Iʼm home!

I very much enjoyed summer in the US this year – lots of getting together with people, boating, frozen custard, seeing family and friends, etc.  My time there seemed very short, but I’m grateful for the time I did have.  Thanks for taking the time to get together and get caught up for those I was able to see!  And hopefully next time I come I’ll get to connect with many of you that I wasn’t able to connect with in person this time.  Know that I’m grateful for all of you!

After I left the US, I hit the ground running.  I landed in another country in West Africa and soon I was leading a session on linguistics and what it looks like on the field for those learning French.  Then started an intense but very good two-week workshop on translation – what does it actually look like in practical, every-day terms?  Now I can’t wait to get started!

(In case you’re curious for a taste, in our breakout sessions we were working on the first draft of Acts 27 in our languages.  Open to that passage and you’ll see some of the challenges that I faced trying to get the meaning across to My People, who live far from the ocean and have no conception of big bodies of water.  There is also no word for island, anchor, sandbar, shipwreck, beach, . . .)

I’m now back in My Country, where I’m trying to catch up after being gone for several months.  But it’s also been a joy to see so many friends, to get to jump back into life among My People and work towards translation and literacy primers, etc. 

So what do the next few months look like?  Lots of linguistics (hooray!) as I work with some of My People to try to figure out more of the intricacies of how this fascinating yet complicated language works.  In the workshop I saw how very important it is to understand this well in order to have a translation that is well understood and still has accurate meaning.  So it’s back to the grindstone, with exciting things in store in the next year or so, Lord willing!