Christmas

We spent Christmas at my parents' house in England, with them, my sister Ali and her family (and yes, Mum and Dad had to leave the house for a couple of nights to make space for us all!). It was just so nice that my kids could experience the kind of Christmas I had as a child.

Walks on muddy footpaths:





My mum's delicious Christmas dinner:



And of course stocking presents:



And as for me, I was in church 3 times in 24 hours!!

On tour by train...

Eve and I got back on Thursday from a two and a half week tour around part of England, visiting friends, supporting churches and individual supporters. We travelled over to England by Eurostar, which worked very well (except for them forgetting to give us a window for our window seat on the way over!).



We visited London, Bedford, Westbury, Yeovil and Bath, finishing our tour with a couple of days at my parents' house in Chesterfield. My lovely parents had travelled with us from Bedford onwards to provide chauffeur, baby-sitting and technical services where necessary, and it was great to have their help and to spend time with them!

It was a bit of a whirlwind of a journey, but we had a great time. We were wonderfully welcomed by all those who hosted us, and all the different meetings I spoke at went well. I'd been invited to church services, special meet-the-missionary meetings, a mum-and-toddlers' group, a group for retired people, home groups and meals.

After 4 years working in Benin almost non-stop (obviously we had some holiday during that time, including 5 weeks in Europe in 2013), it was really encouraging to be able to talk to interested people about our work, show photos and answer questions. We know people are praying for us when we're in Benin because they tell us so, but it is really special to be face-to-face with those people, to connect personally again and to pray together in person.

As an extravert, it isn't always easy for me to work in an office for hours on end. So this people-focused part of our work suits me well, and I have found myself able to come back to my desk in France re-fueled and re-enthused for my work on the biblical text.

I didn't manage to get many photos of me speaking, but here I am being projected onto the big screen at St John's church, Yeovil. (Photo credit: Judith Brookes. Video credit: David Matthew.)



And taken out of chronological order, here are Eve and I at the beginning of our tour in London. (Photo credit: random passer-by):

On tour...

During the kids' two-week autumn holiday, we had the first of several journeys we'll be making to visit churches and other supporters. We went first to St Etienne, where we stayed with friends and spoke about our work in Benin at their church. Marc also preached there.

We next went down to Orange, to the SIM France HQ, where we had a 2-day conference. We joined the SIM France office staff, missionaries who work in France and missionaries who like us are back in France on Home Assignment. And their kids, which made our own kids very happy! It was great to reflect on God's Word together, hear about other people's ministries, and walk out in the beautiful countryside of Provence. After the conference we had a day of debriefing on our last 4 years in Benin.



We then spent a couple of days in Blois, with friends of ours who are church-planting missionaries there with France Mission. A wonderful time of relaxing and encouraging each other. Again, our kids were very happy to get to know theirs (photo taken at the Château de Chaverny).



We then spent a weekend in Chinon, visiting English friends who retired there who I have known since I was a teenager. We led their church service, Marc preached and we also gave a presentation about our work. There was a shared meal afterwards, giving us the opportunity to talk with people some more.



Simon collecting walnuts in our friends' woods.



We spent our Monday with the friends (Wayne and Margaret, see above) who had welcomed us into their home, and then went on to Marc's parents for a few days before coming home. One of the wonderful things about driving around France at this time of year is seeing the amazing autumn colours. Especially after 6 years without an autumn! (The smudges are on our windscreen!)



This travelling is a tiring business!

luxuries...

a washing machine
an electric kettle
a hot shower
a supermarket I can walk to
a supermarket I can drive to in under 3 hours
a fridge where I can store the fresh food I bought at the supermarket
a freezer which actually freezes things and keeps them frozen
good tea
friends who like to drink tea and chat
generous friends who more or less furnished our flat for us
24-hour electricity
a vacuum cleaner
not all that much dust to have to clean in the first place
clean water coming out of the tap
the American Library
a fast internet connection

and did I mention the washing machine?!

