Summer/Autumn 2011) suggests that “there are roughly 4,400 languages which have no part of the Bible”. If you believe, as we do and this magazine affirms, that “when a community has access to the Scriptures in its own language the impact can be enormous”, this should spur us on to making the Bible available to as many communities as possible!

However, when you are on the ground, working on an existing Bible translation project, the obstacles to making good progress can be enormous. I think writing my doctoral thesis was good preparation for this, as I learnt to work steadily despite the only deadlines I had being arbitrary deadlines I had set for myself. With regards to my doctorate, I was my own worst enemy. Generally speaking, people expected me to be part-time teaching and working on my doctorate the rest of the working day, so they didn't try to distract me from that. I was left alone to fight the temptation to fill my day with other important-seeming tasks instead of plodding on with my research.

In a setting where one of the translation team is a pastor, another is a church elder and the third (me) is a missionary and mother (having other mission and family responsibilities apart from the translation work itself), we find ourselves being solicited by other people on all sides.

There are sometimes entire weeks where the whole team is never in the office at the same time. Someone in the church dies and the pastor has to take the funeral and visit the family. Cows get into the other translator's field and he has to go 15km away to inspect the damage, find the guilty party and negotiate restitution. Marc and I have mission meetings 4 hours' drive away, or have to go to the capital for administrative purposes. People from church come to see the pastor with their problems. The pastor's wife has a death in her family and can't look after Benjy so I have to work from home (whilst keeping an eye on Benjy). The Monkolé churches have an all-day leaders' meeting and once again I have to work from home. There is a vaccination campaign and everyone in the village spends their morning queuing up to be injected. Some random guy from another mission arrives in town and calls all the church leaders to a meeting about one of his projects … And the list goes on. Obviously a lot of these things are unavoidable, and taken one-by-one they can mostly be justified. But even so, they eat away at our productive time on the Bible translation.

Other things seem to conspire to make work more difficult, such as the heat, huge rainstorms in rainy season where we can't even hear each other speak, and electricity not being available all day to run our computers. Sometimes it is like swimming against the current, and it would be easy to fall into discouragement. I haven't yet, but give me a few more months...!

Of course, all these obstacles are exterior to the work itself, and it isn't as if it were easy, fun work when we finally get down to it! Sometimes it's a real brain-tangler to try to understand the Hebrew text (or even the French or English translations of it!) and to express the same meaning in a very different language like Monkolé. We also have to carry the responsibility of knowing that this isn't just any old book which we're translating, but the Word of God. We should be working in reverence and awe, constantly asking that we'll be led by the Holy Spirit and given God's wisdom for our task.

The challenge for us is to remember the importance of making the whole Bible available for the Monkolé people, and managing to keep that as a priority. Which might mean saying no to some people sometimes, and will mean living with tension. But I do believe that it will be worth it on the day when we are able to hand out copies of the Bible in Monkolé to people who have been waiting for it for years!

I would also like to bear testimony to the importance of the work which Marc and the church leaders are doing in teaching people from and about God's Word so that when it is available they will be able to read and understand it. There would be no point in translating the Bible just so that it becomes a status symbol for the Monkolé people or something which should be seen on every Christian's shelf. No, we want it to be in everyone's hands, being read and put into practice!

In case you are now worried that our work just seems like an looming mountain ahead of us, I should probably add that I am still loving doing a job I've been trained to do, and am conscious of the privilege it is to be a small part of bringing God's Word to the Monkolé people. Our office often feels like an oasis of peace, and it can be a very pleasant place to work. But we do need your prayers, that we and others would respect the urgency of our longterm task!

Our office, back in rainy season, there is no vegetation around it now!

Nearly there!

We are close to finishing the extension of our house! Here are a couple of outside photos:




And inside ... where we are just waiting for the doors to be varnished, then we'll move our bed in (hooray, no more sleeping in the living room!) and once the built-in wardrobes have been installed we'll move everything else in. However, the carpenter was supposed to come last Tuesday to do some last measurements and there's been so sign of him, so once again we won't be holding our breath! Our new bedroom:



The new corridor! (I know, not very exciting, but I do like the doors!)


From inside the new office/guestroom:

who am I anyway?

