Andrew & Michelle Sandeen

Translating accurately

2012-02-12T22:21:00.000-08:00

A slightly-ridiculous picture of Stephen being stoned

Making sure a translation is accurate is tricky work. Does "accurate" mean following the words of the Greek New Testament and using those same words, except in a different language? Or does "accurate" mean trying to ensure that readers of the translated New Testaments understand the same thing that original readers of the Greek NT understood? It's quite complicated!

One recent example of this comes from the Ikoma language translation of Acts. On a recent village trip to test their translation draft, the Ikoma translators realized something was amiss. In Acts 22:20, the NIV reads, "And when the blood of your martyr Stephen was shed, I stood there giving my approval and guarding the clothes of those who were killing him." The Ikoma people listening to the translators read were confused if Stephen actually died or not while Paul was looking on. They thought it sounded like people were trying to kill Stephen and he was wounded somehow so he lost some blood. It just didn't make sense.

So was this translation accurate? The draft translation was similar to how it is in the NIV, and it didn't add or subtract anything from the Greek. All the right words were there, and the sentence structure was correct in Ikoma.

As you might have already guessed, we decided that if the translation is not communicating the right message, it is not accurate. The Ikoma translators are in the process of changing this right now so that it is clear that Saul was standing there while Stephen was stoned to death. To DEATH.

Maulid Day

2012-02-06T00:36:00.000-08:00

Will this be a three-day weekend? Should I (Misha) plan for the translators I supervise to take a trip to the village next week or will a holiday mess up that schedule? Do I need to wash my dishes on Sunday or not?

Thanks to Maulid Day, the above are some of the questions I was asking myself last week and over the weekend. Maulid Day is the celebration of Muhammad's birth and is a national holiday in Tanzania, a country which is very fair in celebrating both Christian and Muslim holidays (which means we have a LOT of holidays to celebrate!). The problem with Muslim holidays is that the dates are not known until the evening before the holiday since they are according to the Islamic calendar, which is based on the moon. If the moon is sighted, then the next day is the holiday. If it's still dark in the sky and no moon is visible, then there's no holiday the next day. So we usually know within a three-day range or so when a holiday might be happening, but it's impossible to know until the night before when it's actually going to happen.

There is not really a proper system in place for announcing if the head Muslim guy for the country saw the moon or not, unfortunately. After making plans and if-there-is-a-holiday-on-Monday-or-Tuesday back up plans for the translators going out to villages, I settled into my weekend wondering whether or not it would be a long weekend. There is a woman who comes to do some housework for me on Mondays, but she doesn't come on holidays. So on Sunday, having no news of any holiday, I set about washing lots of dishes. It took a good portion of my day, but I couldn't let them keep piling up! Then in the evening, it was about 8:00pm when Andrew and I realized that if there was a moon, it should be up by then, and we should have some news about whether or not Monday was a holiday. We tried online searches, we tried calling people, but to not much avail. We finally heard that some people thought it had been that day (Sunday). Well! All those dishes washed for naught! Nothing like hearing on Monday morning that Sunday had been a holiday and I hadn't even known. Well, so be it. At least it didn't end up messing up any village trips!

Road Transportation

2012-02-03T04:51:00.000-08:00

I considered calling this post "The Mighty African Bicycle", because let me tell you, Tanzanians (and people from other countries around here seem equally able) can really pack things on their bikes! But it's not just bicycles that can carry amazing amounts of things, it's also motorcycles and vehicles, so really this post is a tribute to Tanzanians who can balance large loads for transport! I did not take these pictures myself; I have co-workers to thank for snapping these on their cameras.

Firewood for cooking at home

Live chickens being taken to the market

A new mattress being taken home (it's folded in half)

All sorts of things being taken somewhere!

People. Lots and lots of people... there is ALWAYS room for one more!

And sometimes there is room for 20 more!

Biblical Swahili

2012-01-29T07:31:00.000-08:00

This morning at church I (Misha) was asked to read the Old Testament reading. Half of a chapter of Zephaniah in tricky biblical Swahili in front of an audience? Gulp! I agreed to do it, but quickly opened my Swahili Bible to read through the passage on my own first.

I didn't recognize one of the words, so asked the man sitting next to me what it meant. He was a recently-retired economist, and I had already determined while talking with him before the service that he, without a doubt, was one of the most educated Tanzanians I've met. He studied the word and the verse, but in the end shrugged and said he didn't know. He told me, "The Swahili of the Bible is very difficult," in an effort to reassure me it was okay that I didn't know it and to explain why he didn't, either. While I was slightly comforted that my Swahili wasn't too bad, I was also saddened. If this well-educated man had no idea what a word in Zephaniah meant, what hope did all the other people attempting to read the Swahili Bible have? I was once again reminded of the great need for Bible translation.

I managed to get through the whole thing without a major stumble. When I finished, I was so relieved that practically bolted back to my seat. The next person to stand up at the front then said, "This is the Word of the Lord," and everyone responded, "Thanks be to God." Oops. I guess I forgot that little closing line from the liturgy... In my defense, the only time in my life when I regularly attended a church which used liturgy of any sort was when I was at Hope College and went to Hope Church, which is in the Reformed Church in America denomination. Since they used English at Hope Church, not Swahili, my liturgical experience for four years doesn't always come in very handy here for remembering what I'm supposed to say!

Church Plant

2012-01-29T06:39:00.000-08:00

The Anglican church is one of the larger denominations in Musoma and they recently (like, three weeks ago) launched a small church plant in our area of town. I (Misha) am quite supportive of their efforts, since I think there is a definite need for another church here. They are meeting under a little group of trees at a crossroads near the market, so people are constantly passing by and can't help but hear a bit of the service. Most listen for a minute and then move on, but some the kids hang out for a while longer to see if there is anything interesting happening.

I once heard a statistic that said something like half the population of Tanzania is under age 16. There are kids everywhere! This morning the Compassion Children's Choir came and sang at our service, so that was about 20 kids. (Yes, that is Compassion as in Compassion International - all the kids in the choir live in particularly difficult circumstances and are sponsored by people overseas.) The people attending the service brought their kids with them, so that added about 6. Several groups of neighborhood kids congregated nearby to listen to the children's choir, which made about 10 more. One group of siblings was bold enough to come sit under the trees during the service, which added 5 more. So for the 9 adults at the service today, there were about 41 kids! There was no Sunday School, no chairs for the kids, no memory verse game, no Bible story pictures to color, no children's message, just a straightforward Anglican church service aimed at adults.

I am not personally interested in starting up a major children's evangelism project, but it seems like the perfect opportunity to reach out to the kids in that area of town. A few kids stayed to watch and listen, but most kept on walking. If there were some sort of fun kid's program that welcomed all and any to join, there could be over a hundred kids there each week, I have no doubt. I hope the Tanzanians in the church plant see this opportunity and do something about it! Or perhaps one of you reading this might be interested...

Food!

2012-01-27T02:14:00.000-08:00

I once heard a missionary who had lived in East Africa for years say, "When you get to the point where over 80% of your conversations are about food, it is time for a trip to your home country." Well, Andrew and I are nearing the point of going back for a few months (we'll be in the States from July 2012 to January 2013), and I think we're also very close to that 80% mark! Because we're starting to find it difficult to think about much else, this blog post is dedicated to the foods we miss the most and just cannot wait to eat when we get back to North America!

Pad Thai

We both LOVE Thai food. Want me to say that again? We LOVE LOVE LOVE Thai food!

Steak

Andrew in particular is really craving some good steak. We both miss quality meats, but Misha might be more inclined to miss things like plump boneless skinless chicken breasts. We can get beef here, but it's not exactly the quality of the cut in the picture above!

Salmon

Good seafood comes next on the list. Salmon, halibut, and all sorts of great fish that aren't available here are another thing we miss and can't wait to get our teeth into. We can get great tilapia here, but we're lacking in the ocean-going sorts of fish and seafood.

Spinach salad

Fresh vegetables of a greater variety are high on our list, too. Baby spinach in a salad... yummy! It's not like we don't have vegetables here, but the variety is minimal and most of them do better cooked than raw.

Strawberries!

And last but very, very far from least, BERRIES! Blackberries, marionberries (especially in cobbler...), strawberries, raspberries, blueberries... We love other kinds of fruits we can't get here, too, like peaches and big Washington apples.

I think I need to stop now before I start thinking about yogurt, cereal, ice cream... It's too late! I don't think I can stop!

Good stories

2012-01-22T22:01:00.000-08:00

After completing the initial draft of the book of Ruth, Mussa, one of the Ikoma translators, went out to a village to read it aloud to see what the community thought it. He had called ahead and asked a man he knew who lived in that village to prepare a group of ten people to be ready to listen and provide feedback on the translation. But when he arrived, a significantly larger group, comprised of some Christians and some non-Christians, was waiting, curious and eager to take part!

After reading two chapters of Ruth, several of the non-Christians in the group spoke up. They said, "This is such a good story! We didn't know the Bible had good stories in it!"

Mussa answered that the Bible had many excellent stories in it, and that someday many of the stories will be translated into the Ikoma language, so they can read them all they like in their mother tongue. He had not planned on doing evangelism when he went out to the village to test the Ruth translation, but perhaps a few small seeds of interest were planted that day.

Music in Tanzania

2012-01-21T06:20:00.000-08:00

Music is a huge part of everyday life in Tanzania. But, it might sound a bit different than what you would expect if you've seen movies of Africa with traditional African music in them. It has definitely evolved over the years, as Western influence and availability of electricity have changed things.

Music is also becoming more and more a part of our work, as we look at ways to promote mother tongue literacy and creative, meaningul use of Scripture. In an effort to share some glimpses of what music is like around Musoma, we've put three different video clips on YouTube. Click on the links below to check them out!

http://youtu.be/OzbqiLB3JwQ

This is from a public event we went to on a Sunday afternoon in 2010. Approximately ten different choirs, some of which had traveled from out of town, performed different songs with energetic dance steps.

http://youtu.be/9cQzxJh3XyY

We had a series of literacy workshops at the office in 2011, working with eight different language groups. During one series, some of groups wrote songs based from Luke and performed them on the last day of the week-long workshop. This is the Jita group performing a song based on Luke 24.

http://youtu.be/gxsW3IcGvQQ

This choir performed several songs at the Zanaki Luke dedication in early December. They were a huge hit with their creative songs, many of which were in Zanaki. Since the dedication, they have been traveling to different churches to perform and are also hoping to make a recording soon.

This is the song book which is used in many Tanzanian churches. All of the songs are in Swahili, and you might notice that most of the songs are translated from Western hymns. Some have retained the original melody, and others are quite different. You rarely see one of these books in good condition because they're used a lot! Just in the last few weeks we've taken some initial steps to hopefully develop some similar songbooks in the Ikoma language.

First copy sold

2012-01-17T03:27:00.000-08:00

Praying for the books at the dedication

The pastor whom the story below is about

This is a story I (Misha) wrote following the December 2 dedication of Luke in the Zanaki language:

On a day that was alternately hot and sunny and pouringrain, a dedication event for the gospel of Luke in the Zanaki language tookplace. The dedication was held in the village of Butiama, which is thehometown of the first president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere. Perhaps inpart because of Nyerere and the fact he was a Zanaki and a national hero,Zanaki people are proud of their language and culture.

The special guest speaker at the dedication was in thefamily line of the area chief and the top person in his denomination for all ofEast Africa, so was a very important local figure. He was the one honoredwith task of cutting the ribbon and opening the box of Luke books. Afterhe opened the box and another pastor prayed a blessing over them, the next partof the ceremony was one of the translators reading a passage from Lukealoud. When it was announced which passage would be the one read aloud,he grabbed a copy of Luke from the top of the box he had just opened and turnedto the passage. While the translator was reading aloud, he followed alongwith his finger on the page, listening carefully and reading it himself. He was fluent in Swahili and could read it, but had never been taught how toread in his mother tongue. But with the help of hearing it read aloudwhile looking at the words, he was able to understand the writing system usedand figure it out.

Soon after this, the sales table opened and people eagerlycame up to purchase copies. The box which had been blessed and dedicatedneeded to be moved from the table at which the special guest was sitting to thesales table. When someone came up to collect the box, he refused toreturn the copy he had taken to read, instead placing money to purchase hiscopy in the box, becoming the first person to ever purchase a copy of Luke inthe Zanaki language.

Flowers

2012-01-13T07:58:00.000-08:00

The work that God accomplishes in our yard is much more impressive than what we accomplish on our own!

Drachmas and cattle

2012-01-10T09:39:00.000-08:00

Today I (Misha) came across a verse that made me laugh aloud. Actually, it wasn't even a verse, it was a footnote. Usually if I'm laughing at a verse (footnote), it means that something went terribly awry during the drafting stage (don't worry, this doesn't happen too often), but this time it was a good sort of laugh.

For context, the verse (which is in the context of sorcerers burning their sorcery books after believing in Christ) is as follows: A number who had practiced sorcery brought their scrolls together and burned them publicly. When they calculated the value of the scrolls, the total came to fifty thousand drachmas (Acts 19:19, NIV). The footnote is to explain the value of a drachma (according to the NIV's footnote, one drachma is a day's wage). In the Ikoma translation, their footnote says that the value of 50,000 drachmas is enough money to buy 250 head of cattle. I guess each bovine is worth about 200 days' wages for an Ikoma person. Now THAT is what I call making a translation good and relevant for the people group for which it is intended!

Lunch from the lake, at the lake

2012-01-07T08:42:00.000-08:00

You know your fish is fresh when you're sitting about three feet away from the lake while eating it and fishing boats pass by periodically! Andrew and I like to go out to lunch sometimes on weekends at a little restaurant right on Lake Victoria and get fish and chips. One gets a whole tilapia fish, fried crispy on the outside and soft and white on the inside. The eyes and teeth and tail and all are still attached to the fish, but we ceased to be repulsed by such things long ago.

So if you're ever in town, we'd be happy to go out for some fish and chips with you! In 2011 we had two sets of visitors and we took both of them here to share the fun of living on the lake. It can take a while to get your food (this is Tanzania, after all), but it's well worth it when it arrives!

Cheesecake

2012-01-05T09:01:00.000-08:00

Chocolate Marbled Christmas Cheesecake!

I wanted to make a special dessert for Christmas, so decided to attempt a cheesecake. Cheesecake is easy to make in places like Canada, the States, and England (I have successfully made ones in all those places), but slightly more complicated in Tanzania. For starters, there is no cream cheese here. And I have no cheesecake pan. And there is no sour cream here. So, what else is there to do but make your own? I bought this strange thing sold here that can only be described as thick, chunky milk. I have no idea how they make it, but it's sold in 500ml (for you Americans, that's a bit over a pint) containers and looks revolting.

Using a rag, a cat toy with a long ribbon (we didn't have any string on hand), and a small mixing bowl, I rigged up a way to strain the chunky milk like I was using cheesecloth or something more professional. Letting it drain for about eight hours in the fridge got it to the right consistency. I bought some yogurt a missionary friend made (from scratch... plain yogurt isn't exactly sold here, either) and strained a few cups of that, too. In the end, after three days of draining and straining, I had enough "cream cheese/sour cream"!

And you know what? It tasted great. Maybe not quite like normal cheesecake, but it was quite yummy. I mixed in some cocoa to some of it and made this nice marble pattern that was so pretty I got Andrew to take a picture before we cut into it.

Long time no post

2012-01-05T08:47:00.000-08:00

Well, I apologize for the long delay in blog posts! We have had some issues with the internet over here...

On December 19th at approximately 11:00am, the internet line was cut. All landline phones and broadband internet went out. At the same time, a water pipe was also cut and the water to a large section of town also went out. There was road work to build a new bridge going on and a backhoe was digging away in a large hole. As soon as it happened upon the phone line and the water pipe, and that was the end of that. As soon as the water pipe was cut, it immediately flooded the giant hole in which the backhoe was working. There was a huge mound of loose dirt around the backhoe and it turned into thick black mud and water. As you might imagine, the backhoe didn't make it out of that hole for several days! A brigade of local people with buckets scooped it out by hand.

The water was restored after four days and the internet to part of town was fixed six days later, on Christmas afternoon. We were excited that we were able to call our families on Christmas - it was a very nice Christmas surprise to get it back! After a week with no internet at home or at the office, we were feeling rather desperate!

One small part of town still has no internet, however, and our office is located there. It is very frustrating (and difficult to get work done) without any internet. The company keeps telling us it will be fixed tomorrow. Many tomorrows have come and gone, but still no internet. Unfortunately, all phone and internet is prepaid over here, and the way it works at the office is that we pay for a period of time (the internet at our office goes in 4-week payment cycles), not by usage, so we can't exactly threaten the company or withhold our money from them. It's very frustrating! Also, since they are the only company, we can't threaten to drop them and go with a different internet option, either. We just hope that they'll fix it soon.

So in the meantime, I will do my best to do some blog posts from home and start updating y'all again!

Great book

2011-12-14T21:39:00.000-08:00

Can you tell I copied this from Amazon?! Sorry, you can't actually click to look inside from here...

A while ago Andrew's dad recommended a book to us, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. We thought that it sounded pretty good, so Andrew ordered it from Amazon and had it shipped all the way around the world. He's not usually a speed reader so when it took him only a few days to finish, I thought, "That book is either really good or he accidentally ordered the large print edition!" Upon finishing it, he announced it was one of the top 10 books he'd ever read in his life, so that seemed to point towards the former reason for finishing it so quickly.

A couple weeks later I started it, and last night I read the final pages. Wow. I think it is the best-written biography I've ever read! It was so good I want to name my next pet after the guy about whom the book is written (you might recall I have a thing for naming animals after people whom I admire). Tonight I'm going to be very sad that I can't go home and read more. That is the worst part about reading a good book - when you finish it, it is like saying good-bye to a dear friend.

So if you're looking for a Christmas gift for someone who enjoys reading or if you're wondering what your next book should be, we highly recommend Unbroken! (And if you're wanting two great books to read, Seabiscuit by the same author is also fabulous.)

Door-to-door salesman

2011-12-12T23:32:00.000-08:00

Sometimes in the afternoon on a weekend day we'll hear "Hodi! Hodi!" in front of our house. In Tanzania, saying "hodi" is the equivalent of ringing a doorbell. Usually we moan and whine and shuffle to the gate to see who is there. We've had people come by selling fish and baskets, people looking for work, and people asking for money for all sorts of needs like school fees and funerals. So when we saw a man carrying things and setting them up on display by leaning them against our car, we sighed and went out the door, prepared to explain that we aren't really interested in buying anything.

When we saw his paintings, though, we suddenly realized that this guy was pretty good! Recognizing that he would be a great illustrator for literacy books, we got his name, number, and people group so we could contact him later. Since both of us liked his work and we have some empty walls in our house that are begging for decor, we started discussing together which one we'd like to get. Because Andrew and I were speaking to each other in English and were obviously debating something amongst ourselves, he drew the conclusion that we liked his work but were debating the price. Without us even asking, he lowered the price on his paintings! We chose the one pictured above and have hung it in our living room.

A little excitement came about when we went inside the house to get the money to pay him and he spotted a large snake under our car. It disappeared, but he and Andrew tried their best to find it to kill it. I hid myself elsewhere, as snakes aren't really my thing. At all. Door-to-door salesmen aren't really my thing either, most of the time, but it worked out quite well this past weekend!

Mowing the Lawn

2011-12-08T23:22:00.001-08:00

Cutting grass

Sweeping cut grass and leaves

We don't exactly have a lawnmower here, but we do have grass that needs to be cut regularly. How does that work, you might wonder. What we have in place of a machine is a piece of metal about three feet long that is bent a bit for its last six inches. Those six inches are sharpened and voila! A lawnmower! Cutting grass with this implement is a bit beyond our skill set, so we hire someone to come to our house every couple weeks to whack it all down for us.

