End of the Picnic Era

Six years ago, when we moved our family to Benin, we bought a second-hand Toyota Picnic direct from the Port of Cotonou, where it had been shipped from Europe. It was eleven years old.

Over the years our trusty car has served us well, despite the state of the roads, and the long journeys we had to make. We love the fact that it has six seats (two-two-two), the back two of which can be removed. Before Eve was born, we got a roof-rack made because we were going to be having to use five of the seats and lose part of our boot!

However, the boys' legs just keep getting longer, and since we are leaving for a year, it seemed the right time to part company with the car. A year sitting around in heat and humidity was hardly going to do it any good.

None of the ex-pats we know were looking for a car, so we asked a friend in the village how we should go about selling it locally. He said we would just need to put a sign in the window ("À vendre" = for sale) with a phone number. It certainly was effective. For every trip into Kandi we had at least one person contacting us, interested in buying. It was almost overwhelming! Some of them were obviously not going to be able to pay an acceptable price, but after a lot of back and forth negotiation, Marc has agreed a sale with a taxi proprietor.

Since the car actually belongs to the Mission not to us (officially to our own ministry account, and we pay into that account if we use the car for personal reasons), the papers have to be signed, and the money paid, in Parakou. This suits us well, as we want to travel down to Parakou in it when we leave. We then have a private taxi lined up to drive us down to Cotonou.

Goodbye, faithful friend, we will remember you fondly!

We plough the fields...

We had a good rainfall here on Saturday night. The local farmers will be hoping for more like it. On Sunday we drove over to Kandi-Fô, where the rains have been more frequent, and saw some people preparing their fields. A few people can afford to use a tractor, but for many, everything is done by hand or by oxen.

Also, computers are too clever!

Today I did a bit of revision with my team on using LibreOffice Writer (an equivalent of Word). They had made notes in an exercise book when they went out to test our translated texts in other Monkolé villages, and I wanted those notes safely copied into a computer file.

Philémon began the work, and I checked whether both translators remembered how to create a file and how to save it. They automatically changed the language setting to "Afrikaans" so that they could use our special phonetic alphabet with the font we need for Monkolé (called Charis SIL).

Philémon was continuing with the work, typing up the notes, while Pastor Samuel and I got on with other work. Suddenly he called me over and said, "I don't understand. How come whenever I type 'si' it changes it to 'is'?"

Oh, the joys of AutoCorrect! I found the menu for Afrikaans, and sure enough, if you type "si" it gets changed automatically to "is". I deleted it from the list, and made sure there weren't any other automatic corrections that were likely to be a bother for us.

But it made me realise yet again just how many unforeseeable difficulties could pop up while I'm away! Please pray for the team!

Computers are complicated things...

I have been training my team to use the internet to send emails and exchange files via the central Paratext server (Paratext being our translation software package). I thought it was quite simple. The problem is that while doing it right is indeed relatively simple, the number of things that can go wrong if you miss a step in the instructions or click on the wrong thing is nearly infinite.

I also realise that for someone like me who has been using computers for over 30 years (and regularly for about 20 years), I have some idea about what to do if something goes wrong. Even that doesn't always get me out of the mess I've made - computers can be very unpredictable - but if all fails I shut everything down and start again. If you are relatively new to computers they are scary things, and if something goes wrong, there can be a tendency to freeze. Which definitely doesn't solve the problem!

We need lots of prayer for the year ahead in which efficient teamwork will be reliable on communication via the internet! (I will be phoning them from time to time, but there are drawbacks to the telephone as a means of communication too.)

Termite feast!

It's the beginning of rainy season, and with the first rains the termites hatch out of nests in the ground and take their flight on wings which will only last a night. On Sunday afternoon I saw a flight of termites streaming up from the ground, their wings shining in the late afternoon sunlight. Then I noticed this bunch, sitting at the place where the termites were emerging from the ground, enjoying an all-you-can-eat buffet! It was funny to see them munching away greedily.

Preparation, preparation...

We will be leaving for our Home Assignment (used to be called "furlough") in a little over three weeks. We need to leave here with enough time to get down to Parakou and leave our car there, hopefully to be sold, and then get down to Cotonou in time to fly out on the evening of July 11th. We will then enjoy three weeks of holiday in the UK before we officially begin our Home Assignment on August 1st, based in France.

There is a lot to organise if you are leaving your house for over a year! No one will be living here while we are gone, but we want to get all our belongings organised and put away. We are definitely intending to come back, but if due to unforeseen circumstances we couldn't, we don't want to leave a jumble of stuff for someone else to sort out! Apart from that, the dust is horrendous, and everything needs to be packed well away to avoid a year's worth of it all over everything!

At work, I need to get my translators up to speed on using the internet, at least to be able to update their anti-viruses, exchange emails with me, and send and receive files from the Paratext (our Bible translation software package) central server. They're getting there, but it's good to make sure they get plenty of practice before I leave and won't be around to trouble-shoot any more.

It is weird to be leaving home for so long! This last hot season was (I use the past tense tentatively, as it is still pretty hot now!) a long, difficult one, and so I'm not finding it too hard to leave. I'm looking forward to holiday in the UK, and to seeing family and friends in both the UK and France. And I'm happy at the thought of spending some time living back in Nancy in the East of France, where I lived for eight years before. But it is so so strange to imagine being away from here for more than a year.

Home sweet home...

Numbers, Hosea and Haggai

Our translation consultant was with us for four days this last week. Despite the heat the team worked courageously, and we finished checking the last 12 chapters of Numbers, and checked the whole of the books of Hosea and Haggai! 28 chapters in one week - our best so far despite having 5 hours fewer than usual!

If you remember the incident with the flock of sheep I mentioned during our checking week last month, it was just as funny when this month we arrived at the words "for their cattle" in Numbers 35:3, and heard a crunching noise outside the window. Not to be outdone by the sheep, this time it was a cow who was perfectly on cue!

Not the cow we saw, but a similar one (a lot later on in rainy season!):

Hot hot hot ... and sticky!

Sorry about my absence from the blogosphere. I think we've all been in a kind of limbo waiting for hot season to end. Usually we get storms bringing the first rains at latest by the end of May, but this year the rain is not in a hurry to get here. We have had some dust-storms, which we hoped would turn into rain storms, but they didn't, or they just brought a few drops. We've seen storms passing us to the north and the west as well, and they send a bit of cooler air our way for a few hours. But otherwise it is still hot and sticky, and we're getting very tired of it!

The rain we had at the beginning of May got the grass growing, but it has now turned yellow and dried up. So it's still very dry around here. We also got most of the big trees in our compound cut back rather drastically, so it all looks rather bleak around here! The kids are happy though, as the big logs have been left as climbing frames!