a week with a difference

This week we hosted a training seminar for 2 Bible translation teams (Monkolé and Fulfuldé) and a literature translator (Baatonu) on our mission station here in Pèdè. We were taught by Dr Pierre Barassounon, who is our translation consultant. The week went very well, and it was particularly good to see the newer translators growing in confidence and understanding new concepts. A few photos:

We had torrential rain - an assault on our ears thanks to our metal roof - for about 3 hours on Tuesday morning. For those three hours it felt as if we were living under a waterfall … and when the rain slackened it looked as if we were living on an island!

It is rare that it rains so hard for so long. On the positive side, we did collect plenty of lovely clean water for washing our clothes (nicer than our orange well water) but on the negative side the ground is taking its time to soak up all that water, and we even have water rising up into our new bedroom floor - eek!

shopping

On Saturday as I drove into our nearest town, Kandi, to do our weekly shop, I remembered how Marc, baby Simon and I used to do our weekly shop on Saturday mornings at Tesco when we were at Bible College. Saturday morning may still be my shopping time, but what a different trip it is!

So I thought that for this post I would describe a typical Saturday shopping trip these days. I drive to Kandi through open countryside with trees and a few round huts dotted about. At this time of year it is all very green, and crops are growing fast. After less than ten minutes I arrive in Kandi, and drive through it on the main road, dodging motorbikes, bikes, pedestrians, sheep, goats and so on as I go … there is no pavement so we all share the not-particularly-wide road! Not-particularly-wide but pretty busy as it is the main North-South road in Benin.

I stop first at the shop which looks most like a shop in the West – it has swing doors and a TV constantly playing. The shelves are all fairly temporary-looking though, and although they do sometimes sell some things you can't find anywhere else in Kandi – Pringles, fruit juices and even Heinz salad cream – the prices of these things are such that I would rarely buy them. Instead I tend to buy cheap biscuits (for our boys and their friends), yoghurts, mayonnaise, peanuts and occasionally sausages (just the industrial sort) or butter. The person at the till is usually a youngish guy who somehow managed to work out that Marc and I belong together despite us never having been to the shop at the same time! If he isn't there it is an older woman who I think may be the proprietor. As a general rule, everyone who is running a business is friendly … though not necessarily everyone selling anything – I've had younger girls going round the streets with produce trays on their heads who were obviously selling for someone else and seemed quite sullen!

I may then go on to the pharmacy. Some of the pharmacies in Parakou look very like the bright, modern ones you find in Europe. This one however looks more like the slightly shabby ones you also sometimes find in Europe! They don't have a huge range of medicines, but are happy to order them in, and I think they are the only place I've seen shampoo for non-African hair in Kandi.

From there I drive back into town and turn off the main road into what feels like the market, though in reality there is a brand-new market standing empty (something to do with places not having been attributed yet, or not enough places to go around...) and the market sprawls all over the streets of the centre of Kandi. I can usually park in front of the small shop owned by the man who sells me flour … I say shop, but it looks more like a large alcove. He has things out on the concrete in front of it – mattresses, plastic chairs, hosepipe, lino – and inside he has sheets of corrugated iron, suitcases, oil lamps, insect spray and a host of other assorted goods. I greet him, and chat for a while, and order my weekly 5kg of flour if he has it … and if he doesn't then often his eldest son (who must be about 14) will usually run off and get it from someone else.

I leave my car there, and cross the road to find the vegetable-selling lady who brings cabbage and/or carrots and/or potatoes up from Parakou most weeks. She tends to greet me with, "Bonjour, Pèdè!", calling me by the name of the village we live in.

I then go on to greet the lady I buy onions from, and to buy onions if I need them. There are no loyalty schemes as such here, but if you build up a good client-seller relationship you usually find that prices are decreased and you get a "present" (ie. a couple of extra onions) added on. We bumped into my onion lady at a wedding in our village, which meant she got to meet Marc and the boys, and so she is even warmer towards me now than she was before! I sometimes buy spinach or "leaves" from another lady sitting next to her.

Then I go on to my tomato lady, who speaks very little French but is always equally happy to see me, and also gives me extra tomatoes every time. If any of them don't see me for a week or two they always ask if I've been away somewhere.

Last Saturday I then remembered I needed batteries too, so went back to my flour supplier. He had disappeared so I asked his son if they had batteries. They didn't, but he went running off and found some elsewhere, came back to ask me how many, went away again to get them, came back to take my money, and then did another trip to get my change for me! I would feel bad, except that I didn't ask him to!