Since the grass is not tidily collected in a lawnmower bag, Andrew does this part of the task. With a broom made of stiff dried grass and a stick for a handle, he sweeps our yard to collect all the cut grass and leaves that have fallen off our trees. It's quite the task, but our yard looks very nice afterwards!

And the disciples gathered in the upper... rock?

2011-12-06T03:32:00.001-08:00

Rocks off the coast of Lukuba Island

From the vantage point of on top of a large rock, you can see the surrounding rocky terrain

In both Luke and Acts, there are several verses that say the disciples gathered in an upper room. Jita people don't build multi-level homes, so it was quite the challenge for the Jita translators to figure out what word to use for an upstairs room. They finally decided to use the word for a big rock resting on top of another large rock. Houses with several stories might be scarce among the Jita, but big rocks are all over their land, as you can see in these pictures. A unique feature of the topography of this area of Tanzania is the very large rocks, many of them resting on top of each other. So it might seem a little strange to say that the disciples gathered in the upper rock for their last supper with Jesus, but to a Jita reader, this is something they can picture quite readily.

Coca-Cola - it's everywhere you want to be

2011-12-03T06:26:00.001-08:00

Visa's slogan might be "it's everywhere you want to be," but let me tell you, Visa has not quite yet reached the roadside shops where I buy things here in Musoma! There are no Burger Kings or McDonalds in the entire country of Tanzania, and Wal-Mart hasn't opened yet around here, but you know what is everywhere I've ever been in the world? Coca-Cola. I've done a fair bit of traveling around the planet and there's only one thing I've seen everywhere I've ever been - Coke. I heard (from someone somewhere - this might be a rumor) that the guy who invented Coca-Cola wanted anyone, no matter where in the world they were, to be able to get a Coke to drink if they wanted one. I think he succeeded!

Sodas are pretty important in Tanzanian culture. No gathering is complete without sodas being offered to all! At events with special guests, the way to show that they are special is to give them two sodas (or even three if they are very honored) instead of the usual one. I never drank much soda before coming to Tanzania, but it's become a fairly regular part of life here because it's rude to turn one down when it's offered. And since it's not safe to drink the water, bottled soda is a very good option for what to drink when out and about.

We have some interesting kinds of soda here that aren't available in the States. From left to right in the picture: Sparletta Stoney Tangawizi (Sparletta is a brand made by Coca-Cola) is a very strong ginger drink. Take small sips and drink at your own risk! I love it, but it isn't for everyone.

Fanta Pineapple is part of what I like to call the "Fanta Family", a Coca-Cola branch of fruity sodas. There are lots of flavors, some better than others: blackcurrant, passion, pine nut, pineapple, and orange. Orange is the most popular and it is second only to Coke itself in the places I've been in Africa. Andrew likes pineapple, and passion is my favorite.

Krest Bitter Lemon is, you guessed it, a soda made by Coca-Cola. Krest drinks are only 300ml and most sodas here are 350ml, but they cost the same amount. I guess Krest is Coke's high end drink line or something. Anyway, bitter lemon is kind of like bitter fizzy lemonade. It actually has a tiny bit of quinine in it, which is what gives it a distinctive sharp flavor. Kind of like the ginger drink, bitter lemon is not for everyone, but is beloved by some.

Fanta Passion is the fourth soda in line.

Coca-Cola the king of sodas is last in line. It tastes a wee bit different here because it's made with a different kind of sugar than in the States and it's in a bottle instead of a can (I honestly think this makes a difference). I think it's better - I am not a big Coke fan, but I like the East African version better than the US kind.

Other kinds available in town but not pictured: Sprite (the third most popular drink after Coke and Fanta Orange), Sparletta Citrus, the other Fanta flavors, Coke Light, Krest Ginger Ale, Krest Tonic Water, Krest Soda Water, Pepsi, and very rarely 7-Up and Mountain Dew.

So come on out to visit us and we'll share some bottles of soda with you! And maybe like me, you'll be someone who called it pop previously in life and you'll change. I never said "soda" in my life till coming here, but since the Swahili word is "soda" and it's just what everyone says, I got in the habit.

Serving God

2011-12-01T00:42:00.001-08:00

Something I (Misha) was thinking about the other day is that if I were here in Tanzania to serve the translators, I wouldn’t be here. As much as I sometimes really enjoy them, sometimes they drive me absolutely crazy. After all, they are a bunch of sinners, and sinners and their sins can be pretty annoying. (I’m sure I drive them crazy at times, too, since I’m also a sinner who sins.) I have my moments when I’d like to fire them all. (Side note: I don’t have the authority to fire them and wouldn’t actually do it even if I did; I’m just saying that there are times when I wish I could.)

Something I knew before I came here is that cross-cultural relationships are difficult. The longer I stay here, the more I realize how true that is. The translators and I have our fair share of comical misunderstandings that leave us all laughing, and we also suffer through some painful episodes that could have been avoided if we were quicker to realize that the problem is one of cross-cultural miscommunication and not us intentionally hurting one another. Over the past couple years we’ve wasted a lot of energy getting upset with each other over cross-cultural misunderstandings.

So when I was thinking that my purpose here is not to serve the translators, I thought, “The Scripture we’re translating is for ALL the people of these language groups, so really it is these large groups that I’m here to serve.” But that idea quickly let me down. Sometimes if I meet a Zanaki person and tell them that I’m working to help translate the Bible into the Zanaki language they get quite excited and are appreciative of this work. But a lot of the time they don’t really care. After all, many of them are not believers, and why would a non-Christian start celebrating scripture translation all of a sudden? And some of them don’t really see the point of translating it into Zanaki, either because they don’t value scripture or they don’t value their own language. So if I were trying to encourage myself to persevere because of serving these Bibleless people groups, well, that would last about a day before I lost heart!

As for me being here to serve Wycliffe Bible Translators or the Uganda-Tanzania Branch of SIL, yes, I would hope my being here would be of service to those organizations, but that’s not my reason for what I do. Organizations and businesses, even Christian missions, let you down. They are run by imperfect people and without a doubt will fail you at some time or other.

I’m here in Tanzania because God has called me to be here and because I’m serving him. When it comes right down to it, my reason for being here actually has nothing to do with me believing in the value of mother-tongue scripture, my work with the translators, or a desire to strengthen indigenous churches. It’s about God. I’m here to obey God and serve him. If some good comes out of my being here, that’s just a bonus. If he’d like to use me to bless people with his Word in their languages, that’s great, but that’s not why I’m here. Out of obedience to him I will try to serve the translators and other people around me and my mission organization, but if I let that be my motivation for service, I’m going to run dry on motivation pretty soon. Only God can replenish me every morning to do his work!

Flood!

2011-11-25T06:53:00.001-08:00

This morning we woke up at about 3:00am to the sound of rain pounding against the windows. It had rained a significant amount the day before, so the ground was already quite drenched. We were not surprised to find that the electricity was out when we got up in the morning. Andrew left early for work (not much to do at home without hot water or Internet) in hopes that the generator might be working at the office. I stayed home, since I'm still sick and supposed to be resting. We hoped that the rain would stop soon because we were expecting guests on the afternoon plane, and because Musoma has a dirt runway, the plane skips landing here if it is very wet.

The rain only got harder and I started to become concerned about the drips coming from the ceiling - the roof was obviously leaking quite badly. But before I could get too worried about the small streams pouring down from the ceiling, I became very worried when I glanced out the front window and saw a mighty brown river rushing through our front gate! Our front door is level with the ground - there are no steps up into our house, and the door does not seal tight against the concrete floor. Suddenly, water started streaming in under the door and flooding through the dining room and living room and pouring down the two stairs into the bedroom!

I ran to the door leading to the back porch and was relieved to see the water go that direction, where I knew it wouldn't cause too much damage. I grabbed electronics and Christmas cards off the floor, snatched towels out of the closet and tried to stop the water from coming in under the door and prevent it from going into the bedroom. I called Andrew in a panic and asked him to come home and help. I called our landlord and let him know we had a flood situation. And then I went a little crazy and couldn't figure out what to do for a bit, but finally figured out I needed to move the couch and then start bailing out the bedroom to try to save the bed from sure disaster if the water level rose too high down there.

Andrew managed to get home (we live down a very long dirt road with several small, broken-down bridges barely holding parts of it together, so this was a dangerous challenge) and Holly, our dear friend and neighbor, came over to help. We mopped, scooped, and used towels to get all the water and mud out. It never did stop raining until 3:30 in the afternoon! I can't believe how much water got in the house and how much work it took to get it all back out again!

Much to our surprise, the electricity returned in the evening and nothing in our house seems to be permanently damaged. A few towels are much worse for the wear and a pillow might have to be discarded, but nothing major was ruined. We are very thankful for God protecting us and our house and for keeping the damage minimal. The yard will take a while to recover, but no trees fell and if it's sunny for a few days, everything will dry out okay.

Malaria

2011-11-19T03:57:00.001-08:00

Some people bring back keychains, coasters, and postcards as their vacation souvenirs. I decided to do things on a bigger scale and brought back malaria with me. When I started shivering at work yesterday evening and developed a horrible headache, I got a bit suspicious that something wasn't quite right. One is not supposed to shiver in Tanzania and I'm not prone to headaches. Sure enough, I then got muscle and bone aches and my fever continued all night. This morning I went to a clinic in town and had them check my blood, which confirmed that I do indeed have malaria. It takes 7-14 days after being bitten by an infected mosquito before developing symptoms, so I most definitely got it while on vacation, since I was away that entire time period.

I find that there are a few misconceptions about malaria. The last time I had malaria, I think some friends in the States thought I was near death, because we always hear statistics about how many Africans die of malaria every year. Yes, malaria CAN be deadly, but that's only if you don't get treated. So while I don't want to discount that many people, especially children, die of malaria every year around here, only a small percentage of the people who get it die from it.

Also, it's not every mosquito that carries malaria. One the females of one species of mosquito are even able to carry it, and they have to bite an infected person first. Despite using bug spray every evening on our trip, I still got a lot of bites, so I can't say I'm too shocked to have gotten sick. Mosquitoes just really like me! It seems like I get a lot more bites than other people do. I'm just so sweet, they can't resist me...

Malaria is actually very easy to diagnose and treat. It's nice in a way that the medicine is just a three-day series of pills and that one starts feeling better pretty soon after taking them. Some diseases take you out for a long time and the recovery is slow, but with malaria you can go from feeling absolutely horrible - fever, aches all over your body, exhausted, and a killer headache - to feeling quite normal in just a couple days if you get the correct pills. There are lots of different malaria medications, but some are more effective than others. I went for the top of the line best drugs when I bought them this morning and they cost me just under $2.00. The test cost about the same amount, so at least while malaria hurts my body a lot, it's not hurting my wallet too much!

So I feel pretty crummy right now, but I'm pretty sure that I'll be doing a lot better by tomorrow and I think I'll be able to go to work on Monday. Malaria is nasty, but short-lived.

Coming or going?

2011-10-25T06:00:00.000-07:00

Clockwise around the table: Andre - translation consultant in training, me - Jita translation advisor, Tom - translation consultant, Neema - Jita translator, Magoma - Jita translator, Magesa - Jita translator

Last week and this week I have been involved in the consultant check of Jita Acts 1-14. Well, we hope to get all the way through chapter 14! An exciting side note is that this is the first consultant check being done in our new building.

Today we encountered an interesting problem in Acts 10:33a. It's one of those half-verses that doesn't have anything particularly theological in it, so it didn't seem likely to have any translation issues. The context is that Cornelius is talking to Peter and explaining to him about being visited by an angel telling him to summon Peter, and how he had done so. In the New Living Translation, it says: "So I sent for you at once, and it was good of you to come." Pretty boring, hey? Well, maybe you'll notice something interesting in the Jita translation, which I've translated into English here: "So this is the reason I told people to come call you, and you have done well to come."

Read it again, just in case you missed it the first time. Do you see it? It's that "I told people to come call you" bit in there. How can Cornelius, who is at his own home at this point in the story, talk about sending messengers to go on a journey of three days to go fetch Peter, say "to COME call you"? It doesn't really make sense in English, but in Jita, it sounds just fine. Because Cornelius is talking to Peter himself, it's "come". In Jita, if he said "go" in this context, it would mean that it was someone other than Peter who had been called. Cool, hey?

The consultant and I both thought the translators had simply gotten confused and messed up by writing "come" instead of "go", but when they explained it, it reminded me once again of the value of having mother-tongue translators! There is no way someone who is not Jita could have possibly translated that verb correctly, but since they are doing it in their own language, it sounds just right.

Holly is coming!

2011-10-20T09:44:00.000-07:00

Holly and me in October 2007 - four years ago!

Holly Higgins is coming to Musoma tomorrow! (Side note: I wanted to put a nice, more recent picture of Holly up here, but somehow it worked out that all I have is a lot of candid shots that, while cute in their own way, Holly would not appreciate me posting for the world to see... So anyway, here we are four years ago. This picture was posed on some stairs - Holly is about a foot shorter than I am.)

Holly and I lived together from July 2007 to July 2008, when I went back to the States for six months. She took care of the house and cats in my absence, then we lived together again from January 2009 to May 2009, at which time it was her turn to go back to North America for a while. We met up at my wedding that July (she was a bridesmaid) and then in January 2010 Andrew and I visited her in Langley, BC, where she was attending grad school (at Trinity Western University, the same grad school I went to). She came out to Tanzania for a couple months to do research for her Masters thesis (which she recently successfully defended!), and is now coming here for a four-month stretch. She has to return back to the States because she's getting married in February! Then later in 2012 she and her husband will come back to Tanzania together to live here long-term.

You might recall from previous posts that the house in which Andrew and I are currently living is next-door to the house where Holly and I used to live. Well, guess where Holly's going to be living when she arrives? That's right - in the same house she and I used to share! We may not be able to be housemates anymore since I'm now married and she's about to be, but we'll be about as close as it's possible to get without actually living together. I'm so excited to have a good friend as my next-door neighbor!

The last of the first

2011-10-10T00:19:00.000-07:00

This elderly man, pictured at the Ikoma Luke dedication, was one of the very first Ikoma believers. The Ikoma people all followed their traditional religion, but this man and a few others heard about Jesus and believed. He became a pastor with the Mennonite church and planted churches in several Ikoma villages. For years he worked to reach his people with the gospel and to start local churches.

Eventually, all of the other first believers died. This man is now the only remaining one from that original group. When he arrived at the Ikoma Luke dedication, he was ushered to the front of the church to sit in an honored position (and a comfortable chair).

One of my (Misha's) jobs during the dedication was to give copies of Ikoma Luke to the important guests sitting at the head table. When I handed the bright blue copy of Luke to this elderly Ikoma man, I was sad that none of the other first believers had lived to see this moment. But I was also happy that at least one of that group was there to see Scripture in his mother tongue. After his years of work to preach the gospel among the Ikoma, I hope he was pleased to see God's Word in the Ikoma language for the first time ever and think that now the churches he planted can read about God in Ikoma, and maybe they can reach even more people!

Shadrack

2011-10-08T05:16:00.000-07:00

At9pm on Thursday evening I received two text messages on my phone. The first one said, “I’ve been accepted at ateaching college. Please call me so wecan talk.” The second one said, “I needto depart tomorrow morning because it’s in the Iringa Region.” They were both from Shadrack.

Shadrackis the young guy who helped me with my Swahili after completing languageschool. He became a good friend as wespent two or three days a week practicing conversation and studying vocabulary.

Beforewe met, Shadrack had completed Form 4 education, which is equivalent to highschool in the States. He has been tryingto get accepted into a school and trying to accumulate the necessary funds tomake it possible, although he has never been pushy about his needs. Being impressed with his natural intelligenceand work ethic, I’ve really hoped it would happen. A few months ago, Michelle and I met withShadrack over brunch and told him that we’d love to do what we could to helphim pay for school if he was able to get accepted somewhere.

Thesetwo text messages on Thursday evening started an interesting cascade of events. We determined that he’d just received thenews that day and had started visiting family and friends to figure out how hewas going to get the money for travel to Iringa and school fees. Iringa is in the southern half of Tanzania,and at least a 2-day journey by bus from Musoma.

Aftera few calls back and forth, we agreed that we’d take Shadrack to the busstation on Friday morning. So, less thaneight hours after first hearing from him, we pulled up in front of his house at4:40am. He met us outside and explainedthat he hadn’t slept at all. He’d spent theentire night saying goodbye to friends and packing his single, carryon-sized suitcase. We went into the house, where his family hadgathered (mother, aunt, sister, brother, and pastor’s son). We chatted for a couple minutes and thenprayed together in Tanzanian style, one person starting and then everyonepraying out loud together. I could sensesome hesitation as the prayers started winding down, and then the sobbing began(a very uncommon thing in Tanzania, except at funerals). It all of a sudden struck me how difficultthis was, despite the positive opportunity. Shadrack was leaving his widowed mother, 14-year-old brother, and otherfamily members for a long time. SinceIringa is so far away, he knew that he might not see any of them again for twoyears. And they don’t even know wheretheir necessities will come from! Will Mombe able to get enough food for the family while I’m gone? Will Shadrack be comfortable in the school’shousing and be able to get the necessary school supplies? What if something happens?

Weall (7 of us!) piled into our car and headed to the bus station where we sawhim say his final goodbyes and board the first of several buses with his littlesuitcase for the beginning of his journey.

Itall happened so fast, I don’t think anyone had adequate time to process. Thursday morning was just another dull dayfor Shadrack. Friday morning he was on abus and off for school many kilometers away from home. And his classes start on Monday morning.

Wepray that all goes well for Shadrack in his studies.

Clive, Feb. 26, 2007 - Oct. 5, 2011

2011-10-05T07:09:00.000-07:00

Clive, age 5 weeks and 2 days (the day I brought him home)

Kittens on the jungle gym! (a chair with the cushions removed)

Betsy and Clive, who always acted like her little kitten and would snuggle up to her

Clive got a toy in a care package from the States and went wild over it!

Clive and some twine that fascinated him for many weeks

Clive and Betsy - he always managed to make her into a pillow and take up the entire cushion

The cutest lazy bum in all of Tanzania and his obliging sister

Clive, looking rather cocky on top of the closet on the day I moved into a new house and he was checking out his new digs

Little cats checking out the big outdoors

Clive and his prize, which he brought inside shortly after this picture was taken and put on my bed...

Clive in a tree, looking very handsome

The last good picture I have of Clive. If you look closely, you can see his mouth is a bit open as he sleeps, which is because he was having a hard time breathing his last months.

October 5, 2011 marks the last day of Clive's little life. He was only 4 and a half, but he had been sick (and getting sicker) since January, and after nine months of struggling, we let him go today. (A vet assisted.)

Clive was a incredibly social, friendly cat, and one of the only cats I've known who didn't mind little kids (too much). He would let toddlers "pet" him and wouldn't run away from kids who came to our house to visit. He loved attention and affection.

His love for people was only exceeded by his love for food. Nothing in our house was safe if Clive was inside! Raw onions left on a plate after eating pasta salad, frozen papaya thawing on the counter before being blended into a smoothie, leftover rice at the bottom of the pot soaking in the sink - you name it, Clive ate it. And loved it. He was cheerful about eating his own food (dried fish), too, but he had quite the palate for human food! Any sort of meat was his absolute favorite, followed by bread. For his final meal, I gave him a piece of bread. He took a while to get it down because he struggled to breathe while eating and had a sneezing attack in the middle of it, but he ate the entire piece.