It's about time for a post about language. Not translation as such...

The first thing is just something funny that happened last week. Simon (5) and Benjy (3) were playing with a friend, Timothy (5 ½). They don't see him a lot usually, but as we were in Parakou they had played with him on Sunday and Tuesday afternoons and it was now Wednesday. It tends to be Simon and Timothy who play together, and Benjy plays near them or runs after them. Although Benjy talks a lot when he's just with the family, he doesn't say much around other people unless he knows them very well.

Anyway, at some point Benjy came to see me, to ask if they could have their afternoon biscuit. I said yes, and Benjy got up on a bench and started shouting, “Simon, time for a biscuit! Simon, come now! Come and have a biscuit! Come quickly!!” Simon and Timothy both came over to me, and Timothy said to me in a very surprised voice, “I didn't know Benjy could talk!”

I posted once before about the different names I can be known by here. In church yesterday, I was, as usual, hoping not to be asked to pray out loud in front of the whole church, but trying to listen carefully so that I would at least know if someone did ask me to. I was listening out for either “aboi Maaku” (Marc's wife) or “Maman Benja” (Benjamin's mum) or maybe even some version of Hilary. The guy who was leading the service said he wanted several people to pray, and I heard “kpaasi something” and thought “eh? Someone's friend?” (this being one meaning of “kpaasi”). I figured maybe he'd forgotten someone's name and so was saying “the person sitting next to so-and-so”. Then he looked straight at me and said, “Did you understand?” So in front of the whole church I said, “No!” Everyone laughed goodnaturedly, and he launched into a rather long explanation about how not many people had said things they were thankful for and so to express our deep-down thankfulness he wanted Jeannette and Fidèle to pray … and possibly someone else, but once again he didn't actually say my name (or “you”!).

So Jeannette and Fidèle prayed (and I was sitting there thinking, “Um, since I'm not sure I don't think I will pray!”) and after a pause the service leader prayed too.

Anyway, after the service Marc told me that I'd been called “woo kpaasi tia”, which, given the flexibility of the Monkolé language, could mean “translator” or could mean “the person who changes paper” (and possibly other things too!). Ah well, I guess they'll realise that if they want me to pray they need to make it completely clear that it's me they're talking to! Perhaps I should have done things Benjy's way, and not given away that I knew how to talk until it became really important!

getting there!

After 6 days without internet (technical problems after a big fire in Cotonou) we're back! Fortunately our builders have no need of the internet to get their work done. The wall around our mission property is just about finished now:


(It looks like that mountain might be here to stay, though!)

Our extension is coming on nicely too. Here is our new bedroom with half the roof on and the electrics in progress:



And here it is three days later after the ceiling had been fitted:


The walls were plastered inside yesterday, and the outside's being done today. Then it needs to dry for a week before it can be painted, and then we are away for a week, so things will come to a standstill for a while. Hopefully the painting then fitting of our built-in wardrobes won't take too long after we get back.

Fêtes!

I feel I shouldn't ignore Christmas and the New Year on my blog, as if they didn't exist just because we're in Africa! They most certainly did! And I found my third Christmas here less difficult than the first two. Now that we're used to it, it doesn't feel so strange to be celebrating in the heat, and this year's Christmas service at church was more joyful and Christmassy than last year's! I enjoyed reading the Christmas story with the boys too, now that they are both old enough to understand at least a bit about what it means.

We also had a friend from Parakou, Esther, staying with us, and having a visitor made it feel more special too. Also another friend we'd known in Parakou, our first language helper, was up in the village for Christmas, so came for tea on Christmas Eve. Here we are with Abraham and Esther:


And here we are on Christmas Day! We have a tradition of doing a one-take family photo on Christmas Day. This year it nearly didn't happen, as Benjy was feeling rebellious, but suddenly he gave in and we snatched the opportunity!! We are wearing the outfits we'd had made specially for Christmas.


We didn't do anything for New Year this year. In fact we couldn't even be bothered to stay up 2 hours past our normal bedtime to see the New Year in ... it isn't as if our boys would have let us sleep in an extra 2 hours in the morning!! But our pastor did give a New Year's message at church on the 1st which almost made me wish I'd got more excited about it!