Back to blogging...

One of the things you realise when you go through transition is that things you did regularly before - like writing blog posts for example - don't necessarily slot straight back into your new routine! Sorry for the interruption!

I am feeling at home here now. In some ways as if I had never left. I went to a conference in Strasbourg last month, and one of the academics I talked to said, "In another world I'm a mother". I feel a bit like, "In another world I'm a missionary in Benin."

Having said that, I am in regular contact with the team in Benin. Too often it is because they are having problems with the internet connection or printing things, and I would like to feel more in touch with the progress of the work. But they seem to be getting on well, and are looking forward to going to a training course on "Translating the Psalms" in Togo next month.

Back here, our kids only have a week at school before their first holidays, which here in France last a whole two weeks. So we'll be heading off to attend a conference at the SIM France base, combined with our debrief sessions, and will also be visiting some churches to talk about our work. We're very grateful for the car we've been able to buy, which will carry us a good number of miles before the end of the month!

Settling

It's nearly four weeks since we moved into this flat, and we are already feeling at home here. It is a comfortable size for us, we have the essential furniture and appliances we need, and we're starting to buy other things to make it feel more homey. We are very grateful for our church's help and God's provision.

The children started school last week, and that went well, considering that security measures mean that parents aren't allowed into the boys' school and normally aren't even allowed into the playground (this was relaxed the first morning). The boys seem to be enjoying school, and adjusting to longer hours. Eve has just finished her first full week (just mornings) at pre-school, and came out with a big smile on Friday morning.

Marc and I had a meeting with our pastor, François, last Friday morning. We talked about the work we are continuing to do for SIM, and about how we can be involved in our church here. We are both going to be teaching the 11s-13s group, Marc will be preaching and leading Bible studies, and François has also asked us both to help with some one-to-one pastoral work. We also want to be as hospitable as possible.

My translation team continue their work in Pèdè. Despite connection problems, they have been able to email me once or twice a week, and the last email I received said that they had managed to print out a document I had emailed to them, which is good news. They are going to be attending a 3-week training course on Translating the Psalms at the SIL centre in Kara, Togo, in November and I was emailing them the research project they need to complete before they go. They are looking forward to this opportunity to learn about this specific genre.

I myself will be going to Strasbourg in September (21st-23rd) to attend a conference on Bible translation being held jointly by the Protestant Faculty and Catholic University in Strasbourg.

And we're off...

The last two weeks have not been easy, though at the same time they could have been a lot harder. God provided for us amazingly in our two weeks' flat-hunting in Nancy. For a start, we were able to leave our kids in the very capable and loving hands of their French grandparents. Half of me was happy to have some time away with Marc, but as the time got longer it did get harder, and at least I knew they were enjoying themselves.

On arrival in Nancy, we had a flat to stay in (some friends who were away) and a car to get us around (another friend who offered us her car). And lots of friends to catch up with, which was great.

The difficult part was the flat-hunting. We soon heard from other people that it has got more difficult to rent because of changes to the law. Agencies don't want to take any risks at all, and we are not ideal candidates. We are used to not fitting into categories, but in some contexts people are willing to listen and to do their best to accommodate us (no pun intended!). Not really in this case. Our last payslips show our pay in Benin, which is a lot lower than our pay here in France. We do have a document from SIM attesting to our higher salary, but it also says we'll be in France for "at least a year", which agencies tended to read as "a year", also not an incentive for renting to us.

Having always had the impression in Benin that "everything would be simpler if we were at home", I was faced with the unpleasant truth that things can be just as difficult at home as elsewhere!

So the first two flats we hoped to rent fell through, and when we went to the third agency, a week after visiting flats, and having spent most of that week just waiting to hear from agencies, I was feeling pretty discouraged. If it had just been us in the equation, I wouldn't have been too bothered about it taking a while, but I knew we needed an address to be able to register the kids at school.