Clive also quite enjoyed his rights as an American - freedom of speech. If he had an opinion, he liked to share it. If he needed something, he had no qualms about telling us. If he wanted in, wanted out, wanted more food, wanted our food, wanted to join the conversation, wanted us to pet him, he just went right ahead and let us know. It was terribly annoying, but it was also handy at times to have a cat who tried to communicate with us.

Clive and his twin sister, Betsy, were the best of buddies. He was a total pest who took her food, laid down on top of her if she was in a spot he wanted, and connived her into giving him a nose-to-toes bath quite regularly. She fell for it all and adored him as her big brother. They usually slept curled up together and it could be hard to tell whose paws and tail were whose as they got tangled up in sleep. I loved it when they'd curl up together on my lap, although such times usually ended with Clive slowly edging Betsy off the lap and she'd finish her nap next to us on the couch while he got the entire spot.

Clive was a good-natured cat who came when called, would let himself be transfered from one sleeping position to another without getting indignant and stomping away like most cats do, caught mice and geckos to keep our house free from critters (although his sister Betsy's ability exceeded his), and lived for the evenings when we watched movies and he got to sleep on my or Andrew's lap for hours. His favorite spot in the world was on his mama's lap (mine). As we drove him to go meet the vet this afternoon, he got a final 30 minutes snuggled up on my lap, leaning his head against me.

Good-bye, Clivey-boo. We love you. We'll miss you.

Good-bye, Rachel

2011-10-01T10:54:00.000-07:00

The missionary women of Musoma! (And no, we did not intentionally coordinate our outfits for the picture.)

This morning all the missionary women of Musoma gathered for a farewell brunch for Rachel Workentine, a translation advisor here at the Mara Cluster. She's been in Musoma since 2008, but she and I become good friends back in 2004. We were assigned to be roommates our very first semester of grad school, and we liked each other so much that we just kept on living together for the next two years! (Side note: we have the same personality, according to Myers-Briggs, and as anyone who has ever been around us much can testify, it shows.) We lived in three different places during those two years, but we always shared a bedroom and usually we had all of our classes together each semester, too, so we saw a LOT of each other during that time. At the time we had no inkling that we'd end up together later in Africa - I know it looks like we planned things this way, but it really did just kind of happen! It's been so wonderful to get to have a close friend here in Musoma, someone who has known me for longer than just a year or two, someone who has met my family and has some shared history with me. I'm really going to miss Rachel.

Rachel and me this morning at brunch

Shannon (our other housemate in grad school), Rachel, and me in Banff in 2005

Twice is Nice

2011-09-29T02:09:00.001-07:00

Rukia, the Ikizu translator, recently returned from a trip to a village. As soon as she came back, I sat down with her and asked all about her trip. I am not able to go out with the translators on their village trips very often, but I love hearing about them when they come back to the office. (If you're thinking carefully, you'll figure out that the above picture is from a previous trip when I was able to go with her.) She gave me all the basic information of her journey first, then at the end she got a little smile and leaned forward to tell me the following story (which I've changed into 3rd person so it can be an independent unit for reproduction elsewhere).

When Rukia, the Ikizu Bible translator, went to a village to read a chapter of her draft of Genesis aloud to get feedback from community members, several people gathered to listen. They were quite surprised to learn that Scripture was being translated into the Ikizu language, but even more surprised to learn that their language could be written.

Rukia began reading and everyone listened very carefully. They were nodding and smiling, following along with the story. She continued reading all the way through the end of the chapter. But as soon as she finished, they suddenly asked her to go back and read the final paragraph again. Rukia immediately thought, “Oh no, what did I mess up in my translation?”

After hearing the final paragraph once more, one man in the group leaned back and said, “Thank you, Rukia, for repeating that part of the story. It was just such good Ikizu and so sweet to our ears to hear our language being read that we all wanted to hear it again! We’ve never heard Ikizu being read aloud before!”

"Then everyone will understand everything!"

2011-09-26T23:57:00.000-07:00

Part of my (Misha's) job is sending the translators out to villages periodically to have them do community testing with drafts of the translation. Last week Pastor Magoma, one of the Jita translators with whom I work, spent some time out in the Jita language area, and when he returned to the office this morning, I eagerly listened to him telling me about his trip. One story in particular caught my attention, and I thought you might like to read it:

One day Pastor Magoma traveled to a Jita village he had never been to before. He had with him several chapters of Acts translated into the Jita language and hoped to read the chapters aloud to the people of the village in order to receive some feedback from them about which parts of his draft needed improvement. A group of people, a mixture of believers and non-believers, gathered around to listen to him read.

Contrary to what he expected, the non-believers eagerly listened to the chapters and gave their full approval right away. They said, “You are preserving our language! You are now a respected person in our village for your work in writing down our language for future generations.” They did not seem to mind that the language preservation work was taking place by translating the Christian Scriptures; they thoroughly enjoyed listening to Pastor Magoma read chapters from Acts and were eager for more.

The Christians, however, responded with many questions. They asked questions such as, “How can you translate the Bible – do you know Greek and Hebrew?” and “Is this a paraphrase or a real translation?” and “Is this the work of a particular denomination?” and “Why did you choose that word in Jita for this theological key term?” The elders among them also wanted to know why some words were in modern Jita or even in Swahili, and not in the Jita of their ancestors. Pastor Magoma patiently answered all their questions and in the end, they broke into smiles, pleased with how he had responded.

Reassured that Pastor Magoma was doing good work, they asked, “Do you remember how Jita people used to sing hymns in their own language? We used to sing hymns translated into Jita in church. Do you think that you would have time to write down those songs in addition to your work translating the Bible? Then we can have a church service in which we sing hymns in Jita and read the Bible in Jita and everyone will understand everything!”

Indoor Sunbathing

2011-09-26T04:08:00.000-07:00

Every afternoon from about 4:00 to 6:00, we get full sunshine coming in one of our windows. Guess who knows exactly where the sun is? As the sun slowly moves across the floor, Clive and Betsy slowly scoot along with it, moving about four feet along to make sure they get their full solar-charge for the day. You'd think wearing a fur coat in Musoma would keep one warm enough, but apparently not, because these cats are sprawled in the sunshine soaking up their rays every chance they get!

There's more than bilharzia in the water...

2011-09-20T23:35:00.000-07:00

We're not quite sure WHAT is in the water in Musoma, but it seems that something more potent than even bilharzia (nasty little thing that causes disease) in the water around Musoma! The last five months have had a few events occurring that seem like more than just coincidence... It all began in April with a frenzy of activity. The Hill family, missionaries in Musoma, gave birth to a little boy, Cooper. Not too long afterwards, Rachel, another Musoma missionary, got engaged! Her fiance is from Egypt, and here's a great shot of them in his backyard. Well, maybe just in his country...

A week or two later, another Musoma missionary family, the Nicholls, gave birth to a little boy, Elliot. After a brief reprieve from activity, in July things in the water came into play again (although that would mean it had lingered in her system for a while, since she was in Canada at the time). Holly, a Musoma missionary, got engaged! His name is Jeff, and he'll be joining her in Musoma next year. Here's a picture of them just after he popped the question.

In September things have really gotten a bit crazy! First a Musoma missionary family, the Kamphuis', gave birth to a little boy, Aron. A couple weeks later, another Musoma missionary family, the Turners, gave birth to a (you guessed it!) little boy, Ezrah. Shortly after Ezrah's birth, there was another engagement, this time with Ellen and Johnny, both of them Musoma missionaries. This picture shows the happy couple (quite a few months before their engagement, however):

There is one more missionary family in the Musoma area expecting a baby, the Archers. If they have a boy, he's sure going to have a lot of little buddies his age to play boy games with, and if it's a girl, she'll have her pick of the crop. Also, there are still several single missionaries in Musoma, too, and you never know, maybe their turn for engagement is coming up soon... I think if they keep drinking the water (after filtering it!) or breathing the air, it just might happen!

What to do?

2011-09-13T00:00:00.000-07:00

On Sunday Andrew and I went to church with a Tanzanian friend and his mom and siblings. Our friend's name is Shadrack and he's a young guy, maybe 20 years old. When Andrew finished language school and needed some more conversational practice, a local pastor connected him with Shadrack, who proved to be a good Swahili practicing partner. He knows English fairly well and is a smart, pleasant fellow and a very committed believer. After church (which lasted about three and a half hours), the pastor invited us and Shadrack's family over to his house for lunch. We visited and ate a meal, and about three hours later we apologized that we needed to leave and excused ourselves - visits here can get very long! Although it had been a nice visit and the food had been good, we were getting a little tired and ready to leave.

We gave Shadrack and his mom and little brother a ride home, and when we got to their house they, of course, wanted us to come in and visit. What could we say? Although Andrew was leaving for a week-long trip to Nairobi early the next morning and wasn't exactly ready for his trip just yet, we couldn't turn down their hospitality, so we went in to visit with them, although we didn't quite feel like it.

Shadrack's father died about three years ago (he had cancer). He was a carpenter, and from the looks of their house and the furniture in it, he was a good carpenter and made a decent living. To try to make ends meet after he died, Shadrack's family started a brick-making business. They built a kiln in their front year and make homemade bricks for people to use for building houses. It was not wildly profitable work, but they could get some money from their labor. However, we were recently the recipients of quite a bit of out-of-season rain here in Musoma. The wet season was very dry this year, and now it seems that the dry season is rather wet. The heavy rains destroyed all of their freshly-made bricks, ruined the big pile of sand they had stored up to make more bricks, and caved in their kiln! Shadrack and his mom were in despair. They showed us the damage and shrugged, saying, "We don't know what we'll do now. The rainy season isn't too far away now, and we're afraid it might rain again soon, even though it's supposed to be the dry season and doesn't usually rain this time of year."

Suddenly our concerns about being a bit tired and needing to get ready to go on a trip seemed very petty. We sat with the family, told them we were sorry for all their problems, and told them we'd pray for them. What does one say to a widow and her children who used to have a hard-working husband who gave them a nice life and are now destitute? We wanted to help, but what they need is employment, and we can't give that. Shadrack politely and indirectly inquired if we'll be hiring anyone at our office in the near future, but we're not. Shadrack is very smart and wants to go to college, but in order to get accepted at a public college in Tanzania, some bribes are required, which they can't afford (and don't want) to pay. He can get accepted at a private college, but can't afford the tuition. And even if he does manage to get a scholarship and go to college, that still means he leaves his mom alone with his younger brothers and sisters and no income. We had no answers for them, and other than a few encouraging words, we had nothing to offer. Our afternoon ended on a very sad note.

Taboo! (not the game)

2011-09-10T02:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I (Misha) was working with the three Jita translators, Magesa, Magoma, and Neema (two men, one woman). We were checking their draft of Acts 9 to prepare it for testing in villages and for being checked by a translation consultant. Whenever we check chapters together, the first step I always have them do is to read their draft aloud. 95% of the time, the two listening to the one reading notice little details that need to be fixed. They usually comment on things like misspellings, awkward phrasings that need to be fixed, and where it would help to have a connector word inserted or deleted.

However, a first came up yesterday, and it took me a while to figure out what the problem was. Magesa had just finished reading the first part of the chapter when Magoma said (in Swahili), "We can't have that word for 'friends' in there!" Then he changed languages and kept on talking to his fellow translators in Jita, so I was not able to follow the conversation. All three translators became very animated and had a vigorous discussion in Jita. I kept hearing the Jita word for "friends" (which could also be translated as "fellows", "mates", or "relatives"), so I knew they were still talking about that, but since I didn't understand anything else, I was really quite curious as to what the problem was!

Eventually the translators' conversation wound down and they changed back into Swahili to explain things to me. Neema said, "The word we'd used for 'friends' in verse 7 (which in the NIV is translated as 'men', if you're checking your Bible!) is not okay for a female to say. It is very taboo!" Only men can say that word. Men say 'abhamura', but women say 'abharume'. Men can't say the women's word, and women can't say the men's word."

I asked, "But Acts is written by a man, Luke, so it would be okay for him to have written that word. So would it be okay for a woman to read that word, just repeating a man's words?"

Magesa said quite firmly, "No, a woman could not stand up in front of a church and read that. She could say it if she was with good friends her own age, but not in front of others. It is taboo!"

"Well, if it is taboo for women to say the man's word, could a man possibly say the women's word?" I asked.

They all laughed a bit and shook their heads. Apparently is is even more taboo for men to say women's words than it is for women to say men's words. "Well, what do you all propose we write instead," I challenged them.

Magoma suggested, "How about the general word for 'people'?" That seemed fine to me to me and the other two, so we made the change in their draft. So now in the Jita translation of Acts, chapter 9 verse 7 says, "the people who were with Paul", and we have not broken any cultural taboos.

No more flashlights!

2011-09-07T00:53:00.000-07:00

The battery and inverter/charger

The switch that flips us from regular power (Tanesco, the electric company in Tanzania) to battery (marked "solar", because the electrician's assistant who wrote the labels thought the battery charged from solar panels, I think)

Earlier this year, Tanzania began to run out of electricity. We started going through a lot of candles and batteries in an effort to see every evening and morning (Andrew gets up before the sun). It was liveable, but pretty obnoxious. We felt like moles living in burrows underground, since it was so dark so often!

But then our church decided to bless us with a backup power system, and on our way through Nairobi in July, we picked out a nice battery and inverter/charger. It took a local electrician three full days to get it all set up and installed, but now that it's done - wow! No more burrow-like life! All we have to do is flip a few switches (being very careful to flip them in the correct order), and voila! Lights! There is a little hum in the background, but other than that, there's no way to know if the lights table come from normal electricity or from the battery. We've now had it for over a month and still get a bit excited when we can use it and just flip on the overhead lights instead of doing something like try to hold a flashlight in one hand and rinse dishes with the other (or some other awkward arrangement - have YOU ever tried to pin a flashlight between your upper arm and body so you can zip your pants after going to the bathroom?!).

Thanks, Calvary Chapel!

Sorting lentils

2011-08-29T02:58:00.001-07:00

Around here, most foods are sold by the kilo. I (Misha) can buy big yellow lentils (dal) at our local market, which gives us a little variety of how to get protein in our meals. I like making spicy Indian dishes with the lentils, which go nicely with rice, which we can get in abundance here!

However, eating lentils can be very dangerous to your health in these parts. What looks like a lentil on your plate is not always a lentil - watch out for rocks! Before coming here, I never realized just how similar rocks and lentils can look. But to the poor tooth that bites down on one, they are most definitely NOT the same.

So, before doing any sort of cooking with lentils, I spread them out on a cookie sheet, one little handful at a time. I peer down and pick through them, plucking out little rocks left and right. In the picture, you can see my findings - that little pile of refuse is comprised of rocks, little green beans (I think they were being sold in the basket next to the lentils, because quite a few of them seem to have gotten mixed into the lentils I bought), and a few pieces of dried lentil "husks". I guess lentils have some kind of brownish skin covering them when they are growing or something like that.

These lentils ended up in a very tasty, although slight too-spicy for me (Andrew loved it) dish. Take out the rocks, add some spices, and cook them for a long time, and lentils make a great meal!

Dinosaur in the yard!

2011-08-27T07:34:00.000-07:00

Well, not quite a dinosaur, but a monitor lizard. They look kind of like dinosaurs, though! This little fellow visited us the other day and sunned himself in our front yard for a while. A bit to our surprise, Clive didn't seem to mind too much. They cheerfully co-habitated in the sunshine. Clive watched him a bit, but didn't bother moving or anything.

Some monitor lizards we've seen here are nearly six feet long, but I'd guess this one was about two feet (not including the tail, which is another two feet). They whip their tails around to kill their prey. They are a bit creepy looking if one is afraid of snakes or crocodiles (or dinosaurs...), since they look a bit similar. They have long, darting tongues that scare me a bit. But so long as they stay well away from me, I'll take the Clive route and give them their space, but not let them bother me.

Unplanned Trip

2011-08-19T09:26:00.000-07:00

Well, when I woke up this morning I was looking forward to a regular day in the office. What a regular day in the office is I'm not sure, because it seems there's always something happening around here! And since we have 22 Austrian guests in the office this week (short-term missions trip) and Andrew is out of town for several days, I guess I already knew it would be an out-of-the-ordinary day.

Before beginning this story, let me back up a bit. Yesterday the Austrians descended upon us. They are here to pray for the translators and bless them with gifts and to pray for the peoples of Mara Region for a week. The team members range in age from late teens to retirement age. It felt like an extremely prayerful Christmas yesterday in the office as each Tanzanian was blessed with prayer and a gift bag. Many of them had no idea what some of their gifts were, and I somehow ended up being the "gifts interpreter". I explained how to open an unusual sort of necklace clasp, what a suncatcher/rainbow-maker was, how much a euro is worth, what a paperweight is, etc. Several of the translators shared their candy with me, and I loved being in a situation in which Tanzanians wanted to share with me because they felt they had more than I did (there were no gifts for expat staff). So you get the idea, yesterday was a bit out of control at the office, but in a good way.

Anyway, I was worn out after all of that (I did a presentation for the team about the cluster and various other things) and looking forward to "normal". But when I got to work this morning, my computer would not start up properly! I won't go into technical detail, but suffice it to say that there was no using my computer all morning and it wasn't looking too hopeful, although a technically-inclined co-worker was trying a few things to try to get it going. This one aging laptop (over four years old) is my lifeline for skype, e-mail, translation work, entertainment, everything. I couldn't figure out what to do at work without a computer, so was pondering just going home.

Just then, one of the translators came to me looking very worried. He explained that his daughter was very sick (from his description she sounded delirious, so I thought maybe it was a bad case of malaria). She is a secondary school student and her school was a bit over an hour away out in a village. The headmaster of the school had called him that morning to say he needed to come pick her up, and that she was not in good enough health to travel on his motorcylce or in public transport. So the translator came to me, wondering if I could arrange anything.

Usually I'm extremely busy at work and can't ever just leave. But since I had no computer, here I was at the office with nothing to do. "Give me five minutes and I'll drive you out there," I told him. He was shocked and very relieved. We took the wife of another translator (Sara, the one who was the bride when I was a bridesmaid) who just happened to need to go to that village and also the mom of the sick girl, along with her baby, the sick girl's little sister.

When we got to the school, the headmaster asked us to come into his office. Another woman and man were already in there. He then sat down and explained that he was a Christian and had studied in seminary. He said that demon-possession had been traveling around the school, being passed from girl to girl as they shared clothes and other possessions, as teenage girls are prone to do. He said that daughters of the two families in the room were currently affected. He explained it began with a girl whose mother was a witch doctor and had given her daughter some spirit-objects. He also said a few things that didn't quite sit right with my theology, such as how males are more resistant to demonic attack because they are smarter than women and that demons inhabit the eggs in females' ovaries, so women are susceptible. But anyway, he was calm and just explained the situation (the two girls had walked stark naked into one of the classrooms the day before, etc. - not their usual behaviour) and said that the parents needed to take their daughters home, pray for them, get them demon-free, and then the girls could come back to school to take their end-of-the-year tests. The two girls then came in, and the other family's daughter seemed out of sorts and very strange. The family I was with, their daughter seemed very quiet and tired, and like her mind wasn't fully present.

We got in the car and started driving home. I asked if they still wanted to go to the hospital immediately, as their original plan had been. They weren't sure and asked my advice. I suggested that since there was a group of 22 people committed to prayer at the office, maybe we could go there to have the girl prayed for. We got there just as they were praying for the people group which this family was from - it was perfect timing! They prayed for her and the girl suddenly became normal and happy again. Her face, especially her eyes, became free and relaxed. Her parents took her home and have decided she will not be returning to that same school.

