Cotton

Every year, from about the month of November, we see heaps of harvested cotton in the fields here.



This cotton is collected by lorries and transported to the factories which treat it. This season it has taken longer to collect the cotton, as the hangars for stocking cotton at the factories are no longer in use, and so the lorries have to wait to unload it directly into the factory.

When we went down to Parakou a couple of months ago we saw lots of lorries waiting outside one of the factories.





We also saw these men working to stuff pillows and mattresses with the spare cotton. Whether it is just the cotton that falls from the lorries or whether it is cotton which the factory has rejected, we're not sure.



At any rate, I've felt one of these pillows in the market, and they are harder than anything I'd like to rest my head on at night!

Words words words

One of the helpful tools in the Paratext software we use for translation is the Word List. This gives all the words in a project - in our case all the words in one book of the Bible - in alphabetical order. I pride myself on being pretty good at proof-reading, even in Monkolé, but sometimes my brain is my worst enemy. When we read, our brains deliberately don't look at every detail, they make sense of what they see. So after proof-reading I always use the word list for another check. And I may see something like this:



There are 28 instances of the word "inaabo", which means female (usually found in "ama inaabo", "daughter"), and - oops - two instances of "inaaabo", a spelling mistake! One of our team doesn't touch-type, which makes this kind of typo easier to make, and when re-reading, our brains very easily slide over an extra "a" when there are already two in the word!

In case you're wondering, "inaaboi" is "female" with a possessif marker, ie. "female of", usually found in "ama inaaboi", "daughter of". And then "[ama] inaabou" is "the daughter" and "[ama] inaaboɛ" is his/her/your daughter", depending on the context.

Anyway, thanks to the word list I removed the extra "a" from the two instances of "inaaabo", and was able to correct many other such similar errors.

If you can read the bottom line in my photo, you might be interested to know that "woo ce alisi inaabo" means "sorceress"!

New baby and weaving

Yesterday we went out to visit a local pastor's family. They had had a new baby last month, and we wanted to congratulate them and give them some gifts. Here are the mother and baby:



And the mother teaches girls to weave traditional cloth. Here are some of her apprentices:



And in this photo you can see the looms better:

Disguise?

Nothing to do with translation, but this is how I can get Eve to eat brown bread...

January

A few January photos. First of all, our front gate (seen as I walk home from working in the office):



Some of the lemons and other small citrus fruit which grow in our compound:



The kids in their hideout under the lemon tree:



Our rabbit friends: