Christmas is coming...

... and the duck is hopefully getting fat! Yes, we should be eating duck this year for our sixth Christmas in Benin. On days when the internet is working I have been looking up recipes and working out how to adapt them to the ingredients available here!

I still find it hard to believe it's Christmas when the weather is over 35°C in the afternoons, but for our kids this is normal. Simon only had two Christmasses in Europe, and Benjy and Eve have never celebrated Christmas anywhere but Benin.

When we first arrived in the village in 2010 there were very few signs of Christmas even in our nearest town, Kandi. But this year there are a few plastic trees and blow-up Santas being sold. Even so, I use the absence of Christmas outside the home as a good excuse to decorate inside our house. We have made paperchains, snowflakes for our windows, fluffy sheep for the Christmas tree (made with raw cotton from the field next to our house) and a paper star for the tree too. And thanks to some gold paint, I have made bells out of yoghurt pots, and knitted a big red bow to tie them together, and spray-painted an old shampoo bottle to make a festive vase.

We have the same very tall (and straight!) tree as usual - which I enjoy because we can put the child-proof ornaments at the bottom, and the fragile ones higher up!

We also have a Nativity scene made of wood which someone passed onto us, and an Advent Calendar, both of which help us to remember that we are, as it were, waiting for the birth of Jesus in this time of Advent.

Moab's lawns

In Isaiah 15, in the middle of a lament over Moab, verse 6 says:

"the waters of Nimrim
are a desolation;
the grass is withered, the vegetation fails,
the greenery is no more."
(The Holy Bible : English standard version. 2001 (Is 15:6). Wheaton:
Standard Bible Society.)

Where the ESV has "vegetation", one of the French versions has "gazon" (the grass of a lawn). One of our translators conscientiously looked up
"gazon" in the dictionary, and our Monkolé draft for "the vegetation
fails" said "Fɔfɔ ŋa iyi à teese iri nŋa ku sĩa ŋau, à bɛjɛ", literally
meaning "the grasses whose heads had been cut to be beautiful are ruined".

The point of the verse is that all the vegetation has been dried up.
While any lawns would obviously be included in that, the Hebrew doesn't
seem to be so precise, and our draft translation definitely seems
unnecessarily detailed. Since we already had three mentions of "grass",
we deleted this one and added a line about trees with green leaves
drying up ... I haven't yet found a generic word for "plants" in Monkolé.

A dry landscape here in January 2011:

The fields are white unto harvest...

As an urbanised Westerner, I can understand in a fairly abstract way what this verse means. But I think people here can grasp it in a more personal way. At this time of year the cotton fields are literally white and ready to be harvested, and the labourers truly are few. I saw this rather elderly man harvesting his field alone:

Deceiving at his leisure?

As we were working through Job today with our consultant, we came across the verse which in the NIV is rendered:

"If I have walked in falsehood or my foot has hurried after deceit, ..." (Job 31:5)

In Monkolé we had translated it as:

"N ci ya n sɔ ibo, n ci ya n saasa n koo n zamba inɛ ŋa" which means "I didn't tell lies, I didn't hurry to go and deceive people" (we had changed the structure slightly, taking away the "If" at the beginning of the sentence and making it a negative affirmation rather than a hypothetical).

However, when we were reading it through, one of the translators said, "Does that mean he did deceive people, but just didn't hurry to do it?"

This made us realise that our Monkolé version was ambiguous, and so we decided to alter it to be similar to versions such as the CEV, which simply says, "I am not dishonest or deceitful".

Such details tend to be thrown up when the text is read out loud, and it is good to get them straightened out!

chilly november?

Even in our sixth year here, it makes me smile to see our kids playing outside with bare arms and legs in November! They, of course, find it quite normal!

This was taken behind our house, where a path leads up into the fields. We enjoy walking there when the temperatures have gone down a bit in the early evening.

bags of white stuff!

These photos were taken on our last trip from Cotonou to Parakou, just to the south of a town called Dassa. You might well wonder what is being sold in these white bags. Manioc is grown here in Benin, and two manioc products are gari and tapioca. You will probably have heard of tapioca – gari is a woodier substance which looks a lot like very fine sawdust! It is mixed with water and used as a staple, or simply mixed into a sauce to give more texture and some taste.

Everyone knows that this part of the country is THE place to buy gari and tapioca. When we first arrived I couldn't quite figure out how this worked. How can all these stands all sell enough to make a living? Well, simply because this is THE place to buy gari and tapioca, and everyone knows it! You can't drive past without seeing someone stopping to buy a few bags, and we often stop ourselves to buy some to give to friends as presents when we get back to the village. If you buy gari or tapioca elsewhere in the country it is either less good quality or else more expensive, so if you're making the trip you might as well stop and stock up!

It still makes me smile though, to drive past all these identical stalls, with just a name above them to distinguish them from the next one. But in case you're wondering, we have our favourite stall, "Les 3 Pneux", where if we buy 4 bags of tapioca they give us a free bag of gari!

kill those idols!

Depending on the version of the Bible you have, Numbers 33:52 says something along the lines of, "drive out all the inhabitants of the land before you. Destroy all their carved images and their cast idols, and demolish all their high places".

As we were working through this chapter as a team, I noticed that the second sentence seemed to begin with "Kill their idols...". I am often discovering new nuances of meaning in words I know the usual meaning of, so I asked tentatively "Can that verb be used in this context?" The translators answered with a very definite yes. I persisted, "But – maybe I just don't know the meaning well – I thought this verb was like 'tuer' in French?" Yes, they said, that was right. "Then, um..." "Unless of course they don't have any living animals at all among their idols!" one of the translators supplied.

