the power of watt?

When we were back in Europe people asked us a lot of questions about our living conditions and about our electricity supply. If you're interested in our slightly complicated electricity supply, read on! If not, I won't be offended if you skip this post!

We have solar panels on our house. So far so good. Despite being ten years old they are functioning well. The batteries, however, which are now coming up for four years old, are as good as dead. This means, logically, that if the sun is up and shining, we have solar power. As soon as the sun sets, or on cloudy days, we don't. (Our reasons for not replacing the batteries will be explained below!)

A second source of electricity is our generator. Since it is noisy and guzzles diesel, we generally only use it for an hour or so in the evening to pump our well water, and to have an hour of electric light while we get the washing-up done and the kids washed. Bought when we moved to the village in February 2009 it very quickly developed a problem with one part which needed replacing. Unfortunately we still haven't been able to find this part in Benin (or through some research we've done in Europe) so our local electrician does a botch job from time to time to keep it going. Recently however the generator had been working less and less well so we had it serviced and the specialist discovered that the capacitor (?) had a fault. It turns out that this might be what wore out the other piece in the first place, so although things aren't perfect, we may have fewer problems in the future.

A future source of electricity will be mains electricity, but it is taking its time! The poles arrived in the village in April 2009. They were erected in October 2010. We got home from Europe in July this year to find cables, though we're not sure the work on the cables is quite finished yet:


The other question is where exactly this electricity will be generated. We've heard that it will probably come in from Togo (or even Ghana), which means it has to come a good distance before it reaches us. So although the poles and cables are in place near us, until they have also been installed between the border with Togo and our nearest town, there won't be much power coming through them. And we also need to find out just how much they will try to charge us to get hooked up (in neighbouring countries some organisations have been charged astronomical amounts and we may need to negotiate!).

So anyway, with the promise of mains electricity at some point in the future, we aren't sure it is worth investing £1000 or so in new batteries for our solar power system, and going through all the hassle of finding where we can order them from, getting them shipped/flown in, and trying to pay customs taxes (apparently we oughtn't to have to pay customs taxes because it's for our personal use, but we might have to spend a while arguing our case!).

We do have enough electricity to charge up our computers and phones, run the “knead-and-rise” cycle of our bread machine, keep our fridge going for 7 hours a day (so we don't bother trying to freeze anything), and to put the boys' fan on during their afternoon sleep. We don't have lights in the evening (except battery-powered ones or candles) or fans at night (hard during hot season!) and we do have to be thinking all the time about what to charge up when so that, for example, I have enough battery in my computer for the first couple of hours of work in the morning.

More electricity would make it easier to work in the evenings (your body and brain tend to think it's the middle of the night when you're in the dark, even if your computer's working), would keep us cooler and help us to sleep better at night, and would give us a properly working fridge and freezer. Obviously once mains electricity is here it won't be perfect, but we will always have solar and the generator, and be able to juggle between whatever works best/is cheaper!

This is absolutely not meant to be a post to make anyone sorry for us. You get used to functioning differently, and I am finding the lack of light in the evenings easier to deal with than I was at the beginning of the year. And the only thing we're asking for is prayer that the mains electricity will arrive soon, and that we won't have to pay too much to get connected! Maybe you could put a reminder to pray for us on the light switch you use the most often :o)

team news

The translation team has not been getting far with Exodus this month, mainly due to me being away for our annual conference, our trip to Cotonou and soon a few more days away to take our friend Judith back to Cotonou and get the car fixed in Parakou. The pastor and Philémon are carrying on with their individual translations, and when I have been here we've been plodding on through the description of the tabernacle.

Sometimes it really does feel hard, when you can't even be sure what the Hebrew means, but I am a stickler for consistency. So even if we aren't 100% sure what an object is, I like us to at least choose a word for it and stick with that. Sometimes it means pulling a sentence apart and then struggling to put it back together again, but it's a good brain-teasing exercise and there is some satisfaction in coming up with something we're all happy with.

Work is also disrupted by things you wouldn't have to contend with in Europe, like snake tracks being found in our compound and a search party being launched (no luck), or cows having got into Philémon's cotton fields (he has had to leave work today to go and sort that out). But of course we don't have other more “northern” problems, like snow making transport difficult!

conference and cotonou

We have had a busy last ten days. After the “Women's Day” service at church on the 6th we drove down to Parakou. This gave us all day Monday in Parakou before our conference meetings started in the evening, which meant we started the conference fresher than we might have. It had the added, and un-planned, benefit that Simon hung out with the kids' worker as she was setting up her stuff, and came round to the idea of going to the kids' activities!

