Lockdown

Well, here in France we've been locked down since 30th October. Honestly, our day-to-day life doesn't feel much different. Schools are still open, so on weekdays Marc and the kids still go out as usual, and I was working from home anyway, of course. And since I go out to accompany Eve to and from school four times a day, I get my exercise on those days without even using the one-hour within one kilometre of home we are allowed. At weekends we feel it more, and have often found ourselves doing 56- or 57-minute walks and wishing we could have gone further. But we are privileged to live in beautiful surroundings, so we have several fun walks of about the right length in nearby parks and woods.

We do miss other people, but we hadn't been seeing many people anyway because of the Covid situation, and Benin got us used to not having a very exciting social life! Obviously we wish things were different, and find it frustrating not to be part of a vibrant church life, but we have been keeping up friendships by phone and internet, and trying to be patient.

I'm getting on well with proofreading the Monkolé Bible. Lockdown has perhaps meant I've had fewer distractions. In a way it's quite isolated work, but I do have contact with my MiDi Bible colleague in Switzerland, exchange emails too with our SIM Benin Project Manager, and have had some encouraging messages from Pierre, our translation consultant. SIM France keep in touch too. And of course I am still in touch with my team in Benin, though they are longer involved in the daily work.

Marc has been dealing with the reality of being a supply teacher. Just as he'd got quite settled at the school he was at, he had a message one Friday evening that he'd be starting at a school in Phalsbourg from the next Monday morning. Phalsbourg is about an hour and twenty minutes drive away, and when he starts at 8am that means a very early start! But he is teaching the speciality he prefers, and his timetable isn't too bad. He was told he'd be there until 30th November, but it's looking likely he'll be there for longer. However, he might not be told until the last-minute again (just to keep him on his toes!).

On a walk in our local woods.

Maps

Today I have been going through lists of place names so that we get the right ones on our maps! It's been taking a while as I've been checking nearly every one to be absolutely sure I get it right! And it's nowhere near finished, I'm going to be at it again tomorrow...

Tidy titles

One thing I was asked to look at in a draft of our Bible was the titles. Some titles are long enough that they end up on two lines, like this one in Numbers 11:

Having a title on two lines isn't a problem, but the line break may be. In this case, the second line begins with "ŋa" which is a plural marker. The word here is "Israelites", so it's a bit as if the "s" of "Israelites" were put on a separate line. This is where my colleague needs me, because I know the Monkolé language and can suggest a more natural place to break the lines.

Decisions, decisions...

Here is an example of something I was working on last week. Most chapters in our Monkolé Bible begin with a title. It's worth remembering that those titles are not part of the original biblical text, and neither are the chapter or verse breaks. Anyway, some chapters don't start with titles, and so we ended up in our first draft of the layout with something looking like this:



Since this is in the Psalms, we definitely want a line left between chapter 42 and chapter 43, to show that these are two distinct psalms. But there are some other cases like this one:


This is Exodus chapter 5 and 6. Here we are in the middle of a conversation between God and Moses, and to put a gap between the chapters might give the impression that these are two separate conversations.

So my job was to go through our Bible looking at all the places where a chapter didn't begin with a title, and decide whether or not we wanted a gap between the preceding chapter and the new one.

Working on the layout

As I said in my last blog post, we have been working on the "layout" of our home, but in this post I'm referring to the layout and type-setting of the Monkolé Bible. Since the beginning of September I have been back at work over internet with my colleague at MiDi Bible, and it has been great to see the Monkolé Bible coming together on the page ... well, on the screen except for the times I have actually printed it out to get an even more accurate idea of how it would be.

So here is my workspace in the corner of our living room.



I do miss having colleagues present, and discussing things face to face, but my MiDi Bible colleague and I exchange emails frequently, and despite never having met, we seem to understand each other and collaborate well together.

And here is the kind of thing I'm looking at! This is part of Song of Songs. More in another blog post about specific decisions we're making at the moment...

School(s) and furniture

Back from England, we had to get our kids ready for school, and find a bit more furniture for our flat. We had the essentials, but were still basically living out of suitcases. If Marc had been given a fixed post, he would have been extremely busy preparing for that, but since he is a replacement teacher, he didn't have much information at all about what he would be doing (and still doesn't really!). He has of course been working generally on building up his knowledge of his subject and of the way that it is taught these days.

