Working Together

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.)