So then I went and checked on my computer. It was working!!! While I was away, it had been fixed. :-) I am writing this blog post on it and am thrilled that it works.

What a day! I came home and went for a walk and ate chocolate... :-)

Prepaid Electricity

2011-08-17T06:19:00.001-07:00

We have prepaid electricity at our home. This is a "special feature" that some houses here have, and is considered a good thing, as odd as that may sound.

The usual system is post-paid, in which case you have a little meter in your home that scrolls along (like an odometer) counting how many units of electricity you have used. Every month the electric company comes and reads your meter and produces a bill and delivers the bill to your home. You then take the bill and go to the electric company's office in town and pay it.

This system can go awry if 1) they come to read your meter at a time when you are not home and thus they cannot get to the meter to read it; 2) they do not deliver your bill in a timely fashion or they attempt to deliver it when you are not at home to receive it; or 3) you are late to go pay it. Then they come out to your house and cut off your electricity.

For people who work full-time, it is basically impossible to be at home at the right time to have a meter read or a bill delivered. And since if we weren't home they would probably give the bill to our landlord instead of to us, then we would have to rely on our landlord to deliver it to us quickly so we don't get our electricity cut off. As you can see, that is all rather complicated and problematic!

So, we are blessed that the tenants previous to us had a prepaid electricity meter installed. (This came about after several instances of cutting off their electricity when the aforementioned system did not work well for them.) So now our system is that we go to the electricity office and pay them however much we want to pay. They give us a receipt with a 20-digit number on it. We go home and enter this number into the meter and voila! It then shows our new amount of units remaining. For example, the other day we were down to 763 units in the morning, so we realized that by the end of the day, we'd be in the dark if we didn't get some more electricity soon. We went and paid 50,000 shillings (about $30 US) and got a receipt (you can see Andrew holding it). Andrew entered the number, and suddenly we were up to 30,000-some units.

It's a little risky in that we have to remember to check our meter and buy more electricity when we need it. It's our own fault if our power goes off now - we can't blame anything on the power company or landlord with this system! (Excepting power outages, of course, which are still happening daily.)

Side note: despite power outages, our electricity bill is not any lower these days. The power company has simply raised the price of electricity per unit used, so that even though they keep the country in the dark about 12 hours a day, they aren't losing any money.

Working Together

2011-08-12T05:55:00.001-07:00

Little baby orphan leopard

Leopard all grown up in the village

Andrew and I just completed our first real work project together, and it went quite well! We worked together on a tract in the Ikizu language. It is an animal fable designed to share the gospel and is a fun little story with a great message.

In the story there is a man who tells a story to his friends about a man who goes hunting and finds a little baby leopard. He thinks it is innocent and cute, so takes it back to his village so the children there can play with it. The village chief tells him that he must kill the baby leopard, because little leopards grow into big leopards, and big leopards kill. The man refuses, insisting that it's just a cute little baby leopard. Eventually, the little leopard grows up and develops a taste for blood. He kills the man who brought him to the village. The village chief then kills the leopard and is wounded in the process. The storyteller then talks to his friends about what the story means and how the leopard represents sin and how the chief is like Jesus, because "by his stripes we are healed" (it has a summary of 1 Peter 2:24).

Earlier this year Andrew took a Scripture Use checking class and checking this tract in Ikizu was his first major item to check. Since I am the Translation Advisor for Ikizu and am familiar with the Ikizu writing system, I was present during the check to help Rukia, the Ikizu translator.

I was a wee bit nervous going into the check because I know how assertive I can be if I think I know how something should be and I'm more comfortable with Swahili and Ikizu than Andrew is. I was worried that I'd start running the check instead of him! Rukia, too, is a fairly strong-minded person and is not afraid to be stubborn when she has an opinion about something, and she almost always has an opinon. So I felt like Andrew was being thrown to the wolves/agressive women.

We ended up having a really successful check, much to everyone's relief. Andrew was well-prepared with lots of questions, quite a few of which led to some positive changes. Rukia and I corrected spelling and natural language issues along the way, so we took turns to initiate changes, too.

The most difficult part of the check came when Andrew asked Rukia, "What is the message of the story?"

She answered, "The importance of obedience." The way she read (and had translated) the story, the sin was the man disobeying the village chief and keeping the baby leopard.

Andrew and I both got a bit worried at that point, because the point of the story as we understood it was that we should not allow "innocent little sins" into our lives, because they will end up killing us, but Jesus can save us.

We ended up resolving the issue by making it a bit more general. But it was interesting to me to see her perspective as a Tanzanian reading the story. Obedience to authority and following rules from above is a high cultural value. When I was trying to explain to Rukia the difference between how she'd understood the story and how we'd understood it, she turned to me and asked, "But how does all sin start? Disobedience to God's commands. We must obey him." It was at that point that I saw she was right, and we were right, too. How we each understand God and sin depends on our cultural worldview.

Something slightly less significant but somewhat amusing was that Andrew and I discovered that we have different opinions about comma use. We're both extremly detail-oriented ("There's a forest? I can't see it - there are too many trees in the way!") and we both kept asking Rukia's about comma placement. It seems we have different opinions about where they ought to be! (Conclusion of that issue: because I was the one who originally taught Rukia about commas, she and I tended to agree, too bad for Andrew.)

Makoko Family Centre

2011-08-08T22:19:00.001-07:00

We live in a place called "Makoko Family Centre", and we are happy you came for a tour! We're really excited to show you where we live. We're on a pretty large compound that has buildings for raising pigs, rabbits, and chickens; a health clinic; a vehicle repair area; houses for the compound plumber, carpenter, and electrician and their families; a basketball court; a soccer field; elementary school classrooms; a large kindergarten complete with playground; a dining hall; an internet cafe; a small convent; a guesthouse; two houses for renters (one is ours); two chapels; and a house for priests.

Just to the left of the entrance gate, there are some topiary bushes to welcome you. The bushes say "Welcome to Bakhita English Medium Primary School". This picture just has the "Welcome" part of that. You can see the school chapel in this picture, too - the kids gather here for mass. The school is run by Catholic missionaries from India - most of the teachers are Indian nuns. The person in charge of the whole center, our landlord, is an Indian priest. Some of the students are boarders and live in dormitories on the centre, and some are day students who come and go each morning and evening. They are kindergarteners and elementary school kids, so they range in age from about 5 to 13.

Straight ahead when you come in the entrance gate is a figurine of Mary surrounded by fake flowers and other decorations. Sometimes at night it is lit up with multi-color lights and looks quite Christmassy. They change the clothes on Mary periodically - she has a little wardrobe stored somewhere on the property, I guess.

To the right of the entrance gate there is a small health clinic. The signs above the doors say "Mother and Child Health", "Eye Services", and "Laboratory". I've never been there as a patient, so I can't say much about the clinic, but maybe one day I'll fall ill and can report back to all of you.

This is the kindergarten and its playground. I love how they have painted all the buildings! I think it looks like a fun place for kids to learn. Every morning when we leave for work we see little kids coming in the gate to go to school. The kindergarteners wear red checked skirts/shorts and red sweaters, so they are easy to spot. The older kids wear gray, which makes them look like serious students.

These are the school buses that transport the non-boarding students every morning and evening. Depending on where we pass the buses on the road to/from town, we know if we're early or late to work! They pack a LOT of kids into these buses - it's not just two kids per seat like they would be in the States. During the weekend (when I took this picture), the buses are just parked on the centre by the girls' dormitory.

These are three of the houses on the centre. There are more houses for the centre workers on the other side of the centre, but these three are all a bit larger. The house on the far left (you can only see a wee bit of each house - this is the only angle at which I could get at least part of each house in the picture) is where I lived from 2007-2009. The house on the far right is called "Adoration Convent" and several Indian nuns live there. Our house (you can barely see it) is in the center. Since we have a hedge and gate and are in the corner, it's a quite private little spot. We like it that way. :-)

So thanks for visiting Makoko Family Centre with us! It's a nice place to live and we're happy here. Come again sometime!

Please Pray for the Ikizu Luke Dedication!

2011-08-04T05:34:00.000-07:00

We have just heard from the group of Ikizu people who are planning the dedication event for Ikizu Luke. They informed us that they have not been able to raise money for the celebration, so they want to postpone the dedication until some future time.

There are several reasons for this:
• This is a difficult year for farmers; there is a drought and people do not have much extra money available to contribute.
• Because the translation project office is in Musoma, which is about two hours away from the Ikizu villages, the churches in the Ikizu area are not very aware of the translation project.
• Ikizu people do not yet understand the value of having Scripture in their own language.
• Spiritual warfare opposing the work.

Please pray that the dedication will happen when and how God wants it to happen! Pray that the planning committee will know whether to organize a smaller event, delay the event until after there is a harvest, or find effective ways to communicate the importance of involvement to local churches. Pray that somehow, someway, the Ikizu people will have the Gospel of Luke!

We are looking at the boxes of books in our office and pray that these books will cease to be in boxes, but will be in the hands of Ikizu people.

Birthday

2011-08-03T22:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was my birthday, and it was really quite a nice day! Just in case you're curious how one celebrates a birthday in Musoma, here's about how it went:

6:00am - Andrew woke me up and I discovered he'd made me fruit salad and hot chocolate for breakfast! He hadn't realized that our cocoa is just straight, plain baking cocoa and not hot chocolate mix so I had to add some sugar, but it was a nice treat in the morning.

6:30am - I exercised (marched in place) in the bedroom while reading a great book I'd borrowed from a friend here, "The Calligrapher's Daughter". I usually make myself work out a bit more energetically and use my arms, too, but since it was my birthday I let myself just march and read.

7:45am - As we were heading out the door to work, I realized that Andrew had fed the cats for me and put their bowls of food (dried fish) and water outside for me, even! What a husband, doing my morning chores for me on my birthday.

8:00am - Right when I got to work, Rukia, the Ikizu translator, immediately noticed I was wearing a shirt she hadn't seen very often (I don't wear it much so it'll stay looking nice) and complimented me on looking pretty. It was a nice surprise that she noticed and said something!

8:30am - When my friend Rachel got to work, she came by my office and gave my a present: a dish towel, two hot pads, and some hand-santizing lotion that smells great. It was wrapped in a great reusable ribbon, too, so that was also sort of part of the gift!

10:30am - After our morning devotion time with the whole office, Andrew announced it was my birthday and everyone sang to me. Then during our morning tea break, Rachel showed up with cookies, which was a fun surprise! She'd put candles in 29 of them, which I utterly failed to blow out. 29 is a lot of candles! The cookies were great and I ate a lot of them, definitely more than my fair share.

11:00am - I spent a few minutes on Amazon looking for what to get with the gift certificate my father-in-law gave me. I love Amazon!!!

8:00am - 4:30pm - My workday was quite nice, as I assigned myself my favorite tasks to do. I checked one and a half chapters of Ikizu Genesis, which is something I really enjoy doing. However, I happened to be on Genesis 19, which is just about my least favorite chapter in Genesis, so that was a bummer! Nothing like getting to celebrate my big day by spending hours thinking about the men of Sodom trying to break into Lot's house and then Lot and his daughters in the cave...

4:30pm - Since we were out of cat food and toilet paper, two very, very bad things to run out of, I had to run to the market after work. It wasn't terribly celebratory, but hey, it was better than going home to desperately lacking both!

5:30pm - I had done some dinner prep already, so when we got home I got to go lounge on the back porch with a cat in my lap instead of having to start working on dinner right away. Andrew gardened for a while outside and I enjoyed some book/cat time.

7:00pm - We had Korean Beef Pulgogi for dinner, and it turned out great. I opened a gift (a promising-looking book) from my mother-in-law. Andrew apologized for not having made me birthday cookies but offered to share his hard candies from Nairobi with me. I put on a doleful face and said that having some candies would be nice, and asked him to go into the kitchen to get them. He walked in and exclaimed, "Where did this cake come from? When on earth did you make this?!" I had secretly made a cake while I was making dinner and he had no idea. It was kind of fun to shock him and then we enjoyed our cake.

8:00pm - We played Quiddler and I creamed Andrew. We don't usually play too many games together on non-weekend days, so that was kind of out-of-the-ordinary and fun.

9:00pm - I finished my book with a cat on my lap. What a nice way to complete a birthday evening!

Flowers

2011-07-27T23:08:00.001-07:00

Our new house held a nice surprise for us, these cool flowers! They are in the side yard close to the house, so they are tricky to find unless you are looking for them. But when you find them, what a treat!

They grow like bananas, which probably doesn't mean much to you. :-) But like a banana stalk, they start small and tightly packed together. Then they start growing downwards and expand to their full size. I can't figure out how you could pick them and display them, because they are growing from the top down, so we just leave them on their giant stalks (about 10 feet tall with one HUGE leaf at the top) and walk outside and around the corner of the house to enjoy them. Beautiful, aren't they?

Rice Packaging

2011-07-24T09:07:00.000-07:00

While we were in Nairobi, we bought a bag of jasmine rice from Thailand. In Musoma we can get Tanzanian rice and basmati rice imported from Pakistan and/or India, but Thai jasmine rice is a treat for us.

Today I opened the bag and was reading the back of the bag, which was rather amusing in its use of English (as anyone who has a read an instruction manual for a device manufactured in China can imagine). Then when I got to the part about cooking directions, it ceased to be simply amusing and became quite confusing. As you can see in this picture, the amount of water to add to the rice apparently depends on what month it is! What on earth?! I can only hypothesize that it is really humid sometimes in Thailand and so the water in the air makes it so you need less water added to the rice to cook it. But then, I ask myself, why is the package printed in English, not in Thai, if it was intended for cooking in Thailand? No clue. I couldn't help but take a picture so you all could laugh along with me. Let me know if you know why the rice/water ratio depends on the month, as I'm quite curious!

Ikizu Luke has arrived!

2011-07-22T05:12:00.000-07:00

Ikizu Luke has been printed and the books are ready! It's pretty exciting to see the Ikizu words in print in a real book instead of just on a computer screen!

However, Rukia and my sneak peeks are the only peeks that are going to take place for a while, because we can't be letting undedicated books run wild. (That was a joke.) The Ikizu Luke dedication is not until August 25, so we have to close up the boxes and sit tight for a little while yet. It is very tempting to take a few out and take a picture for you, but if we all have to wait before we get the books, you all have to wait before you get a picture of the books!

Thank you very much to those of you who prayed for us through the whole process of developing an Ikizu alphabet and writing system, learning about the language, hiring and training translators, and working on the Luke translation and checking the drafts. The fruit of your prayers is now sitting in boxes in my office, and come August 25, we'll be celebrating it!

New House

2011-07-19T22:42:00.000-07:00

We're pretty excited about our new house! We've now spent eight nights there and it's starting to feel like home. I think yesterday was our first normal (not unpacking or packing) evening and this morning we were actually in a bit of a routine for getting ready for work. After the craziness of moving and almost immediately going to Kenya for ten days, we're mighty thrilled to have some normal routine in our lives.

One interesting thing that came about because we moved and then left right away was that when I was unpacking after our Kenya trip, I couldn't remember where to put things. Like, I took my lotion out of the suitcase and then stood in the middle of the bedroom looking at various cabinets and wondering where on earth I had decided to store lotion when I'd unpacked our boxes to set up the house two weeks earlier. I hadn't exactly had time to use any lotion before packing it again! I did figure it out, though, eventually (and random other things that also had me stumped for location).

This is the sideyard and backyard of our house. In the newsletter you all saw some pictures, so in this post I'm putting up different ones. There is lots of space for Andrew to exercise his gardening skills! Neither of us are under any delusions that I have any gardening skills, so the outdoor area is all his. I told him that if he'll grow it, I'll cook it. My skills are more in the cutting up plants area of life with a knife and cutting board, not in the tenderly nurturing little plants area of life.

This is our bedroom, which is huge. I think someday we'll put a desk and bookshelf down here and make a little home office for me. In the meantime, we're enjoying the luxury of empty space. We have a bathroom (with a toilet that has a LOUD flush! No sneaking into the bathroom to quietly go potty at night with that thing!) off our bedroom, which is the open door in this picture. Having a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house is pretty exciting!

This is the kitchen. Yeah, it has two sinks. It also has extremely low counters and is kind of long and thin. It has cupboards, though, which is a nice treat that one doesn't find in most Tanzanian houses! I'm still figuring out where the best place is for various things. I think the more I cook, the more I'll have a feel for where I want stuff.

This is our back porch. Someday we'd like to have some comfy chairs and a coffee table down there. Right now, though, there is a very big hole in one of the screens that needs to be fixed before we're intersted in spending time there! I am not going to volunteer myself to be mosquito fodder.

Spaghetti in Musoma

2011-06-29T02:58:00.000-07:00

When I cook, I like to listen to music. Unfortunately, due to power cuts in Musoma, in order to listen to music, one must have music that works off of a battery! For me, my iPod and headphones suffice. It's a little awkward when the cord snags on a pot handle or something, but thus far I've managed to avoid disaster (iPod flying into a pot of soup, etc.).

Also, when I cook, I like to make tasty things. Unfortunately, due to lack of canned chopped tomatoes in Musoma, in order to make tasty spaghetti sauce, one must peel one's own tomatoes! As you can see in this picture, I'm lifting the peel off of a tomato. I have discovered that peeling tomatoes isn't as difficult as a process as it may sound. If you boil the tomatoes for about 3 minutes, you can lift it off without too much struggle (or losing too much of the tomato). It takes some time, and I highly recommend letting the boiled tomatoes cool a bit before you attempt peeling them, but it works just fine and the spaghetti sauce tastes great.

Fridge-dried gecko

2011-06-21T05:13:00.000-07:00

This little dude made a wrong turn one day and scampered right into our refrigerator. Unfortunately for him, we didn't notice. Somehow he ended up on the shelf where I usually keep cilantro, and I, not looking very closely, mistook him for a little cilantro sprig that fell off the bunch.

After a few weeks, I got tired of having a messy cilantro-shelf in the fridge door and took it upon myself to clean up the fallen sprig. Lo and behold, I realized it was a gecko! Not quite freeze-dried, but fridge-dried. Apparently geckos do not survive when trapped in the refrigerator.

Andrew took this picture of him, and then dropped his crunchy carcass on the kitchen floor for Betsy (cat) to consume. She's more used to the fresh and wriggling variety of gecko, but cheerfully consumed this one after a bit of sniffing. Maybe it's like astronaut food for cats - shrunken, aged, and dried, but still food.

Sick Cat

2011-06-17T05:44:00.000-07:00

Clive at age 6 months

Clive in a tree (he got stuck in a tree as a kitten, and since then has always figured out how to get down himself)

Clive and his sister, Betsy

We've got a sick little guy, Clive. He's been on antibiotics for a while, but his problem might not be biotic, or he might just need more antibiotics or a different kind. He's hanging in there pretty well, though - despite having problems breathing, he's very active and healthy-seeming.

So what does one do when one lives in Musoma and has a sick cat, you might be asking yourself. Well, that's a good question. I'm still trying to figure out the answer myself, in fact.

When Clive and Betsy needed to be neutered/spayed years ago, I had a vet who lives about three or four hours away travel to Musoma by bus and come do their surgeries on my dining room table. That was an adventure. After he left, I found a couple little male kitten bits on the floor under the table - he had cleaned up the table well, but I guess they, being wee round balls, had just rolled off.