But at this third agency, as she asked us to remind us of our surname, she wrote it out and then said, "Oh, but I already know you! You lived in rue Emile Gebhart ... I used to work for the agency you rented from!" I immediately felt much better knowing that we had a connection with her, and that she knew we'd been good tenants before (and Marc for another 3 years before our marriage). It still took a long time to get everything done, because the agency wanted a guarantor, and so papers had to be sent back and forth to Marc's dad, but at last on Monday we were able to sign for our flat.

Things moved fast after that, as we rented a van to pick up some furniture which is being lent to us, and more which has been given to us, and with help from friends from church got it moved into the flat. It was an odd feeling to only be seeing "our" furniture for the first time as it arrived in the flat! On Tuesday we picked up some furniture we'd bought, and with help from friends got most of the furniture put together again. I was even able to make up the beds before we left for Paris on Tuesday afternoon to go and pick up the kids. And another friend went to the townhall to get our kids signed up for school ... it is such a blessing to move somewhere where we already have friends in place!!

When we arrived at Marc's parents, we had a wonderful reunion with the kids! Lots of smiles and cuddles!

We then drove back to Nancy on Thursday morning, spent the afternoon and evening with friends, slept in our new flat overnight, had a quick forest-then-shopping trip on Friday morning, and came away again for the weekend to stay with Marc's brother and his family in the Vosges.

At some point I expect we'll come down to earth...

Waiting...

Marc and I are now in Nancy, having arrived here last Tuesday. We are staying in the flat of some friends who are away at the moment, and another friend has been lending us her car. We are very thankful for this, especially as flat-finding has turned out to be a longer process than we thought.

We found a flat we liked easily enough, but then discovered that (probably since new laws have been passed recently) we had to give in a form with a whole lot of documents to be able to "apply" for the flat. We asked how long it would take, and the receptionist was a bit vague, and said that her boss was on holiday but they were still sending her things. She was sympathetic to our situation ... but that isn't going to help much!

We have been enjoying catching up with friends - and it sounds like the kids have been having a lovely time with their grandparents near Paris - but the wait is getting frustrating! While we appreciate the novelty of having some child-free time, I am starting to miss them, and don't like the idea that I don't know how long it is until I'll see them again! (We can't really bring them here until we have a flat and a minimum of furniture.)

Anyway, I am trying to trust that it will all fall into place in God's timing, because I know it will, whether it is this flat or another!

Here are the two of us in Place Stanislas:

They call me the wanderer...

We are safely in the UK, and enjoying our holiday, catching up with family and friends.

I love being here, and most of the time it feels very natural to be an English person in England. But just occasionally, in a supermarket or other public place, I feel a bit like an imposter. I look like I fit in, but those around me would never imagine what my "normal" everyday life is like! And I'm always slightly nervous I'll make a cultural faux pas from being away for so long.

Off to France for similar feelings in a few days time...!

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!

Here comes the bride...

It's wedding season here, and this year there are four weddings in our church, spread out over two months. We have the third on Saturday, but I thought I'd show you a few photos from the last. It was the wedding of the taxi driver who brought me back from Parakou in February.

The "happy" couple ... I explained in a previous post about weddings that the bride and bridegroom are not supposed to smile too much during the ceremony. Something to do with brides not being supposed to be happy about leaving their family, and in general to show that they are taking it seriously, I suspect.



Eve and her friend Jokebed (Philémon's daughter) admiring one of the wedding cars:



Eve enjoying the pounded yam wedding lunch. She was of course very comfortable eating with her hand like everyone else (Simon looks as if he's relishing the sauce!):

Springing back to life...

Last week we had one rainfall, but it lasted about six hours. It is always amazing to see the effects of the first rain. 24 hours later, the once-dry earth was covered with a green fuzz of grass.



And the grass wasn't the only thing coming back to life. See if you can spot the black line running along our drive:



Much closer up, you can see individual ants carrying things back to their anthill.





Before the rain the anthill had been looking abandoned, so I assume these are new ants which hatched out with the rain.