We got Eve signed up for school quite easily, as primary schools are run by the local town hall, which continues work over the summer. The secondary school is a bit more independent, and so we had to wait until the week of the 24th - the week before schools went back - before the boys could be signed up. Everything is basically done by catchment areas though, so there is no question of trying to choose schools - which made things a lot easier for us! We found lists online of the books and equipment the boys would need, so at least we could get started on that even before they were signed up.

Even five years ago with anti-terrorist measures the schools were a bit like forts, so now with Covid as well it is even more the case. I'm glad Eve is at the school the boys went to, because at least I have some idea of what things are like inside! Another plus has been that I still recognise some of the parents, so from the first day I was chatting with some of them at the gate - quite a contrast from five years ago when I knew no one!

The kids all had a good first week at school, and were looking forward to going back again this week. What more could we ask for?!

I had a struggle with buying secondhand furniture to start with. I went to a couple of places which sell secondhand furniture, and found tables and a two-person desk for the boys, which was good, and a friend with a bigger car helped me with transport. But the website which "everyone" uses just didn't seem to work for me. I finally realised that for some reason my messages don't work on there, and that I can only contact people if they leave their phone number. Having caught onto that, I have now managed to buy several chests of drawers, a couple of beds and a desk, and I'm still looking out for other things we need! I feel quite strongly that while it's worth buying a few things new as investments for the future, there is so much unwanted furniture out there that it is much better to save money and give these things a new home, rather than buying new and encouraging the consumerist society we live in!

First day at school:

English jaunt

I had planned to spend a week with Mum in April, and then as a family we were supposed to spend the whole of the month of June in England, visiting Mum and some of our supporting churches. Of course, none of this happened as planned.

At the beginning of July, when we were at our debriefing at the SIM France base in Orange, someone asked me if we were planning a trip to England this summer. I replied that I had no idea - plans just seemed presumptuous! - and that we had first to concentrate on finding somewhere to live.

Once we had signed for the flat, I asked Marc if he thought it was a bit mad to try to get across to see Mum in August, and he said that on the contrary, he thought that we really ought to. And so we booked ourselves a return trip on the Eurotunnel, travelling on Wednesdays as the quietest day, and praying that rumours of quarantine would not come true (too soon). The Eurotunnel is the perfect way to travel at the moment, as we stayed in our own car the whole time, and didn't come into direct contact with anyone except masked customs officials.

It was such a special week! The weather held, and so we went out walking every day - another pretty good way of avoiding crowds! Neither we nor Mum had really dared hope to see each other this summer, so it was a great gift!

It was also lovely to join her church via YouTube for the Sunday morning service, and then for her to watch with us the evening service we'd prepared for Christ Church Bedford.



In the Peaks with Mum



Podding peas

I'm very glad to say that we were back in France before any quarantines were re-imposed!

Nancy

Nancy is the city where Marc and I first met, where Simon was born, and which we left in 2007 for missionary training in the UK before our time in Benin. It's also the place we came back to for a year 2015-16 as a family, and so we are all attached to it to some extent.

Marc was able to take leave of absence from teaching for the whole 13 years we were gone, and was still guaranteed a post this September ... but all we knew was that it would have to be in the Nancy-Metz administrative region, which is pretty big. I knew that what I wanted most was to be living back in the suburb of Villers-lès-Nancy where we lived 2015-16, where our church is, and where we had loved the primary school and still have some very good friends ... but I knew that my will was not necessarily God's will, and that Marc could be given a post in another town.

When Marc's post was announced we were rather taken aback, as we learned that he doesn't have a fixed post, he is a replacement teacher. This doesn't affect his salary at all, but it means that he may teach in several different places over the year ... and indeed probably over the next few years to come. He was told that he would be based in Meurthe-et-Moselle, and Nancy is the main city in Meurthe-et-Moselle, so actually it ended up seeming logical for our family to find a home in Nancy.

