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| the beautiful sunset view from our front porch |
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| the boys early Christmas morning |
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| enjoying Christmas dinner together |
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| talking to Grandmama on the toy phone |
Considering what a long way we travelled, we passed surprisingly few vehicles. But there were a few, including this one that I thought was carrying quite the load considering the roughness of the road:
We arrived in Berberati three days ago after two days on the road – the second day a very bumpy one on a dirt road. The more westward we got, the more rain-foresty the view became. The trip went very well, and although the rack on top of our car broke, it broke only a few miles out of Berberati, so we were able to get to our new home with all our luggage intact! Because the place we live is on an open compound (no walls, just a lot of grass and trees surrounding our home) we are already having quite a bit of interaction with our neighbors.
Early in the evening a couple days ago, I decided to take the boys to explore a small food market just beside our house. Women work in their fields during the day, then bring their goods to sell at this market in the early evening hours. Some women were selling piles of cooked caterpillars, called do (pronounced “dough”) in the Gbaya language. I was intrigued by the piles of crinkly black caterpillars, but they looked far from appetizing.
As I was threading my way back home through a long row of women sitting on stools selling tomatoes, greens, peanut butter and bananas, I heard a woman exclaim appreciatively in Sango, “The little white boy eats caterpillars too!” I looked down at the three year old holding my hand and trailing slightly behind me, and saw that, indeed, the back end of a little caterpillar was just disappearing into his mouth. Upon being questioned, he affirmed that yes, someone had given it to him, and yes, it tasted good!
Tonight some dear missionary friends in Bangui came over to play games with us, and they brought supper. Then they insisted that we keep the leftovers to eat in the next few days! And over the next three days, we have people making meals for us three more times! This is how our community here is helping us get ready for our move to Berberati. It’s tremendously helpful and encouraging, and means that instead of focusing on making food, I can keep stuffing space bags full of clothes and trying to figure out how to arrange the Tupperware to take up the least room in our truck.
I am truly overwhelmed by the help and support of fellow missionaries here who have really become like family to us, even over the course of less than a year! We will miss friends here in Bangui when we move out to Berberati, and among those we will miss dearly are other missionaries. But we anticipate coming back to Bangui for various reasons, so it is not like we are saying a final goodbye to them.
As I was contemplating the wonderful friends that God has often brought to surround us at times we need them most, I reflected that a year ago, we were also in the process of moving. I remembered how when Adam left our Dallas home a couple days before me in order to drive our car to NC. Meanwhile, I stayed in TX with the boys to finish up packing and then fly to meet Adam.
While I was “husbandless” for a couple of those final days, many friends came over to visit and help me pack. One friend even stayed up most of the final night with me, helping me finish packing suitcases. I looked back at some photos today, dated “December 9, 2010” and saw photos of a smaller Sam and John in the little living room of our Dallas trailer, surrounded by piles of suitcases, and also by many dear friends.
Whenever it comes time to move somewhere new, I find it hard to imagine making new friends that can be as special to me as the people I already know. But God never ceases to provide new friends, and a support network, whenever we arrive somewhere new.
And then, of course, comes the inevitable goodbyes when it is time for the next move, and I am forced to add more names to the mental list of “people that I miss.” That is okay, though. My heart is filled with happiness when I think of all the people who have so lovingly poured into our lives and become part of our extended “family.” I am so thankful for them all.
The green buses are even less expensive to travel in than the yellow taxis, and the buses hold a lot more riders!
For transporting goods in and out of town, people come up with creative ways to carry the maximum possible load.
Likewise, people come up with ingenious ways to carry the maximum possible number of passengers.
People also get around on bikes and motorbikes.
Small wooden canoes are used for river transport. To get to DRC, the country just across the Oubangui River, one might be ferried across in a boat like this.
Eating Thanksgiving dinner, complete with turkey and pecan pie (!) on a hot, breezy day under the shade of tall palms and other tropical trees didn't feel quite like any Thanksgiving I've had before. The U.S. ambassador and his wife had invited all the Americans in town to their house to celebrate Thanksgiving, and it was fun to get to meet other people from the U.S. and hear what they are doing here in Bangui. There was also a nice big yard for the kids to play in.
On Friday, we got to check out the academic library that Adam and Idriss have just finished organizing. It looks amazing! Monday will be the "grand opening," when translators and others can come in and see the newly-organized library and discover the resources that are available to help them in their work.
Thankful for a two year old son who dances just as wildly to Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto as he does Carlos Vives.