The Word of God is going out (part 2)

Last month I wrote about the way our outings to test our translated texts in surrounding villages is bringing God's word to people who have never heard it before. We have also recently started making our consultant-validated OT books available to people in the church. They always were available in theory, but no one asked and we hadn't really pushed the idea.

Then one person asked for a copy of the book of Job. Others saw it, and asked to have their own copy. I made a list of books we've already checked, with prices based on the price of photocopies, and it was circulated, firstly to the church elders and then more widely. It's been great to see people's enthusiasm, and we hope that it may also help us to pick up any small errors still hiding away in the text.

The book of Ruth in Monkolé (sometimes the photocopies aren't very good quality, but it is at least readable!):

Comic timing...

As we were reading through the book of Numbers last week, checking our translation with our consultant, we came upon the words:

"and the livestock of the Levites" (in Numbers 3:41)

Just at the point the word "livestock" was read, a flock of sheep came running into our compound, as if they'd been waiting for their cue:

Enter SHEEP stage left (running)

It gave us a good laugh, which is always welcome when we're working through a detailed and repetitive text!

Some local sheep (though not running and not in our compound):

Weekend away

We spent last weekend down in Bembéréke, visiting friends. We had thought we'd escape the heat a bit down there - it isn't far but the micro-climate is very different in the hills - but while it was cooler, it was also extremely humid.

We went walking up the hill behind the hospital, something we'd never done before on other visits. We live in an extremely flat part of this generally very flat country, so it was wonderful to do some climbing! Just the sensation of being high up and looking out over the town was quite a novelty! (But oh, in 90% humidity we were dripping like sponges!)

Sermon illustration, anyone?

In Cotonou there is a beach restaurant where we often go to have a drink or an icecream, enjoying the sound of the crashing waves. Being on the edge of the sea, the proprietors had built a huge concrete wall, planted deeply into the beach, presumably hoping this would protect them from the constant wearing-away of the beach by the waves. Here is the wall with a little Simon standing next to it in 2011:



When we were last in Cotonou we went to the restaurant one afternoon, and were startled to find that 20 or 30 metres-length of their seating area had simply disappeared, along with the huge wall. The beach looked exactly the same, yet it must have advanced a good way in just five months.

A little way down the beach, next to a wrecked ship, part of the ruins of the wall can still be seen. I pointed out to our kids what a good illustration this is of the parable in Matthew 7. Building on sand can look impressive ... but it isn't safe!

The Word of God is going out!

When you're working in a translation office every day, working on the details of the Biblical text, it is sometimes hard to remember that God's Word is actively at work "out there". But our team has recently begun what we call "village testing", taking texts which we have translated out to Monkolé villages, where people are asked to listen and to comment on how well they understand and how the translation could be improved.

I don't go out with the team as we don't want people to come just because they see a white person, and it is better that it be the Monkolés on the team asking other Monkolés about the best way to express things in natural Monkolé. This is the best time of year to find people in the villages, as there is no fieldwork to be done at the moment, so my two colleagues have been going out once a week for the last few weeks.

It has been great to see that in every village they have visited, they have found people very willing to sit and listen for long periods of time and to give their comments on the text. In one village three people even enjoyed the book of Jonah so much that they asked to have their own copies of it to read again.

This stage of the work is obviously a help to us in making sure that our text is easily understood and natural-sounding, but it is also sometimes referred to as "pre-evangelism". I like to think of it as a kind of teaser campaign! Whatever you call it, it is inspiring to know that God's Word isn't just staying in our office, but is getting out to people who have never heard its message before.

Uninspired by translation!

Seen on a toy being sold in Cotonou.

Something tells me this was translated ... badly! Either that or they simply strung a few English words together...