Conference was good. The teaching on Romans 12 challenged me, in ways that confirmed things God has been teaching me lately about total trust in Him and acceptance of my limits and His infiniteness. Time spent with others was a blessing, and easier now that the boys are a bit older. Simon had a few wobbles but generally got on well at the kids' club, and on the last day of the conference even took his lunch off to eat with the other boys! Benjy decided to stick to me more than usual, but that may be a reaction to our new routine at home involving me leaving him for the mornings – he decided that even if being in our meetings meant being still and quiet, it was worth it to have some “Mummy Time”, and since he was so good I was still able to concentrate.

I do love our church here in the village, but it was a refreshing change to be able to worship in English and French! We were privileged to have a speaker and worship leaders come down from SIM Niger to serve us for the week, and our family also enjoyed getting to know them better over breakfasts in the Guesthouse (the other families were staying elsewhere).

One highlight of this conference for me was a Ladies Afternoon Tea I helped out with. A church in the States had very kindly sent over bookmarks and cards of encouragement, and also presents for us all! We played a game called Chinese Christmas which does involve some rather un-biblical behaviour (it can involve “stealing” someone else's presents – though our conference speaker had encouraged us to “appreciate” other people's gifts … probably not what he was thinking of!). It was fun though, as was the game which ended up with “stacks” of ladies sitting on each other's laps – very close fellowship at this Spiritual Life Conference!! And of course we enjoyed our tea and sweet treats too!

After Conference we didn't have much time to be sad that it was over, as we headed down to Cotonou to pick up a friend, Judith, who is staying for a couple of weeks. We also wanted to collect our residency cards. I managed to, but Marc's wasn't yet ready. At least this means the whole family won't have to travel down again for this reason, he'll go down on his own.

The dry harmattan wind is now blowing from the North here at home, and we haven't seen rain for weeks, so it was a surprise when we approached Cotonou to see this:


By the time we got into the city the rain was pouring down. It had taken people by surprise, and we saw lots of “abandoned” motorbikes by the side of the road, with their riders sheltering under buildings.


The roads are getting better in some places, where work is being done, and deteriorating in others. The long journey back from Cotonou to Parakou seemed endless … and then on our journey from Parakou to the village, the next day, our exhaust pipe dropped off! We were on a temporary road avoiding roadworks, ploughing through very fine sand. We heard a loud bang, the car shook, and Marc hurriedly stopped it. At first I thought maybe we'd lost our back wheels or something, the impact seemed so great … it was a relief when we realised that we could still drive the rest of the way home (albeit very noisily!!). The exhaust pipe was bent in two, so Marc shifted it to the edge of the road and left it there. A mechanic in Kandi is going to convert another exhaust pipe to fit our car, so we should soon be back on the roads a little more quietly!

wildlife of West Africa

Sorry, no elephants or camels, though elephants were seen just down the road from us last weekend, so maybe we'll get lucky one day! First of all, one of our huge rainy season snails. I was concerned its shell was about to fall off, but it seems this was normal:


Next two photos of frogs/toads (I'm no expert) which are lurking near our back door at the moment:



And finally, a baby bat we found which I assume had fallen from a nest (?) in our roof:


And yes, I am enjoying having a camera which can capture real close-ups!

fighting through a linguistic jungle!

Sometimes I feel rather overwhelmed by the task we have of rendering the Hebrew Bible in the Monkolé language in a way which is faithful to the original text and yet as far as possible understandable to a Monkolé reader (or listener). Fortunately I am not working alone! I have my Monkolé team mates and some very good resources on my computer.

Just recently, as I was working on Exodus 23:24, I read about the Israelites being instructed to break down the “pillars” or, in another translation, “sacred pillars” of the Canaanite people. This had been translated in Monkolé as “push over the stones they have put in place”. My first question was to know what these “pillars” represented, and here my Logos resources came in extremely helpful. I searched for the term “pillars”, which brought up more than 4,000 examples. I scrolled down, found “The Archaeological Encyclopaedia of the Holy Land”, and opened up the different instances of the word there. It gave me the Hebrew word massebah and an explanation of how these pillars were set up and used by the different Canaanite peoples in their cultic practices. Since it said they were stones (not the highly polished columns I tend to think of when I hear the word “pillars”) I supposed that the word “stones” would be fine in Monkolé, but my second question was to know whether a Monkolé hearing the sentence “push over the stones they have put in place” would realise it had religious overtones, and there I can only rely on my co-workers' mother tongue knowledge! We had quite a lengthy discussion about this, but finally agreed with the youngest member of the team that since the instruction is placed with other prohibitions of idol worship, it should be clear to your average reader that these were no ordinary stones.

