June 28, 2013

Dear family, friends and supporters;

Greetings again from Chageen. We have been staying healthy and are finding satisfaction in our labors here in Chad. Hot season has finally ended, the rains have begun, and Diane’s garden should yield its first cucumber in a couple days. Meanwhile, we have finished translating the Gospel of John and 1 Thessalonians and are gearing up to do some more Psalms before embarking on Ephesians and 2 Thessalonians. We are close to having completed 50% of the New Testament.  Also, we have enjoyed the company of several guests in our home over the past months, including our former colleague and new senior director Lorraine Green,  and presently, Karissa Nulty from the U of I for a missions internship. We hope the following vignettes of our life make for enjoyable reading and provide food for prayer.  

Your fellow servants in Chad,

Mark and Diane

In the beginning was the WHAT ???!

The opening lines of the Gospel of John are some of the most profound, recognizable words of the New Testament: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…”  But back in January when Mark, Joseph and François began the translation of John, they took one look at those words, and without further adieu, skipped straight to verse 19 which begins with the rather more prosaic statement “This is the testimony of John…” The reason for their intimidation was that they immediately perceived a monumental problem: the term for “word” in Kwong means “word” only in the context of people talking to each other, something which is manifestly not the case in John chapter 1. In most other places, alas, the term in question (swa) means… “problem.” So a literal, word-for-word translation of John 1:1 would be, quite simply, a blasphemy: “In the beginning was the problem, and the problem was with God, and the problem was God.” Richard Dawkins would doubtless have been delighted by such a masterpiece of humanistic insight, but it would hardly do for the confessing church of Christ.

We came back to these words once we finished the rest of the book. After studying the various usages of the Greek term “logos” which our English term “Word” translates, and considering the various options open to us in the Kwong language, we took a deep breath and made a stab at the verse as follows: “In the beginning, Him who is named the Meaning was already there.  At that time, he was together with God, and he was indeed God himself.”  The difficult part was, of course, the term “meaning” which Joseph and François rendered with a rare Kwong term (gindiddøø) which we weren’t familiar with but which apparently carries the sense of “root” or “origin.” When some of the bright young bucks return to the village during the summer school break, we will test this translation with them and see whether they in fact understand the phrase the way Joseph and François intend for it to be understood. Assuming they do (and we are somewhat sanguine about the prospects of that being the case), then the Wycliffe translation consultant will also cross-examine the guys on it as a further level of quality control.

Gawking at the natives

The stereotype of a tourists gawking and taking pictures of “the natives” is as familiar as it is deserved. Only the Lord knows how many times we, too, would have loved to take a picture of some of the more colorful, exotic scenes of Chad, but were restrained from doing so by the unwritten rules of propriety which govern such things. We are not, after all, tourists. So you can imagine our surprise and amusement when Diane and the intern who is with us this summer, Karissa Nulty, went (without cameras, of course) to see the camp some nomads had set up near our home and were greeted by a nomad girl who, seizing the occasion to get a picture of some of the indigenous white women in their native costumes, whipped out a cell-phone and started taking pictures of Diane and Karissa. It seems the stereotype is taking on a whole new dimension.

Another iron in the fire for Diane

A grown Kwong man weeps uncontrollably. After 20 years of estrangement with his brother, he has finally been reconciled to him, only to be unwittingly complicit in his untimely death at the hands of incompetent surgeons at the government hospital during a routine hernia surgery. If only they had gone the extra 12 miles to the mission hospital. Friends and neighbors heap accusations on him. He is devastated and feels hopeless.

A Kwong woman visiting her daughter in another village lashes out in anger and bites the hand of the young lady who got in a fight with her daughter. Two days later, as she prepares to return to Chageen to attend church, her husband takes the opportunity to acidly point out how very unfit someone who bites another woman must be for spiritual things.  Nevertheless, she makes the two hour trek, but on arriving, is overcome by exhaustion and guilt.  She collapses in a fit of tears and starts throwing bricks at her own children.

These are but two recent examples of occasions where Diane has been able to minister to the Kwong as a novice counselor. Additionally, her missionary colleagues here in Chad have seen her gifting (Mark is writing this, by the way) and have elected her the Member Care Coordinator for several years running now.  So we jumped at the invitation for her to attend a well-regarded two-week training workshop in counseling for missionaries which will be held in Antalya, Turkey in October. As the workshop organizers prefer couples, and as Mark wouldn’t mind getting out of Chad for a couple weeks, he will be attending as well. The organizers have, however, been discretely advised that he has no gifting in this particular line of work. So he will, at their suggestion,  do “counseling lite” and attend a 3-day meeting of Team field treasurers (which is another hat Mark wears in Chad) and which, it turns out, will also be held in Antalya during the same time. When we told our translators that we would be visiting the ruins of Ephesus, they wanted to join us and wondered whether they could maybe ride their bicycles there. We are looking forward to the trip. ●

Our translator Joseph has never been to Bible School. He was, however, recently ordained as a pastor by the national leadership of the Evangelical Church of Chad on the merits of his many years of doing Bible translation.

Diane, Joseph, and François (right) recently finished proofing their translation of the book of 1 Thessalonians.

A nomad camp a short distance from our home. (A picture taken, we might add, by a visitor, not us.)

Karissa has been a tremendous help in our ministry to Kwong children. She is applying to medical school.