Easter sunrise service

Every Easter Sunday our local church holds a sunrise service on a nearby hill, known in the church as "Galilee". This in reference to the verse in which an angel tells the women who've found Jesus' tomb empty, "Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’" (Matt. 28:7)

Marc has been to this service before, but I never had, and this year Simon and I decided to get up early (the service starts soon after 5am) to go to it. The night had been a heavy, hot and sticky one, so it was quite a relief to stop fighting for sleep and to get up and go out into the relatively cool night (still about 30°C!). There was a bit of a wind, which was lovely, and the moonlight was so bright that we walked the first bit of our way without torches. After that we were on a path through the fields though, and I thought it would be better to have torches to scare away snakes. As we made our way up towards the hill, we did hear a rustling sound nearby, and I swung my torch round to see the coils of a snake not far from the path. I momentarily regretted my decision to come, and to bring Simon with me, but we'd got that far, so we weren't going back again!

We could see a light on the hill, and the smaller lights of people making their way to the hill on foot or by motorbike. After a while our path crossed that of some young people walking up from the village, and we were glad to let them lead the way (and scare off any more snakes!).

It was very pleasant on top of the hill, and if it hadn't been for my lurking fear of snakes (or my fear of lurking snakes) I would have been tempted to suggest that during hot season we should always hold church services up there early in the morning, instead of packing into a small church building once the sun is beating down!

It was good to be with brothers and sisters, though I was a little disappointed that the service wasn't more concentrated on the Easter message! There was a disturbance not far from us during the service, people exclaiming, and leaping up, and a young man hitting something with a stick. I thought they'd killed a snake, but learned later that they'd seen a snake, which had got away, and had killed a gecko (said to be dangerous - perhaps they are different from European geckos?).

The sunrise was also a bit of a disappointment, being a typical hot season sunrise where the light just starts to become apparent through the haze. But I was glad to mark a special day by doing something a little different.

I haven't yet mastered night photos, but here is the blurry moon (and the blurry red light on a mobile phone tower in the village):



Once the sun was up, here are some of the people at the service:



Here is everyone leaving the hill again after the service (a few of the village roofs are visible in the background):



And this shows you how small this hill is, despite being the highest hill around:

Temua

The Monkolé word "temua" can mean both "patience" and "perseverance".

"Patience" is a great help in teamwork.

"Perseverance" is essential in Bible translation.

I thank the Lord for a team blessed with plenty of "temua"!

Here comes the Sahara...!

During dry season we are used to the cooler North wind bringing dust and sometimes sand with it. However, the few sandstorms we get usually come in May, at the end of hot season and with the first rains. So we were not ready for a sandstorm on Friday! This was what we woke up to ... the weird red light is not a filter, it really looked like this ...

As the day slowly got lighter, we realised just how much dust and sand was covering everything in and outside the house. This is Simon's comment on our windows (it says "Dirty!" in French):

This is the front of our car, despite being under the cover of our car port:

And here are the leaves on our mango tree - the bright green underside of a leaf shows you what they should all be looking like!

The last few days have seen us gradually trying to remove the sand and dust from every horizontal surface in our house, and even some of the vertical ones. The mosquito netting over our windows is particularly good at catching dust and then releasing it in huge clouds at the slightest touch or breath of air!

And all this without the temperatures falling below about 28°C first thing in the morning, and still hitting 40°C in the afternoons!

Scary, scarier, scariest...

In the series of "things to remind us we're in Africa", we had a stray dog wander into the compound yesterday afternoon. The first thing we knew about it was when Benjy called us to say that Eve had pointed it out to him. We hustled them inside the house - you can never be too careful with dogs here - and Marc managed to chase it out of our smaller compound into the outer, larger one.

Most dogs here will run if you throw a stone or wave a stick near them, but this one was acting weird, and that didn't exactly reassure us! It did seem to be trying to get out of the compound, but couldn't find the open gate. And instead of running away from us and therefore letting us herd it, it seemed entirely unimpressed by us. It sniffed around a locked gate at the other end of the compound, and then headed towards me where I was standing by the open gate to our little compound. As it got close, I waved a stick at it, and instead of running away, it ran straight towards the thrashing stick (and me!).