Jesus clearly states that after any human dies you live eternally either in the blessed presence of God and His saints in a perfect state of perfect love, joy, and honor called the new heavens and the new earth…or…you will in a place characterized by an intense physical and emotional torment as Jesus describes it five times in Matthew “a place of weeping (emotional pain) and gnashing of teeth (physical pain) Like, what sound do you make when you get a pin poked in the end of your finger, you suck air through your teeth, right?, There…that’s the meaning of this imagery).”
Both realities are real, unavoidable, will be experienced consciously, and will be eternally experienced consciously. And will be coming soon to you. It is always interesting to see how modern folk inside (and outside) the church like to deny that there will be an eternal experience of judgment (some say that lost people will fall out of existence somehow), but those same people never seem to have any qualms about God giving people an eternal blessedness and joy. Interesting, huh?
Well, here is a quote by Jonathan Edwards talking about the same (as we see now…un-modern) disdain for the biblical doctrine of hell that people had three hundred years ago. I guess people really don’t change that much over the centuries.
“God aims at satisfying justice in the eternal damnation of sinners; which will be satisfied by their damnation, considered no otherwise than with regard to its eternal duration. But yet there never will come that particular moment, when it can be said, that now justice is satisfied. But if this does not satisfy our modern free-thinkers who do not like to talk about satisfying justice with an infinite punishment; I suppose it will not be denied by any, that God, in glorifying the saints in heaven with eternal felicity, aims to satisfy his infinite grace or benevolence, by the bestowment of a good infinitely valuable, because eternal: and yet there never will come that moment, when it can be said, that now this infinitely valuable good has been actually bestowed.”
What a joy it is to know that you have eternal life! Think about it….eternal life! Eternal life! A life that is a permanent display of the goodness of God. As Paul says in Ephesians, “so that in the coming ages he (that is, God) might show the riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” A prize and joy obtain only by faith in Son of God, Jesus Christ, the Righteous One.
Maybe the thousands of dollars used towards paying tuition on an advanced degree in linguistics was not a complete waste. J
The linguistic discovery itself is not the indicator of the nerdy-ness…just the unparalleled joy of the discovery.
So…here it is
A nominalization morpheme in Sango!
Now, I most certainly did not “discover” it in some “no-linguist-has-ever-noticed-this-before-kind-of-thing” discovery. But it was the kind of discovery that would be that kind if I was working here several decades before and it was done through principles that I learned in school! Yeah!
Well, anyways…here it be…
You take a verb in Sango like ga which means “to come”
And
You add the morpheme “ngo” at the end of it and it makes the verb a noun so gango is translated something like “the coming”.
That is not too interesting as in English we use “the coming” like “The coming of Jesus is at hand. Etc.”
But they also do this with the verb te meaning “to eat” so tengo means something like “the eating”
So, Tengo ayeke nzoni is literally translated “The eating was good.”
But in English we do not say it that way. Although “The eating was good.” Kind of makes sense, it sounds more like a caveman talking. The translation just is not natural. The word-for-word translation just does not work. You must translate meaning-for-meaning. We would say something like, “It was a pleasant dining experience.” or something like that.
So I went through every verb I knew and added the ngo morpheme to see whether or not this was used on these particular verbs and each time our language helper said, “Yes, we use that a lot.” And many times the verbs are like the example above of “the eating” where it would be impossible to translate it from Sango into English word-for-word.
Neat, huh?
* We each have our lessons separately, one hour per day for each of us, so that one of us can watch John and Sam while the other is learning Sango.
Sango language learning is fun.
I have never learned an African language before and there are little things in the language that are much different than Latin based languages like French or English.
One of the most interesting little features of Sango to me so far is the “heart” phrases. It seems that any description of any emotion is embedded in a phrase saying something like “My heart is happy” Be ti mbi anzere” or as we say in English “I am happy”. Although it is technically possible to say “I am happy” (Mbi yeke anzere) it is just not the way people say it. You say “My heart is happy.” Your heart is always this or that depending on your present emotional state. You get the point.
So, today I was looking up a word in our little Sango/English/French dictionary and I came upon the word for fire (wa). It had a subentry under the verb saying that “be it lo za wa” literally translated “[his] heart shines/burns like a fire” which means in English “He is furious”. “My heart is burning” in Sango means “I am red-faced furious.” So, I immediately stored that somewhere in the recesses of the (ever filling) foreign language section of my grey matter to later retrieve when needed.
