Sunday 22 July 2012

a big job well done

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

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

Before:



There is a house hidden behind there, honestly!

And after:

Wednesday 18 July 2012

bulls, field boundaries and colour dilemmas


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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