Not what I was expecting! I wouldn't generally act in a threatening manner towards a dog, but I was getting rather scared by its unpredictability, and tried to poke it away from me with the stick. It squealed, and dashed past me and through the gate back into the little compound. The kids were in the house, and so were safe - Benjy had even locked the door, which meant I couldn't get in! Marc opened the big gate between the two compounds, having opened the big one out of the other compound, and managed to get the dog (eventually) out of both.

I was quite shaken, though I had to smile at the following conversation:

Me: Wow - fire, snakes and then this!
Simon: Fire-snakes?
Me: No, fire comma snakes.
Benjy: What are fire comma snakes?

And you've guessed it, I do NOT have a photo of the stray dog!!

Anonymity and where's Whitey?

One thing I'm looking forward to in Europe is anonymity. Simply being able to walk down the street and blend in with the crowd. I feel at home here now, but on my weekly shopping trip I still get kids calling after me in town because they aren't that used to seeing white people.

During one of our last visits to France I went into Paris on the train. I thought that after living in a small African village I might feel intimidated by the crowds, but on the contrary, the lack of any attention paid to me at all was refreshing!

Overall I think it is great for our kids to grow up here, but I do hate it that we only have to walk out of our front gate for them to be pointed at. In our (large) village they are known, and have some very good friends, but with others they have a kind of celebrity status, so we hear people calling their names wherever they go. It probably bothers me more than it bothers them, as they have never known any different, and it isn't as if there is any hostility. It's pure curiosity with a complete lack of empathy, even from adults.

Spot the white family at a wedding last year (my own version of Where's Wally?)

Fire and snakes

Sometimes we are so used to living here that it feels anything but exotic. And then sometimes things happen which remind us that we are a long way from Europe!

On Friday while working in the office I smelled smoke. My colleagues and I worked out that there was a fire to the north-east of us, but we didn't think much of it as some farmers in that direction had loaded up their cotton on Thursday, so we assumed they were burning their fields.

Later that morning we realised that what might have once been a controlled fire was no longer anything of the sort. It was now to the north of our compound, and in places the flames were metres high. At one point there was a "whoosh", and I saw smoke billowing up behind our house. I ran out of the office to check how close it was, since I had washing hanging out behind our house, and I really didn't want that catching fire! Fortunately the big flare-up was 100 metres or so away from our compound walls, but the smaller flames were approaching.

By the end of the morning the dry grass to the north and east of our compound was burning. We were very glad we had taken the precaution of having the long plants cut down, so the flames never got too high. My colleagues went to help prevent the fire reaching a black-market petrol "station" near us, and Marc passed water over the wall to them.

I then noticed that the fire had managed to spread under one of our gates - which was easily put out - and had also begun to burn the wooden roof beams of our (disused) chicken coop, which is built into one of the compound walls. This was also put out with water.

With the efforts of my husband, my colleagues and some helpful neighbours, the fire was soon completely under control, and eventually burnt out, except for a large tree trunk in front of our property, which carried on smouldering for another 48 hours.

Then on Sunday,  Marc went over to the little guest/schoolhouse on our property to put some water in the water filter over there. When he was about to get some water in the main room, he suddenly saw a snake gliding away from him, which hid under the kitchen cabinets.

Snakes are not something we have much experience with, unlike most people around here, so Marc immediately called a friend from church. He arrived with another guy within about five minutes, and another five minutes later they had killed the snake! Phew! What a blessing to have helpful friends like them!

A not-very-impressive photo of the fire (well, I could hardly send someone to stand next to it to show the scale!).

Questions within questions

In Isaiah 45:9 we find the following questions:

"Does the clay say to the potter,
‘What are you making?’
Does your work say,
‘He has no hands’?"
(Isaiah 45:9, NIV 1984)

If you think about it, the first two lines of this contains a question within a question. In English, when we see the inversion of the subject and the verb, ie. "Does the clay" rather than "The clay does", we know that this is not an affirmative but an interrogative clause. The use of the question word 'What', plus the question mark at the end of the text inside the inverted commas, shows us that the reported speech within is also a question. The text is asking if the clay can (metaphorically speaking) ask a certain question.