After all that I go back to the car and drive round two corners (again dodging what- or whoever is in the road) to Rosine's shop. It looks like a very small warehouse with a front terrace. She has a fridge and a freezer and I usually buy things like sugar, rice, couscous and pasta from her, and tinned goods like evaporated milk, sardines or corned beef. Rosine is always very welcoming and, having met our boys before, sometimes sends presents of packets of biscuits home with me. And when our car got a flat tyre a few weeks ago and Marc was having it repaired just round the corner from Rosine's shop, I took the boys and we went and sat with her while we waited for it to be mended.

Last Saturday I was surprised to see a pile of three brand new fridges on her terrace. I said, "Rosine, are those yours, or are you selling them?" "Oh, I'm selling them," she replied, "Why, are you interested?" "No, what I could be interested in is a washing machine," I said, and she said, "Oh well, I can see whether I can get one if you like!" She told me that the fridge suppliers have their own lorry and so deliver directly to her, so I said that if the washing machine suppliers could deliver all the way to our house I might well be interested!

After leaving Rosine I drop into the Post Office on my way home. The main part isn't open on Saturdays, but the small room with the post office boxes is, and so I check ours. It always makes me very happy if I find post there!

And off home I go. It probably takes about as long as it used to take us to do our Tesco shop, and it's less convenient but also less expensive, and there is definitely more personal contact with the people I meet.

family fun day

While we spend most of our time living in the village of Pèdè, where our nearest missionary neighbours are 50 minutes' drive away, we do enjoy the times when missionaries get together for fun and fellowship. The mission TWR has an annual "Family Fun Day" in July or August, and we very much enjoyed the last one. They have a large property - they need it as they have a very tall radio tower - with a lake and mango grove, and 40 or 50 of us met up for some barbecuing, swimming, zip-wiring, water-fighting fun! (Fortunately none of these activities were mandatory!) Our boys spent a lot of time by the side of the river or on the rope bridge above it, and their parents spent a lot of time chatting to friends! We also enjoyed the food.

The way up to the zip wire (would this pass European safety standards?!)

a big job well done

One of the many "hats" that Marc wears is his reponsibility as our Station Manager, which means that he is the one who manages the personnel (ie. his own family!) and property of the mission in Pèdè.

Since our bougainvillea was looking "slightly" overgrown we decided we needed to do something about it, and last weekend Marc set to work.

Before:

There is a house hidden behind there, honestly!

And after:

bulls, field boundaries and colour dilemmas

Last week the translation team was joined by our translation consultant, Pastor Pierre Barassounon, to continue checking the book of Exodus. It was slow going, as we checked Exodus 19-30 (working from Tuesday morning until Friday lunchtime) and it is full of detailed laws and descriptions of the plan of the tabernacle.

What was very interesting was to hear the translators' reactions to some of the laws. For myself as an urban Westerner, laws about goring bulls, field boundary markers and suchlike don't have much practical application. I can see the point of them, but the ideas remain very abstract. We read things like,

“If a bull gores someone and that person dies, the bull shall be stoned to death, and even his meat shall not be eaten. The owner shall not be punished further. But if the bull had already gored someone, and the owner had been told yet had done nothing about it, the bull shall be stoned and the owner too shall be put to death.” (Exodus 21:28,29 my own translation back from our Monkolé version)

The translators' reaction was, “Wow, imagine if that was the law here, it would make people more careful about their bulls!” and they told the story of a bull in a nearby village which was dangerous and yet the owner, despite being warned, did nothing about it. Apparently some children, seeing that nothing was going to be done, took the law into their own hands and hamstrung the animal!

Laws on land rights are also very relevant – just looking out of the translation office window beyond the mission property we see fields which are currently being fought over in court.

When we got onto the tabernacle furnishings the challenge was to translate as accurately as possible when the language doesn't necessarily have exact equivalents. For example, the hangings are to be made of “blue, purple and crimson linen” … or in some translations “violet, purple and scarlet” … not so easy when Monkolé only has a limited range of colour words. We ended up having to say “blue, red and blue mixed with red”.

While progress was slow, there was an encouraging feeling of teamwork and mutual commitment to our task. I felt that I learned some new things about the Monkolé culture, and we all learnt things from God's word, having pored over it in detail for so many hours.

The team at work: (Left-right, Samuel, Pierre, myself and Philémon)

And a big thanks to my lovely husband who took on extra childcare duties that week to free up my time!

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.