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.