I found flat-hunting difficult, emotionally speaking. We'd had a difficult experience in 2015, where some estate agents treated flat-letting like job applications. And this year, as I phoned around about the flats I'd seen advertised, I mainly heard either that the flats had just been let, or else that they weren't available until the end of August/beginning of September. While this had the consequence of narrowing down the list considerably, at the time it felt quite discouraging. I finally managed to book viewings for two flats on our first day in Nancy, and a few more later in the week.

As it happened, the first flat we visited was in Villers-lès-Nancy, and corresponded to almost everything we were looking for (we would have liked a fourth bedroom, but anything that big was too expensive). The flat isn't far from the flat we had in 2015-16, is just across the park from the primary school (and just down the road from a secondary school), is a nice size with big balconies, and is a duplex, meaning that the kids' bedrooms and an extra shower room are up stairs under the roof. The estate agent seemed to like us, and told us two days later that all our papers were in order ... then made us wait another 5 days to sign, which I found a bit nail-biting! So we didn't even make the visits we had planned later in the week.

Funnily enough, the same day that the estate agent told us that we had the flat, Marc heard that he is administratively attached to a college within walking distance of this flat. While he may in fact not be in that college much, it made the choice of flat seem even more logical!

Once we had the keys, we started filling the flat with the essentials so that we could bring the kids back here. We bought a fridge and a washing machine from "Envie", a company which takes old appliances and gets them running again, and also trains up job-seekers. We decided to invest in new mattresses for us all, and a new double bed and sofa-bed. A friend passed on some furniture she was replacing, and we were able to borrow some chairs from church (they aren't being used at the moment!). We also bought some camping tables as a temporary solution to a kitchen table and desks. Now I'm starting to look at second-hand furniture to fill in the gaps!

The kids were really happy to get to their new home, and they love their upstairs kingdom! We are so grateful to God for His provision.



Our flat - the top pink balcony - seen from our parking space outside.



The view from the boys' room - spot the handy bus stop!



The view from Eve's room - the trees on the horizon are the park we will walk through to school.

It's all very different from Pèdè!

Keep on moving now...

We have done quite a lot of moving about in the last month! After arriving in France we were in quarantine in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine for two weeks. We found a lovely Airbnb - a small house and courtyard - and enjoyed our time there despite not going out for the first ten days, and just having walks around the area the last three (we left on the fourteenth). We organised exercise sessions (PE with Joe for those who know him!) and those of us who wanted to took up a writing challenge - to write for an hour each day and read it out to the others in the evening (fiction and non-fiction). Marc's parents kindly did our shopping for us.


Eating in the courtyard.

Then at last we were able to join Marc's family, safe in the knowledge that we had nothing to infect them with! After two years apart, that was a very joyful reunion!

The week after that, we went down to Orange for our debriefing with SIM France. We always enjoy seeing the team there, and it was good to talk things over. This time even our kids were debriefed separately from us, and apparently that went very well too. We also had a weekend to explore Provence a bit, visiting the Pont du Gard and some rivers.







Back at Marc's parents', we were able to attend their church, which has been able to open again for services - with strict mask-wearing and distancing. They asked Marc to preach, which he found to be more difficult with a mask on!

After that, Marc and I left the kids in the safe hands of their grandparents, and drove over to Nancy, in the east of France. It's where we met, and where we spent a year with our kids 2015-1016. Finding a flat was a bit of a palaver last time, so I was very thankful when we liked and were able to rent the first flat we visited this time! We will hopefully be signing tomorrow or Tuesday.

We made it!

Yes, after two and a half months extra in Benin, we at last got on a plane to France. With amazing timing, Simon finished school the week before we left, and his brother and sister finished four days before we left Parakou. What a weight off our minds! Our suitcases were lighter too ... or they would have been if we hadn't been given presents which nearly filled the space!

Marc's dental treatment was only completed the day before we left - that too was a relief to have done.

We stocked up on masks before we left - some throwaway and some which I made myself. We knew we'd have to wear them all day on the Tuesday as we travelled in a minibus down to Cotonou, and again all day Thursday for our flight.

