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!