Once again, it's been a while since I've posted anything here! I would really like to post on here more regularly, but when I'm in Balimba, my schedule is itself irregular and usually pretty busy. Also, our slow internet connection makes it very hard to load the blog page from there. Hopefully, during those times when I have better internet and more time on my hands, I'll be able to catch up on some posts that I wasn't able to write earlier.
In the meantime, I'll try to summarize what happened in the past month or so.
In late January and early February, Joy Hart and I hosted three guests: Joshua Hedges, who came for Bible translation; and Larry Fogle and Tim Fink, who came to teach in the local theological school. Joshua spent three weeks checking Proverbs and part of Job in the Day language (pronounced "die"). This group is eager to finish the entire Bible and has been working hard. Keep praying they can finish it!
Larry and Tim came to teach a pastoral studies course. Larry is an MK from Africa and visits Chad often, so he is a familiar face to many people here. Tim is a missionary in Romania, and although he speaks Romanian well, he doesn't speak any French. Very few Chadians can speak English, so he needed a translator in order to communicate with the Chadians. Yet in spite of the considerable language barrier, he was able to identify well with the Chadian culture as he recognized parallels with the culture of the gypsies of Romania. The Chadians greatly appreciated his teaching and preaching, and were quick to invite him to come back next time he has an opportunity.
In the second half of February, I prepared for, and then led a translation checking workshop with the Sara Madjingaye. We checked the books of Jonah, Micah, Nahum, and Habakkuk. The heat of the Chadian hot season was making itself felt toward the end of the week, but the Lord helped us to get through all the material. It actually rained early Saturday morning and cooled things off - too late to help our workshop, but we were glad of it anyway.
I spent the first week of March organizing and packing to leave for my two-month mini-furlough to Australia. The long trip began yesterday, March 10, with a 12-hour bus ride to the capital. Today, the 11th, I am just relaxing and enjoying the good restaurants and faster internet here in N'Djamena. The plane leaves tomorrow afternoon, finally arriving in Melbourne, Australia on Friday afternoon. It will be a tiring trip, but I am looking forward to seeing my parents and friends again.
Thanks for praying!
Translating "half"
In my last prayer letter, I mentioned the difficulty one translation team had in translating 1 Kings 10:7. I thought some people might be interested in knowing more details about it – why it was a problem and how we finally found a solution.
In this verse, the queen of Sheba tells about how she’d heard so much about King Solomon’s greatness, and says “the half was not told me”. That might sound pretty clear and straightforward, but we quickly ran into difficulties in translating it into Sara Kaba Dem.
If you have followed my ministry for a while, you will remember that our workshops are not translating sessions, but editing sessions. The team had already prepared a rough draft of the entire book of 1 Kings before coming to the workshop, and we were checking it over verse-by-verse to see what needed to be edited. For each verse, the translator, Job Hondo, read it first in Sara Kaba Dem so that the entire team could hear how the translation sounds. Then he translated it orally back into French to help me understand what the translation was saying (I had already received and studied a written back-translation, but it is helpful to do it orally too).
When Job came to 1 Kings 10:7, he started reading the rough draft, then stopped when he came to the part about “the half”. Even without looking at a Bible in any other language, he saw that the first attempt to translate it wouldn’t work, as it didn’t make sense in Dem.
“What does the Hebrew say here?” he asked.
The biblical text is pretty straightforward, and it was soon clear to everyone what it meant: “The half was not told to me.” But translating that into Sara Kaba Dem was another matter.
There were two hurdles to overcome. One is that there is no true passive voice in Dem; that is, they can’t say “was not told me”. They have to use the active voice: “did not tell me”. This lack of a passive voice is true of many languages throughout the world, and can sometimes make translation difficult. But in this case, the solution was not difficult. Although Sara Kaba Dem does not have a passive, they can use a verb in an impersonal sense - that is, without expressly stating who did the action: “[They] did not tell me.”
The second hurdle was much more difficult, and the translators puzzled together over what to do about it. The Sara Kaba Dem language, like many other languages in the Sara language family, does not have specific words for fractions, like “half” or “quarter”. They can say something like “one part in two” or “one part in four”, but that didn’t work in 1 Kings 10:7, as it is referring to words and not to a physical object or group of objects that can be divided up.
