Stars and letters

I was very happy just before Christmas when I managed to finish working on the glossary and the footnotes of our Bible. The finished text of the beginning of Hebrews 9 now looks like this, with stars marking glossary entries and blue letters for footnotes:



Not all pages are quite so liberally sprinkled with either - I chose to take a photo of this chapter because it had so many!

The end is nigh

We set 2020 as our deadline for the project back in 2011, so it is hardly a surprise to us that we're getting ready to leave. I have a habit of trying to sort through our "stuff" regularly, so as not to accumulate too much, but as a family of five we inevitably have a certain amount of books, toys, clothes, bedclothes, gadgets and so on.

In about 2015 we discovered an NGO in Kandi which comes and picks up anything you want to throw away and takes it away, promising to recycle anything which can be recycled, and to take the rest to the town dump. That worked pretty well the last couple of times we had used it, so having gathered together quite a lot of things we wanted to get rid of, we contacted them before Christmas. It took a bit longer - perhaps due to the holidays - to get them here, and it seemed a bit less well-organised this time. What they didn't explain was that they would come and do the sorting for recycling here ... which got rather messy ... and then they disappeared off with what they wanted leaving us the junk ... which fortunately someone came and took away on Monday (mainly broken flipflops, old bags, boxes of the kids' used schoolbooks, various kinds of packaging, a random piece of rusty barbed wire...). Last time it was very expensive, but this time nothing was said about payment, and we didn't even see the boss, so...!

Now it's all finished with, it's good to have more space here for sorting what is left! I'm really trying to take the time early enough that it isn't too stressful. Getting down to ten suitcases plus hand luggage is quite a challenge! In the office too, I'm trying to make sure that we are still focusing on detail while we can!

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...!

Church doing church

I shared about a good number of men from church coming to clear our property of weeds back in September.

They surpassed themselves harvesting Pastor Samuel's cotton fields. He has spent the last four weeks down in Parakou where his wife and son are in hospital. So about 160 people - mostly from church but a lot of others too - turned up and spent a day harvesting his cotton. Then a lot of them were there again to load it into a lorry. That will be a weight off the pastor's mind, and a very practical proof of people's love and care for him and his family.



Benjy walking past a cotton field last year.