When Clive was bitten by a snake and was in acute near-death misery for a week, I used Skype to call the vet in Olympia, WA, that we used to take our cats to years ago. The vet, after hearing that I had a deathly ill cat in East Africa, gave me advice over the phone. That was helpful, but not the kind of thing I felt I could do unless a cat really was deathly ill.

There are two local vets who can do things like administer rabies shots each year. One year I put Clive and Betsy in a basket and took them to his little roadside shop in town to go get their shots, thinking that would be easier than having him make a house call. When I got there, he hopped on his bicycle and went to go buy a syringe! I was a bit surprised he didn't have any on hand. When he returned, he stuck Betsy with the needle and gave her her shot, and then promptly stuck Clive with the same one for his shot! I have a feeling that vets in American don't usually share needles between animals...

With this most recent sickness, I've relied on a vet in the States, whom I call Dr. Sarah when talking to Clive about her as I shove pills down his throat, who has very kindly sent advice and prescriptions via e-mail. I did have a local vet come to the house to look at him one day, but I think this vet was more accustomed to cows needing vaccines than cats with airway issues. Anyway, Dr. Sarah and I met because she's a very good friend of a very good friend, and she's now my (and Clive's) friend, too. We can get all sorts of drugs here at our local pharmacy, so finding the right medication is rarely an issue, although it's often sold under a different name than in the States, so I have to read packages to figure out the ingredients. What IS an issue is finding them in the right size! Pills here are designed for humans, not cats. Even the worm pills are too big, because they are intended for dogs. But hey, what's a knife and cutting board for, if not for cutting your cat's pills into quarters?

So if you are reading this and you have animals, may I advise you to build up a good relationship with your vet there at home, because you just never know when you might need to call or e-mail them if you should happen to move overseas someday!

Not all candlelight dinners are romantic

2011-06-13T23:20:00.001-07:00

Andrew and I have lots of candlelit evenings. When the sun goes down at 7:00, he lights a few candles (I'm afraid of matches, fire, and generally all hot things) and we have what looks like a nice, romantic evening - just the two of us and a candle and a quiet evening ahead.

However, when this happens every other day, it starts to lose the romantic aura. These days we're having power cuts every other day and every other evening. That means that (when they are following their schedule, which is not always the case) that Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings our power is cut from 6:00pm to 11:00pm, and on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays our power is cut from 8:00am to 6:00pm. But sometimes instead of 6:00 it is 5:00 or 7:00, and sometimes it comes back on at 9:00 instead of at 11:00, and sometimes it is cut for a while on Sundays, too. In my mind, the whole point of having a schedule is so that you can follow it, but there seem to be frequent exceptions to that idea when it comes to power cuts in Tanzania!

My computer battery is pretty wimpy; it only works for about 20 minutes. Andrew's has a lot more gumption, though. We can use it for watching TV (downloaded or on DVD, we don't actually have a TV) for about two hours, so that is our entertainment on dark nights. We're careful to not open the refrigerator or freezer too much on days without electricity, and I have to plan my cooking around the fact that we can't put hot leftovers in the fridge several days each week. Also, thawing meat or cheese in the fridge can go much more quickly than anticipated when the power is off, so we have to think through issues like that, too!

We've learned in which position our light switches are on and off, because we're often going around the house at night (in the dark) making sure they are all off so at 11:00 when the power returns, we aren't awakened by the house lighting up. We've learned that African nights can be very, very dark if there is no electricity and not much of a moon that night. There are times when you truly cannont see your hand in front of your face. Contrastively, we've also learned that on a full moon night with a clear sky, it looks like the outdoor lights are on! We've also learned that cooking in the dark (and cleaning up the kitchen in the dark) is a hassle, so we make sure we're done eating by 7:00 when the sun goes down. There have been times, though, when I've been cooking by the light of gas stove - you know that little blue flame under the pan? Turns out it's bright enough to be of some good assistance when one is desperate!

Musoma Airport

2011-06-06T21:43:00.001-07:00

The Musoma airport only has a little dirt and grass runway, but it's got quite the departure lounge! There are giant "thrones" like these bordering the walls of a large room. Since there are only four flights a week (when the plane actually comes... sometimes it skips landing in Musoma and passengers have to travel by bus to Mwanza, a city three and a half hours away, to catch their flight!), there is no need for multiples gates and waiting lounges. When you walk into the airport, they put your luggage up on a table and search it by hand, since there are no luggage scanning machines. Then men and women split into two lines and in different parts of the room, male and female airport workers give passengers a pat-down and wave a metal-detector wand around and hand-search their carry-on luggage. Then you are free to go and wait for your plane in the lounge, where you can feel like a tiny little person in a big chair. I can't remember the last time I felt so little! When we flew to Dar es Salaam in May, some of the other Mara Cluster ladies and I felt like we were traveling in pretty high style - it sure beats those little metal row chairs at many international airports around the world!

"Naomi has a son!"

2011-06-03T02:02:00.001-07:00

The Ikizu and Zanaki translators and I recently checked their translations of the book of Ruth. In the process of doing so, they taught me something new about the story. I first realized that I had misunderstood the book when we were looking at possible pictures to use in Ruth. One of the Zanaki translators said, “We must have one of Grandma Naomi with the baby on her lap, because that is the climax of the story!”

Personally, I have always thought of the climax of the book being when Boaz and Ruth are married, because I’m used stories that have a goal of the guy and girl getting married and living happily ever after. However, the way the story was intended is that the great moment of the story is when Ruth gives birth to a son. Boaz and Ruth getting married merits about a third of a verse (Ruth 4:13a) and the son’s birth and the joy surrounding that event takes up about nine and two-thirds verses (Ruth 4:13b-22). Boaz was a wealthy man and could provide for Ruth and Naomi while he was alive, but he was probably old and likely to die before Ruth would, which would have left her a penniless widow once again. The inheritance goes to sons, not wives! In this instance of levirate marriage (inheriting the wife of your dead brother/relative and having children that would be considered his), Ruth’s son would inherit her first husband’s property. So the true great moment of the story is the son’s birth, because only then did Naomi and Ruth have a provider.

So even though this idea is not in my worldview, it is how Naomi and Ruth thought about things, and it’s how Ikizu and Zanaki people think, too. In most Tanzanian cultures, women who do not have sons are desperate for one, because without one, they have nobody to provide a home for them if their husband dies or leaves them. So even though I’ve studied the Bible and am supposed to be advising the translators, they definitely understood the story of Ruth much better than I did!

Serengeti Safari

2011-05-27T04:28:00.000-07:00

There are lots of animals in the Serengeti in addition to wildebeest, zebras, and cheetahs. We did posts on those animals just because they were so very cool, but elephants, impala, hartebeest, tawny eagles, and lots of other kinds of animals are pretty amazing, too. We saw lions lolling around on rocks, cheetah drinking out of ponds, giant cape buffalo getting their noses picked by oxpecker birds, and some cool birds with shockingly bright colors perched in thorn bushes. The whole two-day trip was just filled with beautiful landscapes that changed regularly (different kinds of trees in different areas, etc.) and incredible animals. We live a mere 1.5 hours from the entrance to this world heritage site and had never been before, so it was pretty exciting.

Our totals were:
A lone leopard
6 cheetahs
11 or 13 (i.e. "lots of") lions (we think two we saw were two of the same ones we'd seen the day before)
100+ elephants
Heaps of hippos
Clumps of crocs
Groups of giraffes
Bunches of buffalo
A bazillion birds
A zillion zebra
A gazillion gazelles
A worldful of wildebeest

Cool Cats

2011-05-25T22:09:00.000-07:00

We were tired. The day had started around 3:30am when we quickly prepared for the drive to one of the entrances into Serengeti National Park. We entered the park a little before 7am, after meeting up with our safari guide and settling into the Land Rover.

It had already been a very successful day. We'd seen a herd of about 30 elephants right off the bat. We'd seen one of the greatest wonders in the world, the Great Migration of widebeest and zebra in the region, with thousands upon thousands of animals filling the area as far as we could see. We'd seen a leopard hanging out in a tree. And we'd spent a couple hours circling rock clusters in the prairie areas, finding a number of lions in various stages of their mid-afternoon naps.

It was around 4pm and we were thinking about getting to the lodge and enjoying an evening of food and rest before Day #2. As we were driving along the open fields with tall grass our driver slowed to a snail's pace. We weren't sure what was going on. Had he seen something? Had he received a report that a particular animal had been spotted in the area? Or did he just have a hunch? As I stared out the window I all of a sudden saw the head of an animal in the distance that looked different than the other heads I'd seen to that point in the day. After grabbing the binoculars, I was able to quickly confirm that there was a cat out there with spots. We'd found a cheetah!

The cheetah was quite a ways off of the road, but since there were no other vehicles around, our driver pulled off the road and headed straight towards our exciting find. But we could no longer see her! The head had disappeared and we had to just continue towards the spot we had seen. We arrived at the spot and still couldn't see anything. But then we found her. She was laying low in the grass, hoping we'd miss her. Then we realized why. Right next to her was a freshly-killed Thomson's gazelle, her afternoon meal that she was not willing to part with. We pulled within about 15 feet of her. She wasn't happy, but was willing to put up with us as long as she could keep her meal. She grabbed the gazelle and pulled it away as we snapped away with our cameras and spent a few minutes simply staring at her. It was an amazing moment I'd realized might never happen in my lifetime. We'd found a cheetah and completed our trifecta of seeing all three large, amazing cats of the Serengeti in one day! What a blessing!

We saw five more cheetahs the next day.

Serengeti - Great Migration

2011-05-25T07:53:00.000-07:00

Every year wildebeest, zebra, and some gazelles travel in a big circle through the Serengeti (and also go up into a different park in Kenya during one phase of their journey). This year the animals were in the western part of the Serengeti in May, which is just when we happened to be there, too! They say there are about 1.5 million wildebeests in the park, and it seems like we saw about 1.4 million of them during our two-day safari. We came across a lot of herds of them, and you can see from these pictures just how big those herds can be!

The zebra travel with the wildebeest, but stay just a little bit separate. I wonder if they feel that they are standing out in a crowd? Not all zebra migrate, but I'm not sure what causes some to do so and some to stay home. Anyway, our guide said that the zebra hear well and the wildebeest smell well, so they are good fellow-travelers, because they can warn each other of danger.

Although our vehicle was on its own driving around for most of the two days, sometimes the wildebeest created a bit of a roadblock and we caught up to other vehicles. The herds are usually just hanging out grazing, but a few times we caught them galloping along, kicking up huge clouds of dust. And if their destination lay across the road, there was no crossing that road for a little while!

BFF

2011-05-18T02:28:00.001-07:00

Today is a pretty exciting day for us - our very first guests are on their way here! I am so thrilled that Shannon and Tom are coming to visit us!

Shannon and I have a long history of visiting each other. You see, we met in London Heathrow airport on our way to Ghana (West Africa) in June 2003 on a Wycliffe Discovery mission trip. Now if ever a story about a friendship spanning miles needed the perfect place to start, Heathrow, gateway to the airborne world, is it. Shannon and I were assigned to be roommates our first night in the country and hit it off immediately as we figured out how to hang our mosquito nets and wondered how to flush the odd-looking toilet.

On the way home from Ghana we had a three-day layover in London, and while everyone else wanted to relax and stay in the London guesthouse, Shannon and I wanted to see the town! We learned how to use public transport in London and made our way all over the place.

During that trip I persuaded Shannon to go to the same grad school I'd already decided to attend the following year, and we also planned some other visits. I was going to college in Michigan and she was in college in Indiana, and our schools had identical schedules for fall and spring breaks. So, using cars, buses, and trains, that fall she came up to visit me and that spring I went to go visit here.

We had two FABULOUS years together at Trinity Western University in Langley, BC, Canada. We learned a lot about linguistics, grew a lot spiritually, and hosted lots of fun gatherings at our house, along with our third roommate, Rachel. During our time together in Langley we took a road trip to the Oregon Coast and another to Calgary, AB. We also had some unplanned road trips getting lost (turns out that one of the many things we have in common is a lack of directional sense).

I left for Tanzania after graduation and Shannon went back to Indiana. One might think that such moves would be the end of our spending time together, but oh no! Oceans can't keep us apart! I flew back to the States in 2007 for my sisters' weddings and Shannon flew out to spend five days with me. We took a trip up to Langley together and had a grand time catching up. In 2008 I was in the States for the second half of the year, so Shannon and I met up (in Panama, of all places!) for vacation and I also spent a week with her in Indiana after visiting friends and supporters in Michigan. In 2009 I went back to the States for my wedding, and of course Shannon had to be a bridesmaid, so she once again boarded a plane bound for Washington. After the wedding, Andrew and I were in England for four months for his Scripture Use training, and who should happen to be passing through England to visit us except Shannon? In 2010 Shannon got married and I made the trip to Indiana to be her bridesmaid (and have some time together before the wedding). Some friends are worth traveling for five days to get to spend five days with them!

So now Shannon and Tom are coming to Tanzania to visit us, because we couldn't let a year go by without at least one of us going to monumental efforts in the travel department to make a visit happen!

Happy Workers

2011-05-17T00:01:00.000-07:00

Neema (Jita translator), Magoma (Jita translator), Rukia (Ikizu translator) and me (translation advisor for Jita, Ikizu, and Zanaki), happily working together. Yes, this picture was posed, but it's not completely unrealistic. We enjoy our work and the translators have fun with each other (and me) while working.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, but there are free rides!

2011-05-16T06:03:00.000-07:00

Andrew and I traveled to Dar es Salaam for a week of branch strategy meetings and after a very good four days of plotting and planning with others from around Uganda and Tanzania, we returned home on Saturday. There are flights to/from Musoma only on Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and since we wanted to return on Saturday, we had to fly into Mwanza instead of Musoma. Mwanza is about 3.5 hours away from Musoma and there are lots of buses that go between the two cities every day.

On the flight from Dar to Mwanza we were served little chicken salad sandwiches. One may not be given food on domestic flights in the States any more, but this was like a little free lunch on our little Tanzanian airplane! I was kind of hungry so ate mine, feeling thankful for what appeared to be a free lunch.

BUT I had forgotten the tried and true statement that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH! Sure enough, food poisoning set in not too long thereafter and I was one miserable traveler. I haven't prayed so hard (most prayers were along the lines of "Please, please don't let me throw up now, God - I can't open the window and there are people all around me!) or felt so awful while traveling in quite some time. But thanks be to God, I never actually threw up.

We got a bus from Mwanza to Musoma and arrived at about 7:30pm. Instead of stopping at the usual bus terminal, where there are always lots of taxis waiting for passengers with some money and luggage, the bus went all the way to the bus company's bus terminal, which is located on a bit of a back alley in town. There were no taxis! I saw a car drive up and although it was not marked as being a taxi, I went ahead and approached the driver, asking "Taxi?"

The driver said, "No, this is not a taxi, but I can help you if you need to go somewhere. Where is your destination?"

I explained where we needed to go and he and his friend cheerfully loaded our bags and away we went. He and I had a little conversation on the way, during which I found out that he is an engineer with Tanroads, the company which has (SLOWLY!!!) been building the road on which we live. Since he was taking us to our office, he knew that we were missionaries involved in Bible translation. He told me, "I'm a Muslim, but I like to read the Bible. It's a good book. You are doing good work in translating it into local languages."

When we arrived, Andrew tried to give him a tip to thank him for giving us a ride. He turned it down! I have never encountered someone here turning me down when I've offered money, especially money for a service rendered! We were astounded by this cheerful, helpful man who was willing to aid a couple stranded Americans.

So, there may not be any free lunches (I paid the price quite dearly for mine), but free rides still exist, at least in Musoma!

Rice

2011-04-29T01:22:00.000-07:00

Have you ever seen rice growing? If not, move to Tanzania and you will! Wherever there is enough water to grow it, it is a popular crop. Because growing and eating rice is an important part of people's lives and the culture here, there are several words to describe it, unlike in English, which just has "rice". There are several different words for rice in Swahili - rice when it's still growing as a plant, dry rice before it is cooked, and cooked rice. Unfortunately for me with a name like Michelle, the word for uncooked rice is mchele, which is michele in the plural. If people see my full name written out, they think I'm named after rice!

This particular patch of rice is growing in an Ikizu village. They have some trouble with birds eating it, so spread mosquito nets on top of the stalks when they mature (we didn't include the nets in our picture!). It is only partway through growing - harvest is still a little while away.

Praying for a People Group in Mara

2011-04-29T01:19:00.000-07:00

Would you like to commit to praying for one of the people groups of the Mara Cluster? We have written descriptions of nine of the ten groups and will do the tenth one at some point (scheduling issues have gotten in the way). But if one of the nine groups about which we've written touches you and you want to be a prayer partner for them, please let us know!

Kwaya

2011-04-16T22:53:00.000-07:00

Murondoro

Kitende

The Kwaya language group is estimated to number about 115,000 people. The area they live in borders on Lake Victoria and includes the city of Musoma. Because of this location many Kwaya men spend their days out on the lake fishing, while the women tend to be at home managing the familes as well as farm plots.

In the past, Kwaya people were encouraged to only marry other Kwaya. But, the mentality has changed. A mentality of unity in the country was encouraged by President Julius Nyerere while he held office from the mid-1960's until the 80's. This impacted most language groups, and Kwaya was one of them. They have also seen a lot of change due to the influx of various people into the Musoma area, resulting in significant diversity of languages and ways of life.

We work with two translators for the Kwaya language: David Murondoro and George Kitende. Though the Roman Catholic church is the most prominent denomination in the Kwaya area, both Murondoro and Kitende are affiliated with the Free Pentecostal Church of Tanzania. Murondoro is an evangelist in the local FPCT church, and Kitende serves as secretary. Kitende and his family (including four children of his own) have lived in the Musoma area since the early 1970's. Murondoro is younger and was engaged to be married just two weeks ago! They had a celebration in the church after the Sunday worship service.

Murondoro and Kitende both speak fondly of Kwaya villages. They claim that good fish is more readily available there than in Musoma, and the opportunity to be able to just speak Kwaya and not have to bother with Swahili is great. Though the big focus of our work is Bible translation, they are also excited about the other materials that will result from Kwaya literacy efforts. They feel like their Kwaya people will be able to take more pride in their culture and language, and will enjoy books that serve as a reminder of cultural stories and sayings.

Customer Service

2011-04-15T04:12:00.000-07:00

Tanzania has recently changed how its driving licenses work and everyone has to get new ones. It's a rather obnoxiously long process and I could complain about how ridiculous it is (and expensive!) for a very long blog post, but I thought I'd share the positive side of the experience instead.

In order to get an eye exam for my new license (you have to prove that you can see before they let you drive, which is reasonable enough), I had to go to the local government hospital. I'd never been there before and was really confused about where I was supposed to go when I got there. I expected there to be a large building with a front door and just inside it an office with a big sign that said something like "Reception". But instead, I entered the hospital gates and saw about fifteen small and medium-size buildings and no signs anywhere. Long story short, I wandered around for a while and asked some people where to go and ended up at a woman's office. She directed me to where the eye clinic was. However, upon getting there I found out that I had to go to the registration desk and then to the cashier and only then could I go to the eye clinic for my exam. Well, I ended up back at that kind woman's office. She took one look at my lost self and left her office, took my by the hand and led me to the registration desk several buildings away and then pointed out where the cashier's office was in a different building and made sure I knew how much I was supposed to pay at each place and what papers I was supposed to pick up at each.

