I was planning on posting about our translation workshop and doing a Happy Thanksgiving post but those are long gone now and I didn’t have a whole lot to say about them anyway. So, here’s the new thing I’m going to (try and) do. For the next week I’m going to journal each day about the day’s activities and events. You’ll get a detailed look into the daily life of Chris Hostetter, and hopefully it won’t leave you wishing you never knew me.
Day 1, Thursday December 12, 2013 I crawled out of bed a little after 6:30 this morning, leaving my sick and dying (I’m lying about the dying) wife behind and joining the four much too energized rug-rats in the land of the living. (My wife and I are both battling colds and coughs but I’m losing my battle less than her.) I got them started on breakfast and made my own (homemade bread (which I made) toasted over the stove in a frying pan). I did a quick check of the email and then got myself ready for the day. By a little after 7:30 I was in my office gettin’ to work. I began work today by transcribing some of the recordings of my translation work I got a couple days ago. This is one step in the many steps of translating God’s Word and here’s how this one works. A few days ago I finished my rough draft of Exodus 7-10. I then invited a local Pal man into my office for the next step of the process. I read my translation chunk by chunk (paragraph by paragraph) in the Pal language and then with my voice recorder running, he said each chunk back in his own words. The reason we do this is that while I may be able to communicate everything I need to communicate, very often they will be able to say the same thing much more naturally and in a much better way. This recording is not now the translation I work with, but I work through the recording integrating it into my rough draft hopefully bringing my draft up to a higher level of clarity and read-ability. So I was about 45 minutes into listening and transcribing said recording when my coworker showed up for a quick literacy school chat. We needed to hammer out a teacher schedule for the next literacy class (starting early next year) and we did so. We discussed and dealt with a few other literacy school minor issues and by that time a number of Pal people had arrived for our weekly reading group. We gathered on our neighbors’ porch and read a book of short simple stories. The reading group consists of the graduates from our first literacy class and we gather together to practice reading and writing. After that, and after further visiting with those folks, I made it back to my office but not too much before lunch time. I did a few little things in the office and then went inside for lunch. 12:00 – 12:30 is Maggie time and while I ate we sat and talked about our mornings and visited for a little while. After lunch is Maggie’s time in the office (I usually bring my laptop to the kitchen table and work while keeping an eye on the kids) but I let a couple guys into my office to hide from the mid-day rains and Maggie was too nice to kick them out. So, she took her work to her bedroom and I went back to work in the office although I left the office door (the one to the house) open a tad so the kids could come get me if they needed me (which, of course, was frequent and often). I worked till 4 on my translation and then tidied up my stuff before heading outside to play with the kids. The kids were already in the midst of a mock sword-fighting battle and so I left them to it and spent a while talking with Maggie about new language things I’d learned and random translation issues. A few ‘whacked’ fingers later and the sword fighting came to an end. Nate and I took on all the kids in a game of kick the can and then the kids just played by themselves for a little while before we turned in and hit the showers. We all got washed up just in time for supper and after enjoying Maggie’s delicious stromboli we (Maggie and I) cleaned up the kitchen while the kids (supposedly) were cleaning their rooms. That was about 6:30 and that’s when I got a call from our coworkers saying they’d just been informed that a man in the local village had just broke his arm. I had actually talked to this man on our porch less than an hour before. Anyways, Nate and I went over to the village, gave the man some pain meds, and put a splint on his forearm. Tomorrow he’ll have to head over the ridge to the nearest aid post. I arrived back home at 7:30, just in time to put the kids to bed and now it’s 8:30. I’ve got this post just about finished and just got our December newsletter uploaded to prayerletters.com for mailing. Now I’ll get ready for bed and then collapse into it and I’m guessing Maggie and I will probably finish the tv episode of Sherlock (S1E1) we started last night. And by 9:30 (10 at the latest) we’ll turn off the lights and drift off to never never land.