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"!
mercredi 25 mars 2015
lundi 23 mars 2015
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!
lundi 9 mars 2015
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!!
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!!
vendredi 6 mars 2015
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?)
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?)
mercredi 4 mars 2015
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!).
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!).
mercredi 18 février 2015
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!
"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!
mercredi 11 février 2015
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! :-)
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! :-)
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