“We just don’t have a word for ‘half’ in our language!” the translators complained.
They tried another solution: “They didn’t tell me all of it.” This made good sense in Dem, but missed much of the force of the queen’s words, since “not all” doesn't exclude "most". According to the queen, she hadn’t even been told half of the truth.
Sometimes, when we are stumped on a problem, it is better to make a note and come back to it later, after we’ve all had time to think about it. So we moved on to other issues for the rest of the day.
Later that evening, it occurred to me that I had among the files on my computer a copy of the recently edited book of 1 Kings from one of our other translation projects, the Sara Madjingaye language. This is an important Chadian language, used between different tribes as a trade language, so the Sara Kaba Dem translators can all read it quite well. Also, it is quite closely related to Dem and shares many vocabulary items and grammatical structures. So there was a good chance that they had already worked through the same translation difficulty in 1 Kings 10:7. Perhaps they had found a solution that would give ideas for how to translate the verse in Sara Kaba Dem.
So the next day, I pulled up the Sara translation of 1 Kings 10 and found verse 7. The Dem translators took a moment to read it. I can’t read Sara very well but was able to get the general gist of what it was saying.
“Ah, nus!” the translators exclaimed as they read the Sara translation. Sure enough, the Sara translators had found a word that worked.
Even though I don’t know Sara too well, I recognized the word nus (pronounced like the English word “noose”). It is not an original Sara word; it comes from Arabic, but it is commonly used to mean half or partial. For example, if someone is pouring you a cup of tea, and you don’t want a full glass, you say “nus nus”. This Arabic word has also been brought over into Sara Kaba Dem and is pronounced nusu.
At last, we had a word for “half” that would work. After just a few short minutes’ discussion, the Dem team had a translation of 1 Kings 10:7 that both made sense in Dem and kept the meaning and impact of the Hebrew text.
Here in Chad, we are surrounded by multiple ethnic groups, each with its own unique culture as well as its own language. This brings some interesting challenges, and it also means we have much work to do in Bible translation work! But in the case of 1 Kings 10:7, the fact that we have multiple Bible translation projects was a help, as some languages face similar difficulties and can help each other find a solution.
In this verse, the queen of Sheba tells about how she’d heard so much about King Solomon’s greatness, and says “the half was not told me”. That might sound pretty clear and straightforward, but we quickly ran into difficulties in translating it into Sara Kaba Dem.
If you have followed my ministry for a while, you will remember that our workshops are not translating sessions, but editing sessions. The team had already prepared a rough draft of the entire book of 1 Kings before coming to the workshop, and we were checking it over verse-by-verse to see what needed to be edited. For each verse, the translator, Job Hondo, read it first in Sara Kaba Dem so that the entire team could hear how the translation sounds. Then he translated it orally back into French to help me understand what the translation was saying (I had already received and studied a written back-translation, but it is helpful to do it orally too).
When Job came to 1 Kings 10:7, he started reading the rough draft, then stopped when he came to the part about “the half”. Even without looking at a Bible in any other language, he saw that the first attempt to translate it wouldn’t work, as it didn’t make sense in Dem.
“What does the Hebrew say here?” he asked.
The biblical text is pretty straightforward, and it was soon clear to everyone what it meant: “The half was not told to me.” But translating that into Sara Kaba Dem was another matter.
There were two hurdles to overcome. One is that there is no true passive voice in Dem; that is, they can’t say “was not told me”. They have to use the active voice: “did not tell me”. This lack of a passive voice is true of many languages throughout the world, and can sometimes make translation difficult. But in this case, the solution was not difficult. Although Sara Kaba Dem does not have a passive, they can use a verb in an impersonal sense - that is, without expressly stating who did the action: “[They] did not tell me.”
The second hurdle was much more difficult, and the translators puzzled together over what to do about it. The Sara Kaba Dem language, like many other languages in the Sara language family, does not have specific words for fractions, like “half” or “quarter”. They can say something like “one part in two” or “one part in four”, but that didn’t work in 1 Kings 10:7, as it is referring to words and not to a physical object or group of objects that can be divided up.
“We just don’t have a word for ‘half’ in our language!” the translators complained.
They tried another solution: “They didn’t tell me all of it.” This made good sense in Dem, but missed much of the force of the queen’s words, since “not all” doesn't exclude "most". According to the queen, she hadn’t even been told half of the truth.