I am not translating into English, so this is by the by, but if I were, I wonder if it wouldn't be possible to translate massebah by “standing stones”. The photo in the AEHL looked more like a standing stone, and I would automatically associate “standing stones” with some kind of religious practices, which is not the case with “pillars”.

Another example, which reminded us not to translate on automatic pilot, was Exodus 4:6 which says that Moses' hand became leprous and “like snow”. Where the Bible describes things as being “white like snow”, we translate “white like cotton”. Fortunately the commentary I'm reading pointed out that this verse doesn't say “white”, and that quite probably it means “flaky like snow”. We were able to find a Monkolé word which means “flaky” and have avoided introducing cotton into a context where it wasn't relevant!

oh, for a thousand tongues...

Most of us Westerners were brought up in mono-lingual families, and we tend to forget that many people in the world grow up being familiar with two or more languages. When the four of us were back in Europe, people were often fascinated by our boys' bilingualism. That didn't bother us at all, except Simon who insisted that he actually spoke three languages, but when we're out here in Benin we're just like everyone else who speaks two or more languages on a day-to-day basis. Esther, who worked for us in Parakou, speaks at least 6 languages relatively fluently, and has even been picking up some Monkolé from us!

As the name of my blog says, I like to think we are at least try-lingual! Our Monkolé is getting better, though we still have bad days where it feels like the language is an express train speeding through the station where we're waiting, and we have no hope of catching onto it!

As a family, we're used to being bilingual by now. Simon never speaks anything but English to me, or French to Marc, except as a joke. Benjy still mixes the two, but is beginning to separate them out and speak more English to me and more French to Marc. If I say to him, “What do you say to Papa?” (when Marc has given him something) he will say, “Merci, Papa!” and vice versa.

We are very OPOL – One Person One Language – which leads to funny conversations sometimes. We parents don't always register which language is being spoken, but Simon is very indignant if one of us answers when he is speaking to the other parent. So the conversation can go:

Simon: Tu peux m'aider, s'il te plaît?
Me: Yes, hold on a moment, I'm just coming!
Simon: I was talking to Papa!!

This also means that it is difficult for Simon to address us both at once, not that this particularly seems to cause him problems. I was amused once in the car when Marc and I had just been singing something, and Simon said, “Tu peux encore le chanter s'il te plaît and you can sing it again, please?” I noticed once recently though, that he started a sentence, “Mummy? Papa?” and then carried on in English when he wanted to say something to us both. He knows we both understand both languages!

That said, I usually speak to Marc in French, and if I say anything to him in English, Simon is likely to ask, “Mummy, why are you speaking to Papa in English?”

For a while I had hoped that Marc and I might be able to speak to each other in Monkolé if we wanted to keep things secret from the boys (who do know some Monkolé, but not as much as we do). For a long time though we found we just didn't understand each other, which was rather discouraging (not to mention a waste of time!). This week I decided to try again. Simon had had a bit of a temperature, had taken some paracetemol and half an hour later got up from the sofa and came to the lunch table to eat some chicken. I asked him if he was feeling better and he said no. Watching him tuck into his chicken I said to Marc in Monkolé, “Despite what he says, he's feeling better!” and Simon replied in English, “No, I'm not feeling better!” … so I guess his Monkolé is improving, and that parental strategy is a dead loss!

We aren't sure how fluent Simon will become in Monkolé, particularly now that he is spending mornings at school in French and therefore has less contact with Monkolé-speakers. His best friend, Benja, has completed a year of school and now only wants to speak to him in French – which does at least mean they can communicate better than before! We'd like Simon to understand Monkolé simply to avoid church being meaningless and boring, but we just don't know to what extent that is going to happen.

People in the village used to laugh at Simon because whenever they tried to speak to him in Monkolé he would just reply “Aawo!” (which means “no!”). However, now he's picked up a bit more, he will reply more sensibly to their questions … and that just makes them laugh even more, to hear a little white boy speaking their language. So it's a bit of a lose-lose situation for him!

