Christ Church

What’s happenin’

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June is here. The old body knows its alive with the the nose sneezing and running. But its great! My bees are bringing in the nectar! Lisa’s garden looks beautiful! The flowers are busting out everywhere and some of the early crops –the spinach and first batch of lettuce — are already done. Now the strawberries are ripening and the zucchini are six inches long!

In the office I continue to work on the translation of Acts along with other Bakwé related work. Check out the “Ministry” pages of the web site and you will see some more content about the translation process, as well as a list of most of our Bakwé publications. I also have been working on getting ready for my trip out to the Bakwé in August/September. Part of this preparation includes meeting with the men who will accompany me and planning out what we want to accomplish.

Benjamin Nieuwsma will come out again to train my Bakwé colleagues in audio recording. His goal will be to record all the Scripture we have translated so far in audio format. Scott Hieronymus will be coming out for the first time and helping troubleshoot and set up computers and an office network. His goal will be to set things up so that the team can return to original settings without too much help. Dr. Kjell Christophersen will come out again to run a follow-up small business seminar with our Bakwé micro-entrepreneurs. Part of what he will be doing will be evaluating how the first three projects went.

We’ll be keeping you posted via this blog while we are over there, so keep checking back for more info and pictures. Have a great June!

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Already March!

Bakwe' Mission on

Currently I am working on my exegesis of Acts and my suggestions for its translation into Bakwé. Alexis, my Bakwé co-translator and colleague, is behind and still finishing up his part of Luke. After he is done, we will go over Luke once more and make changes where they are needed.

The literary structure of Luke and Acts is fascinating! The two books go together, with the “Ascension” forming the middle of the story. Luke starts out in chapter two with a decree from Rome and Acts ends up with Paul in Rome preaching the gospel. Jesus’ preaching ministry takes Him through Galilee, Samaria, Judea and then Jerusalem. The preaching of the gospel by the Apostles and Paul starts in Jerusalem with the coming of the Holy Spirit, and then moves through Judea, Samaria, the Gentile nations, and then to Rome. There are many other structural things going on as well. Although I don’t generally like titles, I have been struggling with how to use them to help bring out some of the structural emphases that Luke has going on in Acts. Most outlines I have looked at do not do this very well. We’ll see if I can pull it off.

The most helpful book so far has been David Gooding’s book True to the Faith: a fresh approach to the Acts of the Apostles (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1990). Another helpful book has been Victor M. Wilson’s Divine Symmetries: the art of biblical rhetoric (University Press of America, 1997). The narrative in Acts seems to be organized in part by five summary statements (6:7; 9:31; 12:24; 16:5; and 19:20). Vincent also points out (p. 196) that Luke and Acts each have a journey narrative in about the same place with about the same amount of text (Luke 9:51-19:40 and Acts 12:25-21:16). The shape of each narrative is a chiasm. The center of the chiasm in Luke’s Gospel is 13:31-35 with the words “…Jerusalem. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, …” The center of the Acts journey narrative is Paul’s speech in Athens to the Areopagus (p. 210). The mission of Jesus is fulfilled in Jerusalem in the Gospel of Luke. The mission of His disciples is centered on taking the Gospel to the nations.

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Bakwé Teacher Training Seminar

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Twenty six adults, from ten villages, came to our Bakwé teacher training course which ran from September 2nd through the 5th. Pastor Firmain and Perez ran the course and, from what I hear, did a great job. Four of the participants that came were women; two were non-Bakwé interested in teaching reading and writing in their churches. All the participants enthusiastically entered into the discussions and some brave souls even participated in getting up in front of the class to demonstrate what they had learned. On the last day of the four-day seminar, the group voted in a new committee for Bakwé literacy.

We are happy that Bakwé reading and writing classes are spreading into more villages every year. This year we have classes starting in the furthest village North and South of the Bakwé area. These two villages speak different dialects of Bakwé but are still able to use the primer with the teachers making some local modifications for their audiences. There are three main Bakwé dialects.