Sometimes, when we are stumped on a problem, it is better to make a note and come back to it later, after we’ve all had time to think about it. So we moved on to other issues for the rest of the day.
Later that evening, it occurred to me that I had among the files on my computer a copy of the recently edited book of 1 Kings from one of our other translation projects, the Sara Madjingaye language. This is an important Chadian language, used between different tribes as a trade language, so the Sara Kaba Dem translators can all read it quite well. Also, it is quite closely related to Dem and shares many vocabulary items and grammatical structures. So there was a good chance that they had already worked through the same translation difficulty in 1 Kings 10:7. Perhaps they had found a solution that would give ideas for how to translate the verse in Sara Kaba Dem.
So the next day, I pulled up the Sara translation of 1 Kings 10 and found verse 7. The Dem translators took a moment to read it. I can’t read Sara very well but was able to get the general gist of what it was saying.
“Ah, nus!” the translators exclaimed as they read the Sara translation. Sure enough, the Sara translators had found a word that worked.
Even though I don’t know Sara too well, I recognized the word nus (pronounced like the English word “noose”). It is not an original Sara word; it comes from Arabic, but it is commonly used to mean half or partial. For example, if someone is pouring you a cup of tea, and you don’t want a full glass, you say “nus nus”. This Arabic word has also been brought over into Sara Kaba Dem and is pronounced nusu.
At last, we had a word for “half” that would work. After just a few short minutes’ discussion, the Dem team had a translation of 1 Kings 10:7 that both made sense in Dem and kept the meaning and impact of the Hebrew text.
Here in Chad, we are surrounded by multiple ethnic groups, each with its own unique culture as well as its own language. This brings some interesting challenges, and it also means we have much work to do in Bible translation work! But in the case of 1 Kings 10:7, the fact that we have multiple Bible translation projects was a help, as some languages face similar difficulties and can help each other find a solution.
January Prayer Letter
I have now experienced my first Christmas in Africa. How different from my previous Christmases! One morning shortly before Christmas, several friends were showing me some new outfits they had bought to give to their children or grandchildren. They told me how excited the children would be, because for most of them it would be the only nice new clothes they would get all year. How different from my own childhood, when we were bored with presents of new clothes and only interested in getting lots of new toys!
A few days before Christmas, I attended a Sunday School Christmas program. In Chad, each age group of children gives a presentation, including songs and Scripture verses and sometimes a short Christmas skit. Most of the presentations were in the local Sara Madjingaye language, and the melodies and words of the Christmas carols were all new to me. Yet in spite of all the differences between cultures and languages, the Savior that we sing about is still the same, and His gospel is still good news for all people. May the good news continue to spread in Chad and around the world!
Workshops in December
In the first week of December, I met with the Sara Kaba Dem translation team to finish editing the book of 1 Kings. In our last workshop, we spent many hours struggling through the construction of Solomon’s Temple in 1 Kings 5-7. Thankfully, the rest of the book was not nearly so difficult! However, even in supposedly “easy” sections, difficult translation problems can arise. In chapter 10, the translators struggled to find a way to translate the queen of Sheba’s words to Solomon: “The half was not told me”. How do you translate “half” in a language that doesn’t use fractions? The team was stumped until they remembered the word nusu, often used to express the idea of half or partial. Although the word comes from Arabic, it is so common that it will be easily understood in the translation.
The following week, I met with the Sara Kaba Naa team. We finished checking the book of 1 Chronicles, and then turned our attention to the book of Psalms. This book is generally more difficult to translate than the Chronicles, but the Lord helped us to find solutions as difficulties arose. In Psalm 104, there are a number of different trees and animals mentioned. Some of these things pose no difficulty, such as the “young lions” in verse 21. Others, such as the “coney” or “rock badger” in verse 18, don’t exist at all in Chad. For most of these, the team simply adapted the French word.
While we are thankful for progress made, both the Sara Kaba Naa and Dem Old Testaments still have a long way to go before they can be printed. Thanks for your continued prayers.