As part of a different stage in the process I had to go to the police station. I ended up going five times, although technically one could do everything in only one trip. I didn't have the correct papers at first, so a kind police officer told me exactly what I needed. The second time their power was out and he came out and found me in line and explained the problem and told me to just leave and try again the next day. The next day I came back and he saw my truck pull into the parking lot and went out to meet me. Instead of going into the back office and waiting, he took me straight up to the office where they actually do the work of the licenses. As a side note, that office is carpeted and so we had to take off our shoes before entering. Due to some complications of me being the first non-Tanzanian he'd done this process with, I had to go to a different government office and then come back. But he called ahead and told them I was coming and what the problem was so when I got there, they were ready for me and I didn't have to wait. Then I came back and he quickly finished his part of the job and explained all of my remaining steps to me so I would know which other places I had to go to in which order in order to get my license.

So the whole process has been a bit of an ordeal, but I've been blessed along the way with some nice people who realize that it's an ordeal and are happy to help. Neither of them asked for anything in return; they were just kind to a confused foreigner who was trying to follow their country's laws.

Choir Album Dedication

2011-04-12T23:53:00.000-07:00

Paradiso Choir, ready to sing

Paradiso choir singing and dancing

Neema

Later this week and next week we'll do the final two posts about Mara language groups (Kwaya and Zinza). For now, though, this post is about our experience last Sunday at a dedication for a choir album.

Neema, one of the Jita translators, is part of the choir at her church, the main Mennonite church in Musoma. She loves to sing and spends a lot of her free time working with her choir on singing and choreographing the dancing to go with the songs. Choirs in Tanzania don't just stand quietly in rows and sing; they put on a show to go with the music! In fact, quite a few choirs just play a CD and lip sync while dancing.

Neema's choir, which is called "Paradiso", recently made a DVD and CD (also available in VHS and cassette tape, which many Tanzanians still use) and Sunday was the big dedication event. Since the invitation card said it started at 2:00pm, we showed up at 2:15, knowing things often begin a bit late. Sure enough, at 3:00 people started arriving and things began.

Several choirs other than Paradiso were there and each sang a song or two. Well, some of the choirs sang and some lip synced. One choir from a town about an hour away really got into the dancing and it was like watching a full-on aerobics routine - they were really working up a good sweat as they were kicking and jumping and snapping their arms around in unison!

A very important part of events in Tanzania is the honored guest. There must be one important person invited to be the honored guest, and that guest is treated like royalty throughout the event. For this choir album dedication the honored guest was the mayor of Dar es Salaam. We weren't sure if the had flown him in just for this event or if he had other business in Musoma, but whatever the case, we were impressed they'd gotten such a big person to be their guest! As the role of honored guest requires, he had a very long speech and cut the tape covering the DVDs/CDs.

Fundraising, Tanzania-style, was a big part of the afternoon. People were called forward to speak into the mike and say their name, what organization or group they were with, and how much they were giving. Some shockingly large amounts were donated! We weren't entirely sure if the money was going straight to the choir for their needs (new speakers, a vehicle for transport when they have events, choir outfits, etc.) or towards a youth building for their church. What we were giving towards wasn't the big point, it was who you were and how much you were giving.

Raising money this way is very common here, whether it's money for a wedding or a church or something else. If a church needs to pay their electricity bill or buy new chairs, they'll extend the service by having a fundraising time where people are called forward and asked to announce how much they give. The very public nature of this giving can encourage people to give a bit more than they might if nobody knew how much they were giving, so it's pretty effective! It also makes us very uncomfortable as outsiders who aren't used to doing things this way.

So all in all it was a pretty good afternoon, albeit a bit long and with more fundraising and less singing than we would have liked, but it was a decent cultural experience.

Kuria

2011-04-05T23:32:00.001-07:00

Kuria kids

Two of the Kuria Bible translators

The Kuria people live in both Kenya and Tanzania. There are a bit over 600,000 total, 435,000 of which live in Tanzania. This makes them the most populous group in Mara Region.

The Kuria are part of the Mara Cluster in a different way than the other nine people groups. Thanks to the hard work of the Bible Society of Tanzania, they already have the entire New Testament (published in 1996) and translators are making progress on the Old Testament. The JESUS Film has already been produced in the Kuria language and there are even some audio Scriptures available. However, not much literacy work has been done. The Bible is available, but people don't know how to read their own language! And while Scriptures are readily at hand, there is a great need for practical Scripture use work. So while the Mara Cluster won't be translating the Bible into Kuria, it will be involved in literacy and Scripture use work among the Kuria people.

Historically, the Kuria were pastorialists living in what is now Kenya. When the Luo people (a Nilotic tribe) began pushing the Kuria south and the Maasai people started pressing in on them from the east, the Kuria ended up fractured and scattered. What had been one large tribe formed two smaller tribes (the Gusii, who are in Kenya) and the Kuria (mostly in Tanzania, some in Kenya). Being confined to a smaller land area and facing attacks from the Luo and Maasai, their pastoral life became more limited and many Kuria, particularly those in Kenya, took up agricultural life.

There are often issues with cattle theft between the Kuria and other groups. While tensions aren't always high between the Kuria and other people groups in Mara Region, they are certainly present. The Ikoma in particular have a long history of problems with the Kuria. The other people groups in the area look down on the Kuria as being agressive hunters and a bit "behind the times" since many still practice a pastoral lifestyle in the bush. Across the country, the Kuria have a negative reputation as fierce, violent people. They are known to be good soldiers in the military, though!

There are a variety of churches in the Kuria area. As with the other people groups in the region, there is a mixture of Christians, Muslims, and those who follow traditional religion. While the Kuria are not considered unreached, they have a great need for good biblical teaching and stronger churches.

Kabwa

2011-03-31T02:30:00.000-07:00

A couple expatriate coworkers visit a Kabwa church

Paul Meja, one of the Kabwa translators, teaches in a reviewers workshop

The Kabwa language committee, plus John Masige (Kabwa translator) in the back row wearing the gold shirt

The Kabwa are the smallest language group we're working with, but that has nothing to do with the importance of the work or the vitality of the language. Kabwa speakers are estimated to number about 10,000, with about 1500 of those living outside of the main language area. They tend to be poor and to get by with little education, but that lifestyle also means that many of the children tend to stay near home and rely heavily on their Kabwa language for communication rather than the national language of Swahili.

Agriculture is a critical part of life for all Kabwa people, and that means they live vulnerable lives. No rain results in no food, and it's not at all uncommon for families to get by with just one meal a day.

There is little variety in churches. Most churches are either Roman Catholic, Anglican, or Seventh Day Adventist. Approximately 70% of the people claim to be Christian, but there are still a significant number of people who follow traditional religions. As with other nearby groups, men oftentimes prioritize other activities over attending church, so the ratio of women to men in a church service tends to be remarkably high.

John Masige, one of the Kabwa translators, beams every time he gets to tell to story of reading Luke 15 in one of the Catholic churches in the Kabwa area a few months ago. He says the "wazee" ("old guys") were overjoyed and absolutely loved it. Having the opportunity to hear God's word in their language just brings a huge smile to their face. Masige is one of many Kabwa men who face the challenge of living in Musoma town while their family stays in the village. Fortunately for him, it's only a half hour trip to get to the village and he's able to travel home every weekend, but it's a difficult sacrifice. His family (including his mother and father) maintains the farm plots where they grow cassava, beans, millet, and a little bit of corn. He has four children 10 and under, and the youngest has severe mental disabilities, requiring constant care.

Paul Meja is the other translator and his story is quite similar. He stays in town while his family stays in the village. He's the father of only two children, but his family also cares for the two children of his brother who passed away. They farm similar crops as Masige's family, adding sweet potatoes to the list (quite different than the sweet potatoes most North Americans are familiar with). He's actively involved in the Catholic church, and he contributes a lot of intelligence and many good ideas around the office.

We're excited with the progress that has been made by Masige and Meja with translation. The book of Luke is complete and ready to be printed, and we anticipate that this small but passionate group of people will be ready to celebrate later this year.

Zanaki

2011-03-29T05:39:00.000-07:00

Andrew and Shem, one of the Zanaki translators

Futakamba, the other Zanaki translator

A Mennonite church in Bumangi, a Zanaki village

Cattle at the Buhemba Rural Agricultural Centre, a large training farm in the Zanaki area

There are about 100,000 Zanaki people. The first president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, was a Zanaki, and because he was the beloved father of the country, this gives great pride to the Zanaki. Nyerere was a strong Catholic and translated the gospels and Acts into Swahili poetry, as well as portions of Shakespeare. He also attempted to write a bit in the Zanaki language and did what he could to help his people. In the Zanaki area there is a museum dedicated to him and since he had a large family, many people are proud to be his relatives.

The gospel of Matthew was translated into Zanaki in the 1960s, as was a small hymnal. People found the gospel difficult to read and there were not literacy classes to teach people how to read in Zanaki, but the two books were quite popular. In the mid-1900s, Mennonite missionaries planted churches and many even learned the Zanaki language. The Anglican church began an agricultural mission and reached out to local people through teaching farming principles and helping people with projects like growing sunflowers to produce oil. There are many churches in the Zanaki area - Seventh Day Adventist, Catholic, Anglican, Mennonite, many small Pentecostal denominations, and a few others. There are some Muslim Zanaki and many still follow traditional religion.

In traditional Zanaki religion, there are many procedures which must be followed. For example, every clan has a taboo animal that they are not to touch or eat. Common taboo animals are hippos, snakes, and zebras. How someone is buried is very important - men must be buried in a blanket with their heads pointed east and women in a sheet with their heads pointed west. One must never walk over a grave, because it is believed that the spirit of a dead person hovers over the grave until a baby born into their clan is given their name, and then the spirit enters that baby. The spirit of a deceased man can cause both good and bad for his family, and the way to keep the spirits happy is to give them something (honey, milk, alcohol) every year or so. If something goes wrong, the witchdoctor will find out in a dream which spirit is unhappy and let the family know. And if someone in the clan does something wrong, often it is required to sacrifice a black sheep in order to be clean again.

There are two Zanaki translators, Shem and Futakamba. Shem is married and has four kids. We were the best man and maid of honor at his formal wedding (he and his wife had a traditional wedding years ago, but this was their church wedding) in October 2010, which was a very good experience. Shem grew up at the local Mennonite Bible college where both of his parents worked, so he's very used to being around international people, especially Americans. He's a leader in his local Mennonite church and loves to talk and laugh and be with people.

Futakamba is a pastor with the Anglican church and is married and has four children and has (informally) two orphans as well. He also loves to talk, so you can imagine what the noise level in the Zanaki office is usually like! Futakamba is very well-educated; he has studied theology at universities in Kenya and South Africa. He has a great sense of humor (as does Shem), and is good at coming up with creative ways to make a verse sound very good in Zanaki while still maintaining the accuracy of it.

Ngoreme

2011-03-28T01:06:00.000-07:00

There are about 55,000 Ngoreme people. They live on the east side of Mara Region, relatively far from Musoma. The Great Rift Valley runs along their land, creating a long, high cliff and many hills and valleys.

The Ngoreme language was one of the first four languages with which the Mara Cluster began work back in 2006. Teams of Ngoreme people came into Musoma town to help with alphabet and writing system development workshops, and people from the Mara Cluster went out to Ngoreme area to do reseach and build relationships with local people. Two Ngoreme Bible translators were hired in February 2009, the same time as the translators in most of the other languages of the cluster. Unfortunately, both have since left the work and only two chapters of Luke have been completed. (Thus I do not have very much information about the Ngoreme people, nor any pictures of their area.)

We plan to restart work in the Ngoreme language in 2012. Please pray that we will be able to hire two good translators with a vision for the work and that there will be adequate support available to train and supervise them.

Suba-Simbiti

2011-03-23T22:46:00.000-07:00

First of all, I apologize for promising a post about a different people group every two to three days and then taking quite a bit of time off! Due to Andrew's busy schedule, we've decided to not go in alphabetical order for the groups and will add more posts as we're able (we divided the groups between us).

The Suba and Simbiti are two different people groups that have a combined population of 98,700. They speak the same language and have a similar history. They live just north of Musoma town on a peninsula extending out into Lake Victoria and most people are fishers and farmers.

The first denomination to take root among the Suba-Simbiti was Roman Catholic, and it remains the largest to this day. There are also a few Anglican, Mennonite, and Pentecostal churches in their area. The Seventh Day Adventist church has recently built quite a few church buildings, but their attendance is still low. Some tensions exist between the Catholics and the other denominations, and when someone changes from attending Roman Catholic church to going to a different one, that person's family and friends often give him/her a very hard time. Other than one village which is almost entirely Muslim, there are not many Muslim Suba-Simbiti people.

Traditional religion is strong among the Suba-Simbiti. The sun is the primary god, and witch doctors and rainmakers are powerful people. As with neighboring people groups, they believe that the spirits of their ancestors must be kept happy, as they can cause both good and bad things to happen. Adherents to traditional religion persecute those who leave it to join one of the non-Catholic local churches and threats of curses and displeased spirits are issues for new believers.

The two Simbiti translators are pictured above (they are Simbiti, but are translating for the Suba as well). The one on the left who is pointing at the computer is Robert Mago, a pastor with the Free Pentecostal Church of Tanzania, a denomination with its roots in the Swedish Free Mission. He is married and has eleven children ranging in age from about 2-25 years old (including three sets of twins). The one sitting in front of the computer is Albinus Waynse, a pastor with the Mennonite Church of Tanzania. He is married and has six children (also including one set of twins - maybe twins run in Simbiti families?). They are dedicated to the work and believe that having Scriptures in Suba-Simbiti will create a significant impact among their people.

Jita

2011-03-08T04:01:00.000-08:00

Some Jita ladies in the village

Magesa, Jita translator

Magoma, Jita translator

Neema, Jita translator

There are about 205,000 Jita people spread out over a large section of Mara Region. Their land borders on the lake and many Jita people are fishermen. They are one of the largest groups in Mara and in the past they have fought with various other groups and emerged victorious. There are not ongoing problems; those wars were quite some time ago, but the result is that the Jita are a strong group in the area.

The New Testament was translated into Jita in the 1950s, but unfortunately the translation used a mixture of three different dialects/related languages, and so people have a very difficult time reading it. The writing system was also a bit complicated and was not taught to new readers, so that alone prevented people from reading it. Now we are starting the translation project anew and being careful to make sure it is actually Jita!

There has been quite a bit of Christian outreach done among the Jita over the years and now there are many churches in their area. The largest is Seventh Day Adventist, followed by Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Mennonite. There are also Anglican churches and a wide variety of Pentecostal denominations. There are only a few Muslims.

However, just because a large percentage of Jita are Christians in name does not mean that they are not also practicing traditional religion as well. Traditionally, Jita people go to small tree groves and sacrifice animals to pacify spirits. Ancestor spirits are an important part of their worldview and people frequent witch doctors when they have problems to see which ancestor's spirit is causing trouble for them. The spirits can also cause good to happen; they are not only bad.

There are three Jita translators, all of whom are pictured above. Magesa and Magoma are both pastors with Pentecostal Assemblies of God, and Neema is an evangelist and choir leader with the Mennonite church.

Magesa is quite serious and is very focused on his work when at the office. He is married and has six young children. His wife still lives in their village home because she has to take care of Magesa's developmentally disabled younger brother, but he tries to go home one weekend a month to visit. He and his wife are also taking care of their niece, whose father is in prison and whose mother has AIDS. Magesa is very energetic and rarely sits still, and he's a force to be reckoned with on the soccer field when we have office games.

Neema is single, but likes to joke about finding herself a good man sometime soon. She's by far the best of the three when it comes to computers and likes to help the men when they are confused by their machines. She's a cheerful worker and servant - she refills everyone's water glasses in the office, helps the office cook during tea break, and volunteers to lead our morning prayer service when the usual leader is away. Singing is Neema's passion in life and she spends a lot of her free time working with her church choir.

Magoma likes to ask the difficult questions about the Bible. Even if he knows how to translate the verse into Jita, if he doesn't fully understand what the verse means, he wants to ask questions and discuss it until he feels confident that he knows the message behind the words. He's a slow, careful worker who is utterly befuddled by his computer. Magoma is married and has eight children ranging in age from quite young to in their late teens. It costs a lot to take care of a large family and he is often stressed by financial problems.

Ikoma-Nata-Isenye

2011-03-05T03:57:00.000-08:00

One of the more unique church buildings in Ikoma-land

The Ikoma, Nata, and Isenye people groups (combined population 36,000) live on the edge of the Serengeti national park and it's not unheard of for elephants and giraffe to wander through their area. Musoma (the town in which we live, the regional capital) is the closest town to their areas, and it is about six hours away, so rural and remote are legitimate words to use when describing that part of Mara Region. Andrew did his village homestay in the Ikoma area, and as you might recall, it was far out enough that he had to take a bus, ride on the back of a motorcycle, ford a river on foot, and walk a while to get there!

The Ikoma and Nata languages are closely related and Isenye is a little bit different. At this point we are confident that the Nata people will be able to use the Ikoma Scriptures, but need to do a little more research before we know for sure about the Isenye. These three groups get along well, but there are two other nearby groups with which they have historically had problems - the Kuria, who look down on them, and the Maasai, who have cattle-thieving battles with them. Wild animals, particularly lions, have been these peoples' other main threat.

In the Ikoma area there are several denominations, including Roman Catholic, Mennonite, Anglican, and a few Pentecostal ones, but there are not many Christians. The god of the Ikoma is a pair of elephant tusks. Being Ikoma and worshiping these tusks are inseparable things. When people go to church and read the Bible in Swahili, others consider them to be practicing an outside religion.

A few years ago I had a moving conversation with an elderly Ikoma believer who was passionate about the Bible being translated into Ikoma. He told me that not until they can read the Word in their own language will Ikoma people see that one can be Ikoma and be a Christian. He has no doubt that the tusks and spirits associated with them are powerful, but the God of the Bible is even more powerful and he believes that one day the Ikoma will know this through the Ikoma Scriptures.

The two Ikoma translators are pictured above. Their names are Muya and Mussa, and they are quiet, hard-working men. The two of them get along very well and are great assets to the cluster project. Both are leaders in their churches - Muya is a pastor with the Pentecostal Evangelical Fellowship of Africa, and Mussa is an elder with the Mennonite Church of Tanzania. Muya's wife lives in the Ikoma area farming their land and taking care of their cattle, and he travels out to visit her on weekends when he has a chance. They have nine children, some of whom live with Muya in town, some of whom live with his wife in the village. Mussa's wife, who comes from a Muslim background, lives with him here in town with their three children. Mussa's parents live nearby him; his father is the man I mentioned in the paragraph above.

After reading about the rest of the language of the Mara Cluster, please let us know if you have a burden to pray for the Ikoma in particular and we'll let you know more, including specific requests as they arise.

Ikizu

2011-03-02T01:26:00.001-08:00

There are about 132,000 Ikizu and Sizaki people, a few of whom are pictured here. While Ikizu and Sizaki people consider themselves to be different people groups, their languages are very closely related, and Sizaki is considered a dialect of Ikizu. There are a few minor pronunciation differences, but their vocabulary and grammar is essentially the same. The groups get along well, and the Sizaki (who are significantly fewer than the Ikizu) seem happy to accept the Ikizu writing system and Bible translation as their own.

As with all the groups in Mara (Mara is a region of Tanzania), there are Christians, Muslims, and people who practice traditional religion. Roman Catholic is the largest denomination, followed by Seventh Day Adventist. There are also Mennonite, Anglican, and a variety of small Pentecostal churches. Some villages have no churches at all and people have to travel to another village on Sunday if they wish to attend. In the traditional Ikizu religion, the sun is the main god, and deceased ancestors play an important role. There are various taboos to follow and special places to worship, such as groves of trees.