As regards the second set of two lines, the question mark is outside the inverted commas, signalling that the reported speech is a statement (in this case an insult to the craftsman's ability). Thus only the entire clause, beginning with the subject-verb inversion and ending in the question mark, is a question (namely, whether the work would insult its maker's skill).

To make things more complicated, these are rhetorical questions which assume the answer is clear, that is to say that of course the clay won't question its maker (and the human shouldn't question his or her maker) and the work won't insult its maker's skill (and how much less should the human).

In Monkolé things just get even more complicated. Our writing system has been simplified, meaning that we don't have quotation marks, making it more difficult to recognise where direct speech ends (the beginning is marked with a reported speech marker like "he said", followed by a comma). Questions are recognised either by question words (like "who", "how", "what" in English), and if this is the case then we don't put a question mark. Affirmative sentences that are to be read as interogative sentences, where there is therefore no question word, end with a question mark.

So in our first draft we had:

Amà á yɔkɔ ku bee woo ma caka ku ni,
mii ì waa ce?
Amàu á yɔkɔ ku sɔ̃ɔ ku ni,
icɛi awɔɛ kù sĩa?

Literally:

Clay it can ask the potter to say, what you are doing [question marker]
The clay it can say to him to say, the work of your hand not good [question marker]

The difficulty is to know which part of the sentence the question marker affects. Someone who is good at Monkolé grammar would know that in the first clause, the question word shows that the reported speech must be a question, and that therefore the question marker must apply to the entire clause. But this is a subtlety unlikely to be picked up by a non-expert reader. In the second clause, it isn't clear whether the question marker should apply to the entire clause or to the relative clause.

Added to this, my colleagues tell me that direct speech is rare in Monkolé ("he said that x" being more common than "he said 'x'").

Are you confused by now? We certainly had to discuss this for a long time before feeling we understood and could find a solution. Our final solution was to erase the rhetorical questions and put negative affirmations with indirect speech. So the questions go from:

Clay it can ask the potter to say, what you are doing [question marker]

to:

Clay can't ask the potter saying what is he doing.

And from:

The clay it can say to him to say, the work of your hand not good [question marker]

to:

It can't say to him to say that the work of his hand not good.

Believe me, it makes more sense in Monkolé than the literal translation seems to in English! It is a shame to lose the rhetorical questions, but the more we turned them round, the more we realised that it was just going to be too complicated to try to keep them.

But if you ever wonder why it can take so long to translate the Bible, this might give you an idea of how long it can take just to discuss the best way to render one verse … and even when the meaning of the original text is fairly clear!

and ... and ... and ...

In the coming eighteen months, our family will be making two international moves, and travelling I-don't-know how many hundreds (thousands?) of miles to visit family, friends and churches during our Home Assignment.

Lists are my friends.

I have lots of lists. And they are wonderful. I read a productivity book recently (« How to be a Productivity Ninja ») and it talked about tools such as lists being like a second brain, freeing up your first brain from the effort of remembering things to give it more potential to do other work. Lists reassure me. With so many lists, and so much to remember, there is no way that my brain would remember it all at the right times. But as I add to my lists, sometimes over many months, I feel like a collector adding precious items to her collection.

Just a few of my current lists :

A shopping list for our trip to Parakou in March
A shopping list for our trip to Cotonou in April
A list of things to take when we travel in-country
A list of things to do on a fast internet connection when we travel
A list of clothes we have here which we want to take with us on our Home Assignment in July
A list of clothes I have already bought on ebay for the family (stored at my parents' for the moment)
A list of work for my translation team to work on during my absence
A list of books to read and films to watch
A list of Lego kits our kids already have

And now look, I even have a list of lists!  :-)

truly tri-lingual?