Here we are ready to leave Parakou:

Here are our washed masks drying in Cotonou:

On the plane:

Marc's parents and sister met us at the airport on Thursday evening, not getting too close to us, to pick up eight of our ten suitcases and to give us some food supplies. Here's Marc eating breakfast at our airport hotel the next morning:

Just after having been dropped off to our Airbnb by a taxi:

Views from the Airbnb:

Simon's writing corner all very well organised;

Technology's getting me down...

Perhaps we shouldn't have got so used to technology. Or perhaps we just shouldn't have believed in its promises of making life problem-free. Because I have to admit that even since I visited Benin in 2002, life has been made much easier because of mobile phones and the internet. In 2003 when I was visiting Pèdè, we had to drive into the nearest town (Kandi) to even be able to use a landline, and even then the call wouldn't go through and I had to call someone else to ask them to pass on a message!

However, these "tools" do depress me a bit when they let us down. During the time we've been living in Parakou, Marc's computer broke down and he had to transfer his emails to my newer computer and use a really ancient battery-less computer for some of the kids' schoolwork. Then my older computer broke down - it's the power cable which is the problem - and so I no longer have my emails on a computer at all. Marc is brilliant at doing back-ups to an external hard drive, so I haven't lost anything, and also we still have the internal hard drive, so it is at least frustrating rather than distastrous!

On top of all of this, there is some problem with Paratext - the translation software - and this week my Swiss colleague hasn't been able to pick up the latest version of our work. But the internet connection is so bad that I haven't been able to get help from Paratext!

The internet connection has also made schoolwork harder, and made it more difficult to organise our travel back to France. But by the grace of God we've had a few hiccups of good internet which have meant we've managed to book our flights and an Airbnb to self-isolate when we get there.

There is a silver lining however, which is that I now won't carry my old computer back to Europe, only its hard drive, which will make my hand luggage much lighter!

"Lockdown"

To be honest, we have never truly lived in lockdown. Benin's government
decided that it was too harsh for this context, and seem to have handled
the outbreak effectively in other ways. SIM France asked us to act as if
we were in lockdown in France, which we mostly did - only leaving the
compound here to shop once or twice a week, to go walking in an empty
forest or to visit the kids' library on the other SIM compound. But we
have interacted with the missionaries and Beninese employees working on
this compound - always keeping one or preferably two metres between us.
However, as the weeks passed and the epidemic didn't explode here, we
did visit a few friends - still trying to keep a distance - which
wouldn't have been allowed in France.

It hasn't been that difficult, because our life up in Pèdè was similar.
Never seeing family, having few regular social contacts, shopping once a
week, nowhere to go out to on day trips...! The big differences were
church services and the handful of good friends we visited or hosted
from time to time.

What will be strange is to go back to Europe and to find things so
different. People talk a lot about "reverse culture shock" when you go
back to your own culture, but whether on short visits or the year we had
back in France, I've never suffered from it. But this time it seems more
likely! It certainly isn't the ideal time to be moving to a new place -
people are hardly in the mood for making new friends, and our own love
of hospitality will have to be inventive to survive!

However, at the moment I'm mainly focused on the short-term challenges
of packing up again, getting to France and finding somewhere to
self-isolate for 2 weeks!

First glimpse...

... at what the Monkolé Bible will look like after page setting. This was sent to me by a colleague at Midi Bible, and it is not the finished edition, but gives an idea of what it will look like. It is very exciting for me to see this!

"Wild" life

Someone who reads this blog regularly asked for some photos of the rabbits and birds, so here they are...!



Both rabbits are white, but Edelweiss is bigger with dark ears and Blanco is smaller with light ears. And they now have a larger cage outside.

We think this next photo is a Green Wood-Hoopoe.



And we think this next one is a Black Kite - a pair of them have a nest in a tree on this compound.

Life in Parakou

When we first arrived in Benin, in 2009, it was planned that we would live in Parakou. We weren't sure how long - I think we said "between 1 and 8 months" - and it ended up being 8. Well, this time we didn't plan to live here at all before leaving, but it's already coming up to a month! It wasn't too hard to get into a routine. The kids have school, and since it is hot season if we want to get any exercise it has to be early in the morning. It would seem a shame not to make the most of living on a lovely big compound, so we all walk or run before school.