Coworkers coming and going
In mid-December, my coworker, Dr Joy Hart, returned safely after a nine-month furlough. She is settling back into life and ministry here in Chad. In late January, my fellow consultant, Susan Hossack, will be leaving for a year-long furlough. Pray for Susan as she enjoys a much-needed break, reports to her supporting churches, and seeks to raise additional support. Please pray for me and for my Chadian coworkers as we continue the translation work during Susan's absence.
Australia trip
Although I will be very busy this year, the Lord has given the opportunity to take a trip to Australia from mid-March through mid-May, to visit my parents and report to the churches and individuals there that support me. Please pray for a profitable and restful stay in Australia.
In Christ's Service,
Anna Beth Wivell
October Prayer Letter
“I know the New Testament pretty well, because it has been printed in my language. But I don’t know the Old Testament very well, because it has not been printed yet,” a young Bible school student remarked to me recently. The local Bible school had just begun classes that morning. After just one day of biblical studies, the student was already feeling his own lack because of the absence of a complete translation of the Bible in his mother tongue! May the Lord grant that one day, the entire Bible will indeed be available in his and many other Chadian languages!
Translation Workshops
In August and September, I participated in two translation checking workshops along with a senior consultant visiting from the U.S., Dr Hantz Bernard. We met with the translation team for the Sara Kaba Naa Bible, followed by a workshop with the Sara Kaba Dem team. Lord willing, both teams will come again in December to check more material. Pray that we will make good progress.
Immediately following the workshops with the Sara Kaba Naa and Dem teams, I participated in another workshop with consultant Dr Troy Manning. We met with the Sara Madjingaye team and were able to finish checking the entire book of 2 Kings.
Each workshop involves much preparation beforehand, as well as days of intense work during the workshop itself, so after three consecutive workshops, I was thoroughly exhausted! So in early October, I traveled to the capital city, N’Djamena, and spent some days resting at a missionary guest house there. The capital is a 14-hour trip from Sarh, but it is one of the best places to go for a change of pace and a chance to relax. Praise the Lord for travel safety and for good rest while I was in N’Djamena.
Literacy Ministry
Earlier this month, my coworker’s sister, Claire Hossack, arrived in Chad. She will be here for several months to help with the literacy ministry. This work is essential to the work of Bible translation, since the printed Bible will not benefit people unless they are able to read it. Pray for the Lord’s blessing on her and her ministry during her time in Chad.
Language Study
Thanks for praying about my study of Sara Kaba Dem. I am continuing to study the language with my language helper, Helene, but our sessions have continued to be inconsistent due to sicknesses or various responsibilities. However, the Lord has provided additional help in the study of the language. Among the new Bible school students are two couples from the Sara Kaba Dem language group. Since the students live just a short walk from my house, I’m looking forward to many more opportunities to practice the language.
Please keep praying also for my continued progress in the French language, so that I will be able to better communicate with those around me.
In Christ's Service,
Anna Beth Wivell
No bottle? No problem!
How do you feed an infant a drink of water if you don't have a bottle? Chadian mothers are able to do it with no problem! Mom scoops up water in her fist - palm side down - then uses her thumb like a spout to direct the water into the baby's mouth. Just the other day, I observed a mother doing this with her baby; it accomplished the purpose quite well, and the baby seemed perfectly content to drink water this way. Granted, this method gets both the mother and the baby wetter than they would with a bottle. But after all, in a hot tropical climate, who cares about getting a little water on themselves?
Vacation Time
After several particularly busy and exhausting months, I'm now glad to be enjoying a short vacation! I traveled by bus all day yesterday to the capital city, N'Djamena, for a nearly two-week break. It is a long, hot and tiring all-day trip, but there aren't too many other good places to take a break in Chad. Here in N'Djamena, there is a guest house for missionaries available where I can relax completely with no other responsibilities or concerns to worry about. I will head back to Sarh on the 17th, but until then, it's vacation time!
If only we had the whole Bible in our language...
I was both encouraged and challenged by a comment from one of the new Bible school students recently: "I know the New Testament pretty well, because it has been printed in Sara Kaba Naa [the student's mother tongue]. But I don't know the Old Testament very well because it hasn't been printed yet." This observation was after just one day of Bible doctrine class. It didn't take long for him to discover how much he needs to have the whole Bible in his own language! May God grant that someday before too many more years have passed, the Sara Kaba Naa people will have the entire Bible in their own language.
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