Monkolé Bible school students

Jumping forwards again to Boxing Day, Sil and I also went to visit Etienne and Pauline, who are currently studying at Bible school so that Etienne can train to be the next Monkolé pastor. They are now in their second year of studies - the wives also have some classes - and it seems to be going well. They are a lovely couple, very committed to God's service.

Last Christmas in Benin

Hopping back in time a day, we had a good day for our last Christmas here in Benin. We were at church for over three hours - but rather expected that - then had a reasonably traditional (for England) Christmas lunch, followed by a traditional (Australian) Christmas dessert of pavlova! We very much appreciated our guest Sil's contribution to the meal! And we'd even made our own non-cracking crackers.

Update

Pastor Samuel's wife Hélène and son Benja have been back at home for over a month now, and went back down to Parakou for a check-up on Monday 23rd December. It seems that things are progressing alright, though Hélène seems to be having extra problems caused by her pre-existing condition of arthritis in her knees.

We've been cycling over - on dirt paths, we never risk the road - a couple of times a week to visit. I chat with Hélène while the kids play with card games they have brought with them. It's always a good time. We went over yesterday, on Boxing Day, with our friend Sil who was staying and who wanted to go over and greet them. She took a couple of photos of us with them.

Conceptual thinking

Fairly on in my time on the translation team, I realised that we had a
different way of looking at text. If I say "the word before" and "the
word after", I am thinking of the order in which I type. If I say "the
word before", it's the word that I typed first. But my colleagues look
at the text more as if it were moving forwards. Imagine that each word
is the front of a train. So they say "the word in front" meaning the
word towards the front of the imaginary train. In my previous sentence,
they would talk about the full stop "in front of" the word "train".

Having realised that there was this clash between our way of thinking, I
used the get-out of just saying for example "the full stop next to the
word 'train'", which worked too. Then just recently I actually found
myself naturally using their way of talking - and then my brain did a
little hiccup, as I tried to figure out what I'd just said! But my
colleagues had understood...!