The title of my blog refers to the fact that I use 3 languages on a daily basis. The « try » refers to the fact that I haven't yet quite mastered Monkolé to the level I'd like to! (In fact I read Hebrew too for my work, but the play on words works better if I just count the three I speak!)

Eve, our 2 year old, has grown up with 3 languages around her. In the family we speak both French and English (but we all know who speaks which language to whom), and every weekday morning since the age of 3 months, Eve has been looked after by Hélène, our pastor's wife, who only speaks Monkolé to her. She quite clearly understands a lot in all three languages.

It is perhaps the effort of absorbing all three languages which has meant she has started to speak later than our boys did, or later than her cousins who are the same age as her have done. She has a very expressive face, and invented her own kind of sign language for the things she wanted to communicate, which meant that her lack of verbal communication wasn't much of a handicap to her. And she has been anything but silent – she does lots of singing in her own made-up language, and her games are punctuated by plenty of sound effects.

Then in the last couple of months the words started coming. Mainly in English, probably because Simon, Benjy and I all speak English to her, and she spends the most time with us. But she also has several French words and a few Monkolé words. She quickly worked out that being able to say goodbye to people in Monkolé made them very happy! (The 'hello' greetings are more complicated.)

She may not speak much, but when she does she often manages to hit just the right comic timing. As she disappeared out of the back door after tea this evening I said, "Er, where are you going?" and she missed a beat, eyes wide, before smiling and saying, "Bye-bye!", then closing the door decisively behind her.

oh, the joys of advancing technology?

Mid-January, Marc was told by our phone/internet provider that our nearest town, Kandi, would soon be connected to the 3G connection. He asked whether the signal would reach our village, and was told not. We weren't particularly surprised, but thought we would at least be able to go to Kandi if we needed to use a fast connection.

However, at the end of last week our 2G connection suddenly went weird. It kept cutting out, and another signal was being picked up, but not well enough to connect with. We figured out after a while that the 3G signal from Kandi was obviously just reaching us, so weakly that we couldn't connect to it, but it was messing up the 2G connection.

For several days we struggled to keep our anti-viruses up-to-date and to get our emails with a connection which was non-existent most of the time, and rarely lasted more than 5 minutes. I was worried about how Simon was going to be able to follow his on-line Spanish course if this continued. Finally Marc had a good look at the set-up of our dongle and discovered that it was possible to stop it from picking up the 3G connection. Finally we are back to "normal".

Honestly, I'm satisfied with the connection we have. It is better than it used to be, meaning that apart from some image-heavy sites, we can surf the internet well, if slowly. We can't watch videos, but I suspect that they would be more a source of time-wasting temptation than a help. It's a nice change to have 3G when we are staying in Parakou or Cotonou (and if we really need it we can always take our computers to Kandi now!) but I don't think we really need it at home.

Simon working on his Spanish:

Come over to my house...

Simon's birthday was in December, and Benjy's was Sunday (25th January). This time we decided to try something we'd never done here before, and hold a (joint) birthday party for them. It was a bit of an experiment, as kids here know what parties are, but they don't have a tradition of birthday parties like we do. Simon's best friend Benja (not to be confused with our Benjy!) was excited about the idea, and agreed to invite the kids on the list that we drew up together.

We had fixed the party for 3 o'clock on Saturday, but I wasn't sure what time to expect them. When they finally turned up at 4.15 we were very relieved to see them ... but I can't really blame them for being late. In the UK it would be the parents who would organise them and drop them off at the venue, but here it was up to them to sort themselves out and get here. And they had all made a real effort to get dressed up for the party (unlike our kids!).

We played some "traditional" birthday party games like musical statues and pass-the-parcel, and some team games including a kind of obstacle course. Then we had some crisps, sweets and fizzy drinks, and finally some chocolate buns - two of them arriving with candles on so that we could sing "happy birthday" to Simon and Benjy.

It certainly seemed to be a success, and as he left, one of the friends said to Simon, "Let's do it again next year!" (sadly for him, we will actually be in France this time next year).