I have been able to look at illustrations for the Monkolé Bible, but not get very far with it as my new colleague in Switzerland has been unwell. He is better now though, so hopefully I may be able to get on with inserting them into the text soon. I am also trying to go through old emails so that I can transfer everything onto my "new" (2 year old) computer from my old (9 year old) computer so that maybe I won't need to carry the old one back to Europe with me.

I have been helping out our interim director where I can.

We have been keeping ourselves to ourselves much of the time. When COVID-19 hits here, as it is likely to, we don't want to be part of spreading it around. We are fortunate to have plenty of space and pretty flowers here to console a little us over missing family and friends who we thought we'd be seeing.







This was a walk we went on at a monastery near Parakou.





We were remembering the buffet breakfast we had in the hotel in Casablanca two years ago, and decided to make our own (on Palm Sunday).

Change of plans ... like everyone else!

We should have arrived back to France yesterday, but as I mentioned in my last post, it was decided rather last minute that we wouldn't travel as planned. Our flight through Morocco was cancelled anyway, and while we might have been able to find a direct flight instead, we felt it was best to stay here. France was just going into lockdown, so we weren't even sure how we'd get ourselves and our ten suitcases to Marc's parents' house, and we were very concerned that we might pick up the virus during our journey and then pass it to them. So far Benin has two official cases, and has already banned large gatherings and shut down places of worship. The government is encouraging people to practise social distancing and to wash their hands regularly. This may slow the spread down, but having seen what has happened around the world it's hard to believe it won't end up spreading here too, though that is of course our prayer.

So we are staying for now in a house on the SIM base in Parakou. SIM France has asked us to limit our contacts to protect ourselves and others, but we do have a lot of space, and the kids even have a "private" playground.





Oh, and it is mango season!



It was a bit hard for all of us to come to terms with the idea of not seeing family again as soon as planned, but we are in a familiar setting and have friends around (to be seen in ones and twos from a distance of a metre or so!). Many other people around the world are in much more difficult circumstances because of COVID-19, so we really can't complain. And we are just trusting that our times are in God's hands.

Now that the kids have got back into school - that at least never changes wherever we are - they have settled down into the routine again. And we're really just taking a day at a time. Not our preferred way to function, but these are strange days.

Goodbyes

We had a weird last weekend in Pèdè, as we'd just heard that we probably wouldn't be going back to France quite as soon as planned, but we still needed to try to keep our minds on packing our suitcases and emptying the house. (We couldn't really stay any longer in the village, having sold our car and got rid of our oven.)

Our last full day was a Sunday, and we had a goodbye service at the Pèdè church. A lot of people had also come from the Kandi-Fô church, and some students had come back from Parakou to be there too. SIM colleagues of ours from Parakou and Bembéréké were also there.

The service, as expected, didn't keep to time. But we were expecting that, and when extra things were added like spontaneous songs of praise or a goodbye dance from the women of the church, we could only be touched by people's warmth.

We sat right up at the front, as can be seen in this photo taken with special guests afterwards. Quite a challenge to sit there for four hours, especially for Eve!



The church was packed.



Various people said their bits, including Marc and I.



There was even a sketch, with an actor representing each of us, and talking about what our feelings might be about leaving.



The preacher, a local pastor, spoke on Acts 20, where Paul says goodbye to the Ephesian elders. He particularly emphasized the need for the Monkolé believers to step up and serve God after our departure. And others spoke about the importance of knowing God's Word, and how much it will help them to have the whole Bible in Monkolé. These are certainly our prayers too!

We were given a gift of clothes made out of traditional material, woven in the village. We all put them on later:



And at lunchtime, about 45 of the "special guests", ie. missionaries, church leaders and so on ate on our property. Pounded yams, and then a rice dish, and plenty to go round! Everyone else was served at the church.





So all in all it was a wonderful celebration of all that God has done in the ten years since we arrived in the village.

Baptisms

Marc helped to prepare some baptism candidates over the course of 2019. On February 9th, the baptisms were held in a watering-hole near the village. What a wonderful occasion!

Harmattan dust

It's a bit dusty at the moment!