But I immediately thought of the passage in Luke 24 when after Jesus appeared to two of his disciples on their way to Emmaus after His resurrection. Those disciples were sad and discouraged thinking that Jesus was the Messiah and would triumphantly set up his kingdom in Jerusalem and reign. But they were very disappointed when Jesus was crucified. Jesus began explaining to them from the Old Testament no doubt that the triumphant Son/King/Messiah of Psalm 2 would also be the suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 whose body would not see corruption and be raised from the dead. At this time they did not recognize Jesus but at the end of their day Jesus sat down at with them broke bread and gave thanks. At that very moment they finally realized that it was Jesus and then Jesus disappeared.
After these incredible events the two disciples said to themselves, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” That is to say in Greek our hearts were happy. A burning heart in Greek means a happy heart, a burning heart in Sango…well….
I immediately laughed and thought, I wonder how the older Bible translation of Sango translated this verse. Hopefully, they didn’t do a literal/word-for-word translation of that passage!
You see, although there are more than 62 languages here, Sango is a trade language and was the first language in CAR to have the Bible translated in it. There are two translations of Sango here in CAR. One is the old version that doesn’t have the best reputation (at least among certain folk) for being a quality translation. However, it has been around for a long time and churches here seem to exalt this translation in the same way like some people exalt the KJV in the states. In the sort of way that is like, “It doesn’t matter if I don’t understand a lot of the old language or phrases in my King James, it is the way God has preserved his word in English and I’m going to read it whether or not I need a dictionary to understand basic words in the text.” CAVEAT: Of course, the KJV was done very well, and I know that many people who hold an “only KJV” view have much more sophisticated arguments than that. But, of course, I have met many people whose KJV arguments are basically summed up in the previous quote. END OF CAVEAT
And there is a new translation in modern Sango where the translators where trained in exegesis and translation principles by (ahem ahem) a Wycliffe translation consultant (the very one who actually will be my mentor who I will be apprenticed under when he arrives from Switzerland next month.)
I compared the two translations of Luke 24:32 that says “Didn’t our hearts burn within us when he explained the scriptures?” and the two translations were very different.
The Old translated “Word-for-Word”
Lo yeke fa na ani tene ti Mbeti ti Nzapa. Be ti ani ayeke tonga na wa pepe?
[Literally translated] [when] he showed to us the Scriptures, Weren’t our hearts like a fire? (but the word translated to the English ‘our’ is also archaic and is only used in churchy language. The word that means ‘our’ or ‘we’ is ‘e’ in modern Sango)
[A good English translation] “Weren’t we furious when He was explaining the Scriptures to us?”
The New translated “Meaning-for-Meaning”
Lo yeke fa nga na e nda ti tene ti Mbeti ti Nzapa so, Be ti e anzere fade mingi pepe?
[Literally translated] [when] he showed us the meaning of the Scriptures. Weren’t our hearts very happy?
[A good English translation] “Weren’t we glad when He was explaining the Scriptures to us?”
So, the old translation communicates something very different than the new translation. By the way, the new got the original meaning from the Greek right, the old got it wrong.
With laughter and sadness I’m imagining 50 years of pastors trying to explain why these disciples were angry when Jesus was explaining the Scriptures to them in their sermons on this text. Can you imagine how they would apply those verses to the congregations everyday lives?
Anyways, this is why we are here. We are here to train mother tongue translators how to first correctly understand the meaning of the Biblical text (exegesis) so that they can translate the meaning from the original languages in a way that has the same meaning in their language (translation principles).
What a great and wonderful thing when the Bible is translated well, and what a sad and sometimes confusing, and sometimes dangerous thing it is when it is done wrong.
Lord help us all in this glad and sober work.
More Providential evidence that Ruth and I were meant to be. We found out yesterday that Ruth didn't like the cake in pineapple upside-down cake but liked the pineapple, and I always liked the cake and not the pineapple. So after discovering this, Ruth spontaneously composed this brief verse in the tradition of Jack Sprat.
Kids in bed.
Rubbing my wife’s feet.
Cool tropical breeze blowing through the windows.
Us listening to D.A. Carson preach on Hebrews 7, Psalm 110, and the Melchizedekian priesthood.
Warm cup of NesCafe.
Certain of Eternal Life.
Happy in Jesus.
And then Adam called my attention to this view of the sky from our front porch, thinking I might want to take a picture of it: 
I put together a little photo collage of Sam’s first ten (and a half) months, and it was fun to see how he has changed. The main change I noticed, comparing his 2-month-old and 3-month-old photos to his 10-month-old photos, was how his face went from having cheeks wider than forehead…to forehead wider than cheeks.
Yesterday, I came out from my Sango language session to find that Adam and John had built a tabernacle replica out of Duplos. I told Adam on the spot that I am designating him as the Bible teacher once we start homeschooling! (I think he’s actually already been planning on that even before I saw his creativity).
