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.)

Makoko Family Centre

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!

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

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

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

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!

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!