When the translation project began, there were two Ikizu translators. One of them has recently moved away and we are not able to hire another one right now. Rukia, the lone Ikizu translator at this point, is pictured above. Unfortunately, she has recently been plagued by health problems. Medical care in Musoma is a bit lacking, so Rukia really needs prayers for her health. Rukia is a widow; her husband died about fifteen years ago, leaving her with two small children. He had two wives (Rukia was the second) and when the first wife died, Rukia became responsible for that wife's son as well. She was raised in a Muslim family but left Islam after her husband died because she became frustrated with not being able to understand the Arabic used in services. After quite a few years of living without any religion, she recalled the kindness of her neighbors who reached out to her when she was left alone, and remembered that they were part of the Seventh Day Adventist church in town, so she began attending there. She became a believer after reading the Bible and learning more through her church and friends. Because of her own experience of not understanding what was said at religious services, she is determined that Ikizu people will have the Bible in the Ikizu language and be able to understand every word!

The Ikizu translation of Luke is almost ready for beginning the publication process. There are just a few final checks that need to be done. Unfortunately, with there being only one ill translator working on the project, these steps might take longer than planned. The book of Ruth and some tracts are also in process. A committee of Scripture reviewers and a language committee have recently been formed, each having their first meeting in February.

During the past five years of work going on at the Mara Cluster, it has always been a struggle to find Ikizu participants for our workshops and other events we’ve held. Different theories have been proposed (spiritual forces hindering us, there not being many Ikizu Christians, inadequate public relations on our part, etc.), and whatever the causes are we know we need prayer for the translation work and other upcoming activities such as the JESUS Film and literacy workshops.

We are tentatively scheduling to dedicate the Ikizu gospel of Luke in August 2011. We hope and pray this plan can become a reality!

Prayer for the Nine People Groups of the Mara Cluster

2011-03-02T01:21:00.000-08:00

We are working with nine language groups here at the Mara Cluster, and we thought you might find it interesting to learn a little bit more about each of them. Also, if you are interested in committing to pray for one group, we would love to facilitate that! Please e-mail us if you want to be a prayer warrior for one of these people groups. Read all nine posts (once we have them up!) and see which one God puts on your heart and then let us know. We can update you with needs and praises as they come up.

The groups are: Ikizu, Ikoma-Nata-Isenye, Jita, Kabwa, Kwaya, Ngoreme, Suba-Simbiti, Zanaki, and Zinza.

Dagaa

2011-02-27T00:25:00.001-08:00

Feeding cats is fairly straightforward in most places. You buy some dry cat food kibbles in a big sack or get them lots of little cans of potent-smelling meat and dump some in their bowl every day. In Tanzania, however, cat food requires creativity.

For starters, Tanzanians don't feed their cats, except perhaps some leftovers of their own ugali (stiff porridge usually made out of corn), so it's not like we can run downtown and get some cat food. Clive and Betsy do hunt a bit and particularly enjoy birds and geckos, but they need more than that.

Since Musoma is right on Lake Victoria, fish are sold here in great abundance. There are huge (sometimes up to six feet long!) Nile perch, big tilapia, little tilapia, and dagaa. Dagaa is a Swahili word; I don't know if there is a word for those kind of fish in English. Maybe they are called minnows, sardines, or wee little fishies... we call them dagaa. Dagaa are the cheapest form of fish. They are caught in great quantity and then laid out to dry in the sun. When they get to be a bit crispy, they are sold by the bucketful.

As you can see from this picture, there are some very little dagaa, and some that are a bit larger. They are dry and crunchy in the form in which they are sold. Tanzanians break off the heads and fry them up with some tomato and salt and serve them over rice or ugali as a cheap form of protein. They are mostly tiny bones, silvery skin, and big eyes; I don't think there is much meat on the fish. One does not clean the insides out of dagaa and filet them!

We freeze them, because they go bad if left out, and they smell rather potent. The cats don't seem to care if they are cold, and they don't freeze solid, since there is no liquid in them. We jokingly call them "fishsicles". Clive and Betsy go through about 3/4 gallon of dagaa a week, which costs about $2.00. Additionally, sometimes we make ugali and mix a bit of that in with their dagaa, and we usually give them the end of bread loaves. To fulfill his taste for getting in trouble, Clive steals every human food item he can, from raw papaya to stirfry to banana bread dough. He's particularly fond of cooked pumpkin and pasta (and of course anything with a hint of meat). But dagaa is what they are actually fed, and fed in great quantity. Several times a day we pull the dagaa Tupperware out of the freezer and toss a handful into their bowl, and the fishsicle chow-down begins.

Going once, going twice, sold!

2011-02-25T00:19:00.000-08:00

I (Misha) don't know about you, but the words "going once, going twice, SOLD!" are not ones I think of as being part of a church service. Well, until I came to Tanzania, that is! Here in Musoma, and I assume in other parts of the country, auctions are a pretty normal part of many churches.

Most people give cash during the offering, but sometimes they'll give potatoes, a papaya, a pencil, candy, a chicken, or something else like that. At the end of the service, a church leader will stand up and pick up one item at a time and run a little auction to see how much money they can raise for the church offering. Usually things are sold for a higher price than what you'd buy them for at the market, since people are giving money to their church and getting an item, too. Typically, the person who stands up is an energetic type running around trying to get people to raise their bids as they compete against each other to pay for an item, so it really feels like an auction.

There is sometimes a little twist on the auction - instead of people bidding in an effort to buy the item for themselves, they will decide to give the item to someone in the church (usually the pastor or a guest). In that case, lots of people contribute small amounts and everyone who wants to take part in giving the gift can do so and it's usually 'sold' for a pretty high price.

Last Sunday I actually joined in the bidding for the first time. Someone had brought some green peppers, and I was all out of them at home. I thought that buying some at church might be a nice way to support the church and save myself a trip to the market! I started the bidding at 500 shillings for six little peppers and upped my bid to 800 shillings when some others bid after me, but I was victorious in the end. After that, apparently people were excited that their American guests were taking part and they auctioned off a little bag of potatoes and several tomatoes and gave them to us as a gift! (We passed the fun along and re-gifted them to the Tanzanian couple hosting us for lunch that afternoon.)

We are thinking that we'd like to take a Swahili Bible as an auction item someday. That way, we can bless the church with a nice offering and provide somebody with a Bible. If we do, we'll let you know how it goes.

Being a Missionary

2011-02-18T23:18:00.000-08:00

There are many cool things about being a missionary. One of my favorites is the opportunity to serve as a link between churches in different countries...in our case, linking Christians in the USA and Canada to other Christians in Tanzania. After all, we are all part of ONE big body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12), right?

One area where I'd personally love to see more of a link is with the children, and I've been inspired by a project that was started in Uganda (the source of these pictures). American children have worked to create colorful and creative posters of recently-translated Bible verses in some of the Ugandan languages. After being shipped to Uganda, the posters are then used as gifts for Sunday school classes or individual children. Regardless of where they end up, gifts like these are treasured and serve as decoration, a helpful tool for learning that particular written language, and a reminder of God's promises in the Bible.

Do you teach a Sunday School class? Do you like to work with kids on creative projects? Do you know of children who would enjoy a creative project from which they could learn about children in Tanzania and create something special for them? We're working with nine different language groups in Northwest Tanzanian, and this year (2011) many of them will receive the first book of the Bible that has ever been translated into their language. If you want to be a part, please watch for more information coming soon here on our blog, or feel free to write me at andrew_sandeen@wycliffe.org to explore these ideas further.

Andrew

The First Ikizu Reviewers Meeting

2011-02-17T22:57:00.001-08:00

On Thursday, February 17, the Ikizu reviewing team met for the first time! They worked on Luke 1-2, and 22-24, since those five chapters are the first ones we did and thus needed the most input and revision. It was almost embarrassing to look back at our early work and see what poor condition it was in, but it was also encouraging to realize how much we have learned since then!

My highlight of the day was talking with one reviewer who is an enthusiastic young church planter. Over lunch, he told me about how he likes preaching in Ikizu and having someone translate his message into Swahili for the sake of non-Ikizu in his audience. He said that although he knows Swahili well and is happy to preach in it, it just doesn't grab his listeners like the Ikizu does. He repeated several times that if the message is in Ikizu, people really listen and care a lot more about what he's saying, so he tries to use Ikizu as much as he can when teaching. The only problem is when he needs to read a passage or verse in his sermon - he then switches to Swahili and tries to translate it on his own as he goes so they will understand what it means. He's really excited that someday he'll be able to preach from the Ikizu New Testament! He laid out a whole plan he has for teaching pastors how to read and teach from the Ikizu Bible and how he's pretty excited for Luke to be printed and dedicated so that people can start using it.

The man in this picture is one of the reviewers. He had other commitments that day, but traveled to come be at the meeting and give his feed back on those chapters of Luke. I wasn't sure how well he could see, even with his super-thick glasses, since he was holding the paper about a foot away from his eyes, but he had quite a few worthwhile comments, so I guess he could see enough to read decently!

Teaching & Seeing Needs

2011-02-16T04:14:00.000-08:00

What a rewarding challenge it has been to teach at the local Bible college lately! It has also proved to be exhausting and a TON of work! My expectations for how much time and energy it would take to prepare for a one-hour lecture in Swahili were far short of what has played out in reality. But I wouldn’t trade the great experience, which is an opportunity to study “how to study” the Bible, be pressured into A LOT of Swahili practice, and to interact with a motivated group of students who are committed to studying God’s word and sharing it with others through their churches and various ministries. I’ve been blessed and impressed by their desire to see real truth taught from the Bible in the appropriate context and in ways that people can understand.

However, I’m saddened by the many challenges and disadvantages these students have. There are the everyday challenges of caring for their families (most of them are married and have children), and there are the costs of dedicating to a life of ministry in Tanzania. Just in the past week I have heard how one student’s family is suffering from typhoid and amoeba. Another student asked for shoes because all he has to wear to church is a worn out pair of sandals. On Sunday evening I received a text from one of my students after storms had moved through the area. He was asking for prayer because the roof of his church back home had been completely blown off in the storm. He was obviously distraught, and it was clear that the church family was trying to figure out what to do.

More heartbreaking still, though, is the lack of resources available to these students for studying the Bible. I’ve become so accustomed to the many resources I have access too. But these guys in my class have next to nothing. One of them asked me yesterday for a Swahili Bible. Nothing more, just a Bible. I’ve explored their school library, and was astonished at what I found. There are a fair number of English books for the more advanced students who know English, but when I asked to see the Swahili resources I was taken over to a bottom shelf that had just a handful of small books in Swahili. Swahili is undoubtedly the dominant language used in Tanzanian churches, and there are plenty of resources published in Swahili, but access to them is poor. It is circumstances like these that motivate me but also leave me wishing that I could do just a little bit more.

Andrew

Did Ruth wiggle that night on the threshing floor?

2011-02-09T23:08:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I worked with Rukia, the Ikizu translator, on Ruth chapters 3 and 4. In general, Rukia had done a nice job with the translation and our work went quickly because there simply were not very many corrections to make or questions to ask.

However, one verse had a significant issue in it. In the NIV, Ruth 3:4 says: "When he lies down, note the place where he is lying. Then go and uncover his feet and lie down. He will tell you what to do."

In the first sentence and the third sentence, the Ikizu translation was fine. That second sentence, though, said something like this (in my English translation of the Ikizu): "When he's asleep, go and uncover his feet and lie down very still."

The word (it's just one word in Ikizu) for "lie down very still" wasn't the usual Ikizu word for sleep in Ikizu, so I asked Rukia what exactly it meant. She said that it meant you are lying down, but not all relaxed like you are when asleep. You are careful to not move and you keep your arms tightly at your sides.

That seemed a little strange to me, since I didn't see anything like that in any of the Swahili or English translations we were using as our references. I asked why she had not used the usual word for "sleep" or "lie down", but her answer didn't really make sense to me. We had a sort of circular conversation with me asking questions and her giving answers that weren't very clear as to why exactly the Ikizu translation had this "lie down very still" word.

Now, the reason why might have already occurred to you, but I was kind of dense yesterday afternoon, I guess. After Rukia saying something like, "I don't want people to misunderstand what is meant by 'lay down' in this verse," it finally clicked. Light bulb moment! I realized that she was trying to insert the info that Ruth and Boaz did not touch during the night. Ah ha!

So, what to do now? Did Ruth and Boaz do anything that night other than talk? What exactly woke him up suddenly during the night, anyway? The Bible does not say. It simply states that she uncovered his feet and lay down and that during the night something startled him and he woke up.

Both Rukia and I are pretty stubborn, but since I had the evidence of all the Swahili and English versions on my side, in the end the Ikizu draft said she laid down at his feet and doesn't mention if she wiggled or not. We're going to ask other Ikizu people and the translation consultant when he comes to see what they all think.

Translation is tricky, and understanding indirectly stated information can be even trickier!

Lunch

2011-02-06T00:24:00.000-08:00

Most days we eat lunch at the office. A woman there is employed as a part-time office cleaner and has her own part-time business making food for us to purchase for morning snack and lunch. The menu is pretty straightforward:
Monday: beans and rice, beef (optional)
Tuesday: pilau (spiced rice with a little beef)
Wednesday: beans and rice and fish
Thursday: beans and rice
Friday: beans and rice, beef (optional)

So, can you guess what day of the week this picture was taken?

If you order fish at a restaurant in Tanzania, you get a fish. We don't have any of that silly American business of cutting off the head and tail, removing the skin, and taking the meat off the bones! If you only want 1/4 of the fish, then you can just pick it off yourself. Around these parts if you say you want fish with your meal, then you get a fish, the whole fish.

We're Getting a New Office!

2011-02-06T00:10:00.000-08:00

Since I (Misha) arrived in Musoma in early 2007, the Mara Cluster had GROWN! We've been through a variety of office arrangements, none very ideal, but all functional for a time.

We're all pretty excited that sometime this year we're going to have a new building! This big building is going up in our current office's "backyard", so we'll then have use of our current space as well as this one.

The very incredibly most exciting part of it is that it will have a conference room! When we have workshops, we always have to go somewhere else in town, which is a bother, to say in the least. It's amazing that we've made it four years without a meeting room, and we're thrilled that someday the idea of being able to use PowerPoint while teaching the entire group of translators can become a reality. It's time for the cluster to enter the modern era...

Hallelujah!

2011-01-20T03:51:00.000-08:00

There is a Seventh Day Adventist church across the street from us, and they often have mid-week services. Yesterday evening we had heard some people over there and guessed that a gathering or service of some sort was happening. A while later, suddenly singing burst out, "Hallelujah! Hallelujah!" It took less than a millisecond to recognize the words and the tune; it was most definitely the hallelujah chorus! It was pretty random and a bit crazy to hear the hallelujah chorus (in English!) bursting out of our little neighborhood SDA church on a Wednesday evening.

Later that evening we were making dinner in the kitchen and, as usual, listening to our neighbors in the house next door. Let's just say their house is very close and that their kids (and adults!) are often very loud. Anyway, we started laughing when we heard one little kid running around the yard singing, "Hallelujah, hallelujah!" It was kind of a pleasant change from the usual neighbor noise!

How did you wake up?

2011-01-14T04:35:00.000-08:00

Greetings are very important in Tanzania. It's rather rude to walk past someone you know with just a wave and a hello; you really need to stop and make sure the person knows that you are placing them at a higher importance than whatever activity you are racing off to do.

Some of the typical greetings and responses here sound a bit funny when translated into English, which is a great example of why we don't translate things word-for-word. Anyway, at the end are a few slang greetings, which sound just as funny in Swahili. If there is more than one possible option of which word to use in the question or answer, I have used a slash.

How did you wake up?
Peacefully.

News of the morning/afternoon/evening/night?
Good.

How have you spent?
Peacefully.

News of here?
Good.

News of work/family/home/rain/any activity?
Good.

Do you have an issue?
I don't have an issue.

Issues?
Clean/Cool/Pipe.

Issues which?
Issues clean/cool/pipe.

Checking spelling in Zanaki

2011-01-10T05:17:00.000-08:00

Now that we have finished drafting and checking Luke in the Zanaki language, we're working hard on getting it ready for publication. One of the biggest jobs is checking spelling. Now, I (Misha) try to pay fairly close attention to spelling when I'm working with the translators and we make a lot of corrections during every check. So when I started spell-checking, I thought, "Oh, this won't take too long; I'm sure there are some mistakes, but I think we did pretty well checking most if Luke already."

WRONG!

Sure, we already caught a lot of errors, but there are still an awful lot of others! For example, check out these two words:

ang'ariri - "he shone"
ang'ariiri - "he deserved"

Believe it or not, both are correct. Now I just have to make sure every other instance of "shine" and "deserve" are correct, too, or readers might be a little bit confused!

okutura - incorrect spelling of "to put"
okutuura - correct spelling of "to put"

The incorrect spelling above is easy enough to fix throughout Luke, but realizing it is spelled inconsistently in the first place took some work. It was used so often with the short vowel that it looked correct, since the translators had been very consistent with it. It was the few instances of the incorrect one that tipped me off (and I first I thought it must be the incorrect one, since it only appeared a few times!).

I'm just glad I got glasses this past year!

I don't think I'd drink that...

2011-01-05T03:58:00.000-08:00

Last week we had some issues with our water pressure being quite low. Sometimes there was enough pressure to get the water to come out of the shower head, but other times it only worked out of our lowest-to-the-ground tap. Then it cut out completely and there was no water anywhere at all.

Knowing that there was roadwork going on by our house, we figured it was caused by something the road folks were doing and that it would come on in due course. But on the third day of no water, we'd had enough. So, we went down to the local water department office to figure out what was going on (or not going on...).

Much to our pleasant surprise, they escorted us straight to the head technical manager's office! He listened to our story and then called in one of the repair work foremen. As soon as this man heard where we lived, he immediately knew what the problem was: there had been a bad pipe that had finally broken last week (thus the issues with the water pressure). They had put in a temporary line for the houses that relied upon that line for water, but the temporary line wasn't long enough to reach three houses. Ours was #2 of those three. The manager asked him to fix the problem right away.

When we came home yesterday evening, the foreman was out front just finishing his work. He gave us a big wave, and a few minutes later came to our gate to ask us to try a tap and see if we now had water. It worked! However, it seemed like some air and dirt had gotten in the pipes, since it wasn't quite the color we usually expect water to be, and wasn't coming out in a straight line! After it ran for a while, it improved, and after a few days I think it might be clear again.

Musoma ladies' Bible study

2011-01-03T03:10:00.000-08:00

Some ladies who regularly attend Bible study weren't there on the day when we took this picture, but here's a quorum of our group. We meet every Tuesday afternoon after work and it's always a highlight to get together and talk, study and discuss God's Word, and pray for each other. Sometimes we even get a snack (which is almost always due to the generosity of one certain special member of the group...).

Ever since I first arrived in Musoma in 2007 there has been a missionary women's Bible study, but the members have changed as the missionary community is comprised of almost entirely different folks now than it was then. The time and location have changed a fair bit, too, as it's tricky to find a good time. Our group has women working in the office who aren't free until 4:30 or 5:00 in the evening and moms with small children at home, and our schedules are fairly different! But regardless of these issues and those of childcare, transportation, etc., we are very committed to our time together and really appreciate it. Right now our group has only SIL women in it, so we're all involved in the Bible translation project in some way.

We have no leader; we just take turns volunteering to lead each week, and it works pretty well. We use whatever studies come our way, which usually means we have only one copy. We utilize photocopying or printing or even typing them ourselves while looking at a book!

Last week we didn't meet because of Christmas/New Year, and I'm looking forward to being together again tomorrow. Our study this week is on wisdom, and I am the one signed up to lead our discussion, so I am praying for wisdom about wisdom!