Primer

Our reading and writing primer is almost ready for its third printing. After a number of years of experience, we divided the primer into two separate volumes; one for beginner level and another for the intermediate level. We have third primer that we use for adult pre-literates.

Communication

We are still having trouble from time to time with our Internet connection in the village. This week the break in communication was caused by Perez’s computer crashing. Alexis got it running again by Monday the 8th and we’re good for now. What a blessing Skype, Google Calendar and Google Documents have already been when we have the connection! Skype is an Internet chatting application. Google Calendar allows us to see each other’s work schedules. Google Documents allows us to jointly edit documents online.

You can read more personal news at the passworded area of this site. To receive the password, please contact Csaba by email. Then you click on the words “login” in the top right-hand of the page. A password box will appear. Type the password in and you will be in.

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Mission accomplished

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We are back in Moscow, Idaho and very grateful to God for a successful trip. We were able to accomplish just about everything important that we had planned.

Following the Ji ‘Mi -Gba micro-finance seminar, we were able to finish off training the Bakwé team. It was intense up until the last day. First there was wave after wave of music groups coming in to give the Bakwé team recording practice. Word had gotten out that we had some professional recording gear. In between the waves we helped the team set up a local network with access to the internet. Here, we were able to set up things adequately but not in the way we had originally planned –giving direct access to a friend in the States who could repair and trouble shoot their computers from a distance.

During this time Perez’s laptop gave up the ghost. We set aside a day to recover his old hard drive and put in a new one, but it turned out that the HDD was OK and the computer itself was bad. It had already served us about 8 years, so it is time to find a replacement. He can work using the spare desktop computer for the time being.

The last day, on our way out of the village we made a stop in the village of Petit-Gabo, the last Bakwé village to the south on the road to San-Pédro. Here we met the chief and observed our newest Bakwé reading and writing class in session. You can see pictures of this class in the “photos” section. We then made a stop in San-Pédro and relaxed a bit on the beach! The weather was overcast and rainy so we didn’t do any swimming, but the down-time was much needed before the 5 hour road trip back to Abidjan.

Benjamin flew out on Wednesday. During the next two days before my departure on Friday, I trained Alexis on how to use Accronis backup software, Google Agenda, Google documents, and FileZilla. Alexis and I also worked on a Bakwé text that I had transcribed from a recording. This text will be useful in my continued analysis of Bakwé discourse grammar.

Join us in thanking the Lord for keeping us healthy and safe, and for all that we were able to accomplish in such a short period of time! Thanks for your prayers.

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‘Killer bees’

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Behind our house in Touadji II we have a bee hive that hadn’t received attention since we moved to the States six years ago. The bees were still there, but the old Langstroth hive was rotting away.

One evening I decided to transfer the bees into a new horizontal top-bar hive I had made for this purpose some years ago. Janvier helped me and Benjamin stood in the background taking some pictures. We work the bees at night in order to avoid having the bees sting people passing by. Of course that means that ALL the bees are home, making for all-out war! African bees (the supposed ‘killer bee’) are extremely aggressive and this night I couldn’t work quickly since the old hive was all glued shut with propolis and hard to open.

Forty-five minutes and twelve stings later I was able to finally put the hive into the new hive with as much of their brood comb as I could transfer over. The honey we found we harvested. The honey, collected from forest flowers, was dark and rich with exotic flavors. We shared it with the old men of the village and with all those that ate breakfast with us over the next few days.

For years I have been working the African bee, learning how to manage it, with hopes of training our Bakwé friends to produce a high quality forest honey to sell to tourists and hotels. The best hive to use in that part of West Africa seems to be the modified Kenyan Top-bar Hive. Though we are living out of the area right now I still have hopes of some day helping the Bakwé start up a local bee-keeping business. While here in the States I continue to learn about bee-keeping while helping a friend work and manage his bees in Moscow, Idaho.

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