Checking Luke with the Zanaki

Here I am in the Zanaki translators' office, working away. We're working on checking Luke 7 and making some important edits to their draft. The translator next to me is named Willy Futakamba, and the one next to him is Shem Koren. They are both pretty cool and I really enjoy working with them.

Zadok

This is Zadok Mwakalasya, age one week. He's a pretty special kid for me and Andrew, because we're going to be the ones to officially name him at his baptism!

His father, Eliud, is a good friend at work. He and I started working in the Musoma office the same day way back in January 2007, and he's a cool guy. He got married last May, and this May, he and his very sweet and pretty wife Jenny welcomed Zadok into their wee family.

To go back in time a few months, one day I asked Eliud what they were going to name the baby. He answered, "Joy, if she's a girl." I asked, "Well, what if it's a boy?" He said, "I have no idea." That, of course, prompted the answer, "How about Zadok?" from me.

Now, you might be wondering why I put "of course" in there. Well, to go back a few more months, one day my dad showed up at breakfast (this was when we were still in the States) and said, "Do you know who the only good priest was in the Bible? I mean, good all the way from beginning to end? Zadok! And who has ever heard of him or names their kid after him? Nobody!" And thus he began a campaign to urge expectant parents to name their boys Zadok. No Americans took him up on his great idea, but a couple in Tanzania sure thought it was a great idea!

I'll post more when we actually go to the baptism and do the official naming!

The widow who walked with many people

The Zanaki translators do their work in the Zanaki language, and then create a literal, word-for-word Swahili translation of their Zanaki translation for me to read. I can read Zanaki a bit, but the Swahili is a must for me to understand it. They can do the backtranslation into Swahili quite quickly with a computer program that helps with this task, so it's not that much work for them.

As I was reading the Swahili translation of Luke 7 (the section in which Jesus meets up with a funeral procession of a widow's only son and Jesus raises the young man back to life), it said, "And the widow walked with many people of the town." Now, true, she was walking and she was accompanied by many people of her town, but a red flag went up for me. In Swahili, the phrase "to walk with" is a euphemism for "to sleep with" (which is the English euphemism for the same thing). I wasn't sure if it had the this meaning in Zanaki or not, so made a note to ask the translators.

When we sat down to discuss their translation of Luke 7, I asked Shem and Futakamba (the Zanaki translators) if this sentence could be understood any way other than just that there was a widow walking alongside the coffin with her neighbors. At first they said no, there was no problem with it, and didn't quite understand why I was asking. Then I asked again, "Does the phrase 'she walked with many people' mean anything other than walking by foot?" They started laughing and said, "Oh no! We have to change that right now! It is probably okay in Zanaki, but too many people know Swahili and might think she had slept with every man in the town!"

Yeah, it's always good to double-check Scripture drafts before publication...

The Wealth Index

One day when I was at the market, I was wondering why Tanzanian women, who are shopping for families of like eight people, carry wee shopping baskets, and I, who am shopping for just Andrew and myself, have this huge basket that I lug around the market filled to the top. I watched them, and realized that they were buying just a couple items. They bought large quantities of these items, like 2-3 kilos of potatoes instead of the 1/2 I was buying, but that would still only be enough for a dinner or two for a big family.

When reading a very good book the other day, "A Passage to Africa" by George Alagiah, I found out why there was a disparity between our basket sizes: I only shop once a week. Here's what he has to say about that:

"... that great ritual of the rich world, the weekly shopping trip. You know those United Nations tables that compare countries according to gross national product per capita or hospital beds per thousand people? Well, I'd like to offer a new, and just as meaningful, category: the number of shopping trips per family per year. Only relatively rich people can be sure enough of their income next week to blow a whole load of cash this week on food. Only people wealthy enough to have their own transport or to pay for a taxi can manage to get all those goodies back home. And only those with money will have fridges and freezers to keep what they've bought fresh enough to be consumed days later."

I think this holds true in developed and developing countries both. For example, in America, the wealthy can afford to buy in bulk, so Costco appeals to the middle class and above groups, but the local mini-mart down the road which sells milk by the quart instead of 2 gallons at a time like Costco is where the lower-class shops. In Musoma, I go to the main market once a week and my Tanzanian neighbors without a car or electricity go each day to the little neighborhood stand and get the food for that night's dinner. Prices are lower in the main market than at the little stands, so just like milk bought by the gallons at Costco is cheaper per cup than the minimart milk sold by the quart, I pay less for what I buy, because I have the luxury of a car to get there and back home again.

To summarize: The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.