Benjy is looked after the pastor's wife while I'm at work in the mornings, and she only speaks to him in Monkolé. I'm a little unsure if this is the best way to do things when it comes to disciplining him, but then it isn't as if he understands French or English when he doesn't want to! At any rate, it does mean that he has more of a chance of ending up fluent in Monkolé, and will probably end up cringing at his parents' accents and messing-up of tones. We'll see...

Well, it is hard to find a photo illustrating bilingualism, so I won't even try! Instead, here I am with my two lovely bilingual boys:

fun with the translation team

I said I would post about translation work, and I have been so busy with the new work routine that I haven't got round to it yet. Marc and I are both finding it rewarding to at last get our teeth into the work which we came here to do. Yes, language and culture learning is essential, and ours has been an enriching time, but it can be very frustrating and the rewards are not instant or constant! We are also aware that although we aren't doing it full-time any more, we still have a lot of room for improvement. So on Wednesday mornings we are still reserving 2 hours for language work (plus time spent in the village hearing it around us).

Marc is getting on with preparation for Dry Season Bible School in March (a month of Bible teaching), and also some sessions to train the church youth leaders.

And I'm working with the translation team at last! During September that meant just Pastor Samuel and me, and we soon got into a good routine. He is working on a rough translation of Isaiah, working from 3 different French translations, and together we are revising Exodus. So while I'm reading ahead in Exodus, or in the afternoons when I'm not at work, he's been getting on with Isaiah, and then some of the time we've started to read through Exodus together. My task is to look at what the Hebrew says – and while I have learnt some Hebrew I have to admit I am well-aided by software which gives me a grammatical breakdown and thesaurus notes on the Hebrew – and to compare it with the Monkolé. Then we go through with me saying, “Is there any way we could say it more like this in Monkolé?” and either he says, no it isn't possible, or else we manage to find an alternative which is closer to the Hebrew while still sounding like Monkolé. It's a pity we don't have anyone who has good enough Hebrew and Monkolé to go straight from the Hebrew to the Monkolé, but we don't, so we have to work this way.

A big answer to prayer is that we have a new member of the translation team who started this month. His name is Philémon, he's about 27 years old, and he's a farmer. He is one of our church elders and sings in the church choir (he writes songs too). He's active in the church youth group and also serves on the national church youth committee.

Philémon started work last week, and it seems to be going well so far, though I'm not sure it's easy to sit at a desk all day and think hard when you're used to being out in the fields doing very physical work. He is going to re-take his BEPC (primary school certificate) this year, and from next week will have evening classes every weekday night and Saturday mornings too. So he'll have a lot on his plate!

I wasn't feeling entirely confident about Philémon starting work, and needing supervision, when I've only been working with the team for the last month. It didn't help that the pastor had to take the first two days of the week off, so I had to get Philémon started myself, and as I only work on translation in the mornings, he was on his own for his first two afternoons. I left him plenty of work to be getting on with, but still!

As a linguist, it is very interesting to see the kind of questions we run into when translating the Bible into Monkolé. For example, the Monkolé people believe that there is one God who created the earth, but they would pray to local spirits rather than God. So the idea of idols, as presented in the Bible, isn't hard for them to grasp. The idea, however, that there are “other gods” as also mentioned in the Bible, even if they are “false gods” is very difficult. Sometimes it's possible to translate it as “idols”, but sometimes that just doesn't work.

Another difficulty stemming from this, is the fact that the Bible often speaks of God as “the God of Israel” or “your God”. If it isn't possible to have other gods, this seems strange – and in fact isn't grammatically possible. I was trying to think of a parallel in English, and the closest I can come up with is the air. The air is everywhere, and we can't talk about “my air” (except perhaps in a very figurative sense). You couldn't talk about people having “another air”, either (though you might say that the air is very different in Benin compared to Europe – that's where my parallel breaks down!).

I'm sure that as time goes on I'll be able to share other interesting examples of translation challenges!

I have noticed my spoken Monkolé improving simply because I'm having to use it in a situation where I'm not thinking so much about the words as about the overall meaning. It is hard work and sometimes very frustrating, but I haven't had to resort to French too often. My Hebrew reading is improving too, having been rather rusty when I got back to it, but again, using it regularly is polishing it up nicely!

I am thankful for the team we have. It is early days yet, but I think we are going to work well together and find that our strengths complement each other. I am also grateful that Grace, my predecessor, uses email and has been able to answer many of my questions about Monkolé grammar and such matters.