A lightbulb went on for me, and I realised that when I think of idols, I always think of "carved images" and "cast idols", perhaps representing a real spiritual force but without flesh and blood. Yet of course here in Benin, some people believe that spirits live in certain creatures (snakes, for example) and so a temple might contain several live snakes believed to be inhabited by the spirits served.

So I pointed out that if you read the verse carefully, quite clearly this was not talking about living creatures but only about the man-made representations of the idols, and that therefore a verb like "destroy" was more appropriate.

This is an example where the Monkolé word "iwɛ̃" is the right one to translate "idol" yet may have connotations which lead to misunderstanding of the situation. By the grace of God, we will iron out as many of these "wrinkles" as possible as we work through the text.

customer loyalty

Many shops in Europe have loyalty schemes ... or at least they did when I was last there! Things work a little differently here! In the market, for example, I always buy my tomatoes from the same person, my onions from the same person, my peanut butter from the same person ... and in return I am often given a "gift" of a few more tomatoes etc., showing me that I am a valued customer. Other vendors give you a reduced price if they know you.

I think the classic example was when my onion seller once said to me, "Four onions for 250F, but for you 200F" ... and then gave me two free onions as a gift on top of the four I'd paid my 200F for!

On Saturday I was accosted in the street as I bought some flipflops for Simon by a young Nigerian woman who likes to speak English to me, and who wanted to ask me, "Why you not buy flour from me any more? I'm not happy!" This is a long story involving my flour seller who stopped selling flour for a while, but since I park in front of his place I would still go and greet him and he would tell me where to go to buy my flour - often just next door where this woman sells flour. My flour seller is now selling flour again, so like the loyal customer I am, I am buying my flour there again.

I racked my brains as to how to placate this young woman, and then remembered that she sells sugar, and that although I'd forgotten to put it on my shopping list, I actually really needed some. So I said, "Oh! I need sugar! Three kilos, please!" ... and she sent me to get it from an older lady who works with her who I always speak to in Monkolé since she doesn't speak French (or presumably English!). I should point out that she isn't Monkolé either, but is very pleased to have found a common language which we can use to communicate!

I am always a little stumped to know what to do when my usual vendor of something is absent, as I know that if I buy it elsewhere they will expect to see me back again. Sometimes I go to part of the market I don't usually go to, so that they won't see me again the next week, but this doesn't work for things like tomatoes, which are all sold in the same part of the market. Mind you, these days if my usual tomato seller is absent her neighbouring tomato seller recognises me and grabs me. She is deaf, so communication is reduced to pointing and showing money, but we manage!

 
My tomato seller and me last year when my parents were visiting. The new market hadn't been opened yet, and all the stands were temporarily out in the street (for four years!).

near and far

So far this has been a month for both close-up shots and skyscapes! Just a few examples:

a jealous God?

In Numbers 25:11 we come across the idea, as in other places in the Old Testament, of God as a “jealous” God. Even in English, jealousy has negative connotations. We usually imagine it as an ugly, uncontrolled reaction rather than a valid emotion.

Numbers 25 begins with the people of Israel being enticed away from worshipping their God and turning to the idol worship of their Madianite neighbours.

A fairly literal translation of the Hebrew of Numbers 25:11 says, “Phinehas the son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, has turned back my wrath from the people of Israel, in that he was jealous with my jealousy among them, so that I did not consume the people of Israel in my jealousy.” (If you want to know exactly what he did then you can go and read the whole story in Numbers 25!)

The draft Monkolé translation said, “Fineɛzi woo weeu, amai Eleazaa, tɔkui Arɔ̃ɔ woo weeu, í sinda idɔɔkɔ̃m hai si inɛi Izirɛli ŋau domi himmam í naa siɛ si anini nŋa. Ŋɔi í jɔ̀ si idɔɔkɔ̃m nɔu n kù kpa inɛi Izirɛli ŋau fei má.”

A literal translation of this would be “Phinehas the priest, son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, turned my anger from the people of Israel for my zeal came upon him among them. He made that in my anger I didn't kill all the people of Israel.”

One of the Monkolé translators said that “zeal” didn't seem right to him in this example. We therefore discussed the concept of jealousy, which I thought was “igu” in Monkolé, but the translators said no, only women experience “igu”, for men it is called something different. Both words, however, have negative connotations in the same way that jealousy does in English.

So we looked at the way various versions treated it. Few modern translations in English or French use “jealousy”, so we looked at what they had done and ended up saying “he refused to accept that they turn from me to worship idols instead”. We do lose something in the translation, because with the word “jealousy” comes an implicit image of God as a husband and Israel as an unfaithful wife (a recurring image throughout the Old Testament). But unless we made the image entirely explicit by adding things which weren't in the original, we would be running the risk of making it very difficult to understand if not misleading.

These sorts of decisions are always difficult to make, and I'm not always sure if we have made the right one. That's when I am glad we work in a team, and that our work is always checked by a translation consultant. It also encourages me to continue to pray for discernment and wisdom!

little office in the garden

I have been waiting to launch my new blog but have been thwarted by a period of extremely bad internet connection. However, today it seems to be working well enough, and I thought I would kick things off with a photo of the translation office, standing in the middle of the pastor's wife's okra garden (on the SIM property).