Pray for Rain

Well, the dry season seems to be upon us, as the days between rains are getting more and more and the weather is getting hotter and hotter.
Please pray for us as we try to conserve our water, yet stay healthy!

Also, a point of praise—I finally have a language helper! It’s been, what, four months? But finally, I’m sitting down with a Lopit three times a week. Praise God, I’ve been able to learn from Kimmie—our team language guru J--so I’m not too far behind.

Working with William, the schoolmaster and said language helper, has been good, but it’s brought even more things to the forefront that I never would have thought about. I’ve only had one lesson (I have another in a few minutes), but we started to translate some of the story of creation. How do you translate the idea for God creating the whole Earth, when most adults don’t have any concept of it? And when he created the oceans, what do you say? There isn’t a word for oceans; there are no oceans around here. “Big water” was the best we could do. What about Noah and his boat? What’s a boat, anyway?

And these are just word translations—what about translating ideas? I listened to a John Piper sermon the other day in which the whole message hinged on one word in the verse. Are we going to be able to be so true to the original message, even with a language as… basic… as Lopit?

You see, what we have in learning this language is a bit of a moving target. That’s what happens when a language isn’t written down. As Steve so aptly put it, you get one guy with three wives and a bunch of kids, who speaks with a lisp, and the whole language changes. That’s hardly an exaggeration. We learn words from older guys and the younger people don’t have a clue what we’re talking about. Don’t have a word? Don’t know how to spell it? Just make it up. There’s no standard, no fixed point around which things revolve.

It’s evidenced, too, in that when we pulled out the work of Martha and Barbara from the 50s and looked at their translation of John and read it with the people, they hardly understood it. The language has evolved that much, in just a couple generations. Now I know what the old guys are talking about when they grumble about the younger generation making a new language, messing up the old one.

And so I’m left impressed with the idea that maybe schooling the children here—getting them to read and write and establishing a set language—deserves more thought than I first gave it. I mean, I didn’t consider just how valuable it is. Then at least when we translate things, we’ll know they’ll be good 20 years from now. This is no novelty—Martin Luther, in translating the Bible into German, ended up basically setting the standard for the German language, giving it rules and spellings and such.

Just another great product of the reformation. J