Things we appreciate about living in Musoma

2010-12-30T21:04:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it's easy to notice all the things that are irritating about living here, so yesterday we took a little time to list things we really appreciate and enjoy about living in Musoma. This isn't a complete list; we just rattled off things off the tops of our heads and I'm sure we missed some, but here's what we came up with yesterday:

- Fruit! We really like having fresh and flavorful mangoes, passion fruit, guavas, bananas, pineapple, and watermelon.

- Mama Peter's shop! Mama Peter is a very kind and friendly woman who owns the shop where we buy our non-produce items. She makes shopping fun.

- The market! We like wandering through the stalls and choosing our produce from our favorite vendors.

- Music! While we don't always appreciate the music itself (although sometimes it's great), we like how music is a big part of people's lives here.

- No need to be PC! You can stroll up to a stranger and ask them what religion they are, how old they are, etc., and it's totally fine. People call us "white person" and people in wheelchairs are called cripples. While occasionally it makes us wince with surprise, it's nice to just be able to talk without watching every word to be sure nobody will be offended.

- Not being judged on looks! Tanzanians appreciate skinny people, fat people, short people, tall people, all sorts of people. If your clothes don't match exactly or fit perfectly, it's okay. If the water is out and you didn't get a shower that morning and your hair is a little greasy, no worries. Tanzanians seem to care a lot more about your behavior and personality than your body and appearance.

- Househelp! Wealthy Tanzanians hire househelp, and it's expected for foreigners to do so, too. Poor Tanzanians take in orphaned relatives to be their workers in exchange for giving them a home. It's simply how life works here; keeping a house is a lot of work and people are expected to care for those less fortunate than themselves. So we have Rose as our househelp. She's a Christian widow with three children and has worked for me for 3.5 years. We are very grateful for her help two days a week!

- Animals! It's pretty cool when you take a road trip and see zebra, wildebeest, giraffes, and antelope out the car windows.

- Visitor introduction time at church! Every church always has a time for visitors to stand up and give their names, where they are from, etc. It's terribly convenient and a nice way to get to know guests/introduce yourself when you are a guest.

- Hospitality! In general, Tanzanians are happy to have guests and want to make sure they feel welcome. It's a very important cultural value that seems to match up well with how the Bible tells us to live, practicing hospitality. It makes Tanzania a warm and friendly place for foreigners.

- Sunshine! Occasionally we long for a cool and rainy day, but for two people from the soggy northwest, it's still overwhelming to realize that we're guaranteed to have a sunny day every day (with very few exceptions).

Christmas 2010

2010-12-26T21:43:00.001-08:00

Christmas fell on a Saturday this year, and at the end of the day we said, "It was a really nice, special sort of Saturday, but it didn't really feel like Christmas."

We got up early, which was fun because we opened our presents when it was still dark outside, which made the lights on our tree much prettier. Unfortunately, the electricity went off about halfway through, so we finished by the light of a candle and the rising sun. It came back on after 30 minutes or so, so it wasn't out all day or anything.

For gifts, we had received a box from my parents, a package from Andrew's mom, and a wee little package from one of his sisters. His dad sent his gifts via Internet (gift cards). Also, for our gift to ourselves, we experimented with ordering books off Amazon and having them shipped to us here in Musoma, and were very pleasantly surprised that they all arrived quite quickly!

For Andrew, it was strange to not have very many people/kids around. Two of his sisters each have a little troop of kids, and so for him, Christmas with no nieces or nephews around felt a little too quiet. For me, I grew up with Christmas being just our immediate family, so I was the youngest and there were definitely no kids around, so Christmas wasn't too odd with it being just two adults, although I really missed my parents and Christmas Eve service at home church.

It was also strange to not give any gifts this year. Andrew especially missed the challenge of shopping and finding just the right thing and eagerly awaiting seeing the receipient open it. I was relieved to not have to stress about finding stuff to buy and all, but it was kind of sad, too, that we didn't have any presents for each other.

One thing that went really well, however, was the food! For breakfast we had some amazing cinnamon rolls, and for Christmas dinner we had BBQ pork with garlic mashed potatoes and pan-fried zucchini. Carrot cake finished our meal.

So, to liven things up we went for a Christmas walk. We borrowed our friends' dog, Ellie, and headed out on a trail that runs along the border of the local military base and a plethora of small cassava farms. It was really fun to be out in the fresh air and outdoors together. We don't go outside very often, so it was nice to be out and about! It was so quiet, too. Two lots away from our house there was a wild and noisy party with really, REALLY loud music going on all afternoon and well into the night, but when we were on our walk, we were far away from there and it was peaceful and quiet. There are huge rock formations in NW Tanzania, and Andrew got some pictures of the landscape. It's always nice to see Lake Victoria in the distance and giant rocks scattered around.

To close out our day, we talked with our families via Skype, which was really nice to be able to do. I don't know what missionaries way back when did, but we sure appreciate the Internet!

Roadwork

2010-12-17T22:37:00.000-08:00

Sometimes leaving the house is a challenge. Sometimes getting home is a challenge. No matter which direction we're attempting to go, these days we're never sure if we'll be able to get there and back!

They've been doing some serious roadwork on one kilometer of our dirt road for months now. We live at about the .9 km mark, so we're at the very end of the part that we hope someday might be paved. They've completely blocked it on one side with a backhoe parked across the road, and have put dirt piles and stacked thorn branches in such a way that there is no way a car could get past. Motorcycles believe in "where there's a will, there's a way" and will manage to get past anything, but we're stuck on that side. So, that leaves only one way out for us.

Unfortunately, sometimes they dig ditches across the road or dump huge piles of dirt in the middle of it and don't give us any advance warning. We try and figure out off-road paths that we can take to get around the ditches and piles, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Again, in order to prevent cars from attempting such maneuvers, sometimes they'll put up tapes or lay down thorn branches. When they had the tape there once, we looked at it and thought, "It's not strung that tightly..." and so I hopped out and held it up as high as I could, and Andrew drove underneath it. We've learned a few things about fighting your way through from the motorcycles, I guess!

Yesterday evening we arrived at our house to discover they'd dug a ditch right in front of our driveway. Since it might be about a week or so before they actually lay pipe in the ditch and cover it up again, Andrew laid some rocks and dug up some dirt to give us a way out. Now we'll just have to be really careful to follow our tracks every time in and out!

Church

2010-12-13T01:10:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we added to the growing list of churches we've been to in the Musoma area:
Pentecostal Assembly of God
Mennonite (2 different ones)
Moravian
Pentecostal Evangelical Fellowship of Africa
Seventh Day Adventist
Africa Inland Church of Tanzania
Free Pentecostal Church of Tanzania
Anglican Church of Tanzania

This list will continue to grow as we visit other churches. Most churches are surprisingly grateful for a visit, and it's a wonderful opportunity to share about the Bible translation work we're doing in the area. We are also continually reminded of the importance of unity in the church. Our work activities, which are focused on the Bible rather than a particular denomination, seem to promote the concept and fact that there is only ONE body of Christ and we are all a part of that same body (check out I Corinthians 12).

We've mentioned before that church services in Tanzania are always an interesting adventure; one that is rarely, if ever, brief. Some of the questions we might ask ourselves in the morning before heading off to church are:
Will it be less than three hours this week?
Will they have a sound system? (I hope not.)
Will it be working? (I hope not.)
During introductions, how should I introduce myself?
How hot will it be?
Will we have to sit in the front again?
Will anyone give chickens or produce in the offering to be auctioned off at the end of the service?
What is the appropriate amount to put in the offering?
Will the choir do most of the singing, or will we get to sing too?
Should I put on my dancing shoes or should I load up on caffeine beforehand?

The two things that never seem to vary between churches are: 1) filing out of the church at the end of the service and shaking everyone's hand, and 2) ANNOUNCEMENTS. It wouldn't be a true Tanzanian church service without announcement time. Announcements are very important and can sometimes take 45 minutes.

"Bwana ni mwema" ("The Lord is good")
Andrew

Pork

2010-12-09T01:37:00.000-08:00

Today Andrew went to the butcher shop down the street and bought four kilos of pork. As always, these shopping trips are full of the unexpected. After a wait and some phone calls, some pig pieces arrived in the trunk of a car. He carried it home in a plastic bag and whacked it into pieces in our kitchen. Sometimes we really miss going to grocery stores and buying meat in tidy packages! However, when it comes time to pay, we can't help but feel that we're getting a nice deal at a bit under $2.00 a pound.

Christmas tree

2010-12-09T01:29:00.000-08:00

Thanks to some co-workers who recently left Musoma to spend a year in their home country, we are able to borrow a (fake) Christmas tree. We both really love the whole Christmas season and so having a tree is pretty exciting. Over the years, I have managed to bring six strands of lights out to Tanzania with me, so we have plenty of lights for our tree, as well as lights to go all the way around our living room and dining room (see the strand heading up the wall behind the tree). They run on 110 volts, so we had to buy a transformer to change the electricity here (220 volts) so it won't fry the lights (see the box next to the tree). With some Christmas music in the background and our wee tree, we feel like we're all ready for Dec. 25 to come! Thanks to care packages from our parents and thanks to Amazon for shipping around the world, we have now added quite a few gifts under our tree, too. Despite all these fun festivities, we're also determined to focus on Christ, and remember that it is his sacrifice and humility we are celebrating.

We're Visa

2010-12-03T03:32:00.001-08:00

There are not insurance companies in Tanzania (other than auto insurance for those wealthy enough to have vehicles), but there is plenty of insurance going around. People build up credit with friends, loan to other friends, and make sure they have a wide, deep network of giving and receiving money and other help. If they have a problem, they can call in some loans, and they are okay with giving out some loans, because it extends their credit network.

Also, underlying this infrastructure, is the idea that those who have more wealth are to take care of those with less. For example, a good Tanzanian friend here once had a job, a real job as a clerk in a store, but refused to receive a salary, because he knew he'd live better as a dependent of benefactors than he would on his own salary. He said that as soon as people heard he had a salary, they'd come to him, expecting him to be a benefactor and he'd be obligated to help them. So he went to work every day, knowing it was good experience that would enable him to have a better job someday, but never took home a paycheck!

So, in this culture of the "wealthy" helping the poor, coupled with everyone living off of loans and most folks being in debt, you can imagine how we fit in. People look at us like we're unfriendly if we don't participate in the general system of friends helping friends, and since we're wealthy in their eyes, when we don't help those less fortunate, we appear selfish and greedy. We're asked for financial gifts and loans constantly. It's one of the greatest stresses of being here. I thought the most difficult thing for me would be the heat, the food, or the language, but instead it is definitely the mixture of friendship and money.

I have no problem refusing a total stranger who asks me for money; that's easy. But when it's a translator I supervise and consider a friend, our neighbors, or a Christian stranger who is clearly in dire need, it's much more difficult to know what to do. What do you say when someone whom you know well asks you for a loan/gift to pay for their child's school fees? If I say "no", there is a good chance that child will not go to school. But if I say "yes", I'm continuing this pattern of living beyond one's means and putting them in debt.

A friend here recenly said "I'm Visa". As odd as it sounds, I realized that we're Visa, too.

By saying we're Visa, I mean that we help people when they have been caught by an unexpected expense, and just can't pay for it all at this moment. Our system for deciding whom to help usually has to do with deciding if it's really something they couldn't have planned for in advance. If I feel like someone should have found a way to save for something they knew was coming up, and then at the last minute they ask for a loan/gift instead, that's not a good time to put something on a credit card. But if their son was sick and the money they'd saved for rent had to go to pay his medical bill, then that's when they really need some help. That's when we become Visa to people in a country where Visa is not everywhere you want to be. There is no insurance and no credit cards here, but there are friends.

-Misha

Fuzzy Felines

2010-12-02T04:55:00.000-08:00

Clive and Betsy, our wee leopards. Andrew was working from home one day and they hung out on the chair in his office. Even he couldn't resist taking a picture!

Reviewers Workshop

2010-11-30T02:48:00.001-08:00

We recently had a workshop for training church leaders to be reviewers for the Ikizu, Zanaki, and Kabwa translations. My favorite part of the workshop was seeing the translators teaching things that I (and others) have worked hard to teach them!

Kitaboka, an Ikizu translator, teaching the group about "Two Kinds of Translation" - literal word-for-word and meaning-based. She was SO nervous before her lesson slot, but did really well. She had quite the smile of relief afterwards; she was delighted that it went well, and that she was done.

Enjoying a laugh with some of the participants and Patrick, our Dutch translation consultant.

An Ikizu man whom I first met in early 2007. He was one of the people at the very first Ikizu alphabet-development workshop who helped create the writing system for the Ikizu language. I think he was really pleased to see it in use.

Shem, a Zanaki translator (see previous posts about the wedding we were in - he was the groom), teaching. He was the MC for the workshop and did a very good job. Some people are just naturally talented at being up front and in charge!

In the first and last pictures, you can see some typical Tanzanian church decor. Since we barely have room for ourselves at our office, much less 20 additional people, we held the workshop at a nearby church. The swaths of fabric at the front of the church are a very common way to spruce up churches in these parts.

King of the Basket

2010-11-30T02:31:00.000-08:00

There is a certain large basket in our living room that is apparently a really amazing place to take a nap, if you're a cat. Betsy is often there, snoozing away. Clive, who is more of a migratory sleeper, going from place to place around the house in a succession of naps, usually ends up there at some point on his rounds.

It doesn't bother him at all if she's already on it. In fact, he enjoys finding her up there and then jumping up and lying down on top of her. Since he's considerably larger than she is, she scoots to the edge of the basket so she can breathe without his bulk squishing her. Often she then gives him a bath (the lazy bum does lick himself sporadically, but Betsy cleans him from nose to tail tip pretty regularly). Meanwhile, he slowly pushes himself closer to her on the basket and takes the whole thing over. Before she knows it, she's gone from having a nice nap in her favorite place to having about 4 inches of space left on the very edge, and has given him a bath in the bargain.

This picture was taken at the beginning of the process. As you can see, he's already looking sleepy and comfortable, ready for his bath and nap.

Uji

2010-11-27T00:49:00.001-08:00

Most Tanzanian foods are fine - not my favorite dishes, but not horrid, either. There are a few that I'd put in the "I hope I am never served that again" category, and there are a few I quite like. But one particular dish is on my all-time beloved meals list - uji wa ulezi (millet porridge).

Andrew thinks it looks like poop and tastes gross, and most other wazungu (white people/foreigners) agree with him. But I think it's fabulous and I love making it a couple mornings each week. As an added bonus, it's incredibly healthy. The flour is a mixture of ground millet, peanuts, and soy, so it's really high in protein. Locally, it's considered food for elderly people, children, and sick people, since you don't have to chew anything. Also, I think it's popular for students at boarding schools for breakfast, since it's cheap and healthy and easy to make. But, despite all these wonderful things, most non-Tanzanians think it's disgusting.

To make it, you start by heating water, salt, sugar, and milk powder. Then you add uji flour by spoonfuls and whisk away. When it starts to boil, it gets nice and thick. Delicious! Come on over for Saturday morning breakfast one day and I'll make some for you. If you think it's revolting mush, then you can have toast with Andrew.

Life in Tanzania

2010-11-26T07:06:00.000-08:00

Life sometimes gets a little slippery in Tanzania. This poor guy was caught on camera by Andre, our Dutch colleague, as he was on a trip to a village. It is very common to see bikes carrying large loads of various items. Charcoal like this is a typical load. Tanzanians use it for little outdoor cooking stoves.

Going to church

2010-11-20T00:12:00.000-08:00

Growing up, both Andrew and I went to church multiple times a week. The church building was a second home of sorts, and we spent a lot of time there. On Sunday mornings, never was there a week where we were anywhere else. Well, I remember ONCE when we were on vacation, we didn't actually go to church, but we still sang and Dad gave us a message from the Word, and since he's a pastor, it was pretty close to the real deal, minus lots of people. But the rest of the time, vacation or not, we went.

In college I think I missed a couple times because of having too much homework and a swim meet that took up all day Friday and Saturday. But I still went to the evening chapel service every Sunday night without fail for four years. During my grad school days, I continued in my faithful attendance, because, what on earth would one do on a Sunday morning other than go to church?!

And then I became a missionary...

Before coming to Tanzania, I envisioned myself joining a local congregation and taking part in church every week alongside Tanzanians and enjoying spiritual fellowship with local friends and neighbors. It was a nice picture, but reality met up with me at language school.

Upon arrival in Tanzania, I came to face with the fact that Tanzanian church services are in Swahili, and I didn't know Swahili. That was a pretty good deterrent for a while. Considering a screaming pastor using a bad PA system makes even one's mother tongue pretty unintelligible, sometimes it's still an effective deterrent.

So although my church attendance while in language school was sporadic, I attempted to go every other week or so. But since Sunday was the only day when a ride into town was guaranteed, I admit sometimes I used the lift to go to the Internet cafe and send/receive e-mail... And then I came to Musoma, sure that things would change when I was settled into one place and could speak the language.

The message I heard growing up wasn't that you were supposed to go to church just for the sake of going, but that you are to go serve others, fellowship, and get solid Bible teaching. So what do you do when you can't find a local church that has all of those things? Staying home listening to a sermon from home on a Sunday morning seems like a pretty valid option sometimes.

During my first term here, I finally just made a rule for myself (living by the law, I know): go to church twice a month, no matter what. In every given month there would be something happening on a weekend that prevented attendance, a week when I'd simply be too worn out to go, and two weeks when it worked out to go, and I made myself do it. I visited a lot of different churches (Musoma has over 30 denominations, most with more than one congregation), and habituated two of them a bit more frequently.

During my second term, Andrew and I have lived by grace and not the law and just go when it makes sense to go, and stay home/do something else when that makes more sense, and it ends up being about the same percentage. We have come up with a list of things that one must consider when thinking about going to a church:
-Length of service. There is a big difference between a two-hour service and a four-hour service.
-Attention. In some churches they don't pay much attention to white visitors, and in some they make a big (i.e. annoying) deal out of it.
-Sound system. No sound system is best, and one at low volume is second best. However, most churches ascribe to "the louder, the better".
-Music. We like churches which have congregational singing. Some have only the choir sing, not everyone.
-Use of the Bible. Using the Bible at all is a good thing, using it correctly/in context is a great bonus.
-Temperature of the building. Some places tend to trap heat, some have a nice breeze.
-Dance teams. It can be fun to visit a church with a good choir/dance team that really gets going while singing.
-Parking. Is there a place for our truck? Do kids at the church tend to draw with dirt all over it while it's parked there?
-Seating plan. Some churches have all the women and kids on one side and all the men on the other (guess which side fills up more...). I didn't care when I was single, but now it's an issue, since we like to sit together.
-Number of offerings. One is enough.

And the final one, which is often considered the most important...
-Type of seating. Wooden bench with uneven legs or a plastic chair? A two-hour service on a bench feels like it's about the same length as a four-hour service with a plastic chair!

"I am like Simeon"

2010-11-05T00:34:00.000-07:00

In Uganda, there was a seminar to train Bible study leaders using the newly-published books of Mark and Acts in Bwisi, the local language.

One man told an interesting story after the seminar. He said, “This is the 50th year that I have been attending church, but I have never, ever read any Bible verse in my language. I am like the old man Simeon in the Bible whom the Holy Spirit promised he would not die without seeing Messiah. God has given me a time of grace in this world so that I can hear the Word of God in my own language, the language which I understand. No one can understand the plans of God; people used to say that no one would manage to write the Bible in Bwisi because it is an un-writable language… but here it is!”