March 2010

Dear friends and family,

We want to tell you about our recent trip to the village, which lasted just over three weeks. We spent the first couple of days getting settled in and getting our dirty village house cleaned, while Susan, in particular, was home-schooling the children. Then I (David) met with the translation team to make the final decisions on the location and dates of the village check of Luke, and to discuss our schedule for the rest of the year. After that, our family made a two-day trip to Lae to renew our vehicle registration and insurance, refill gas bottles (for our stove and refrigerator and the resource center stove), and buy some more supplies.

After getting those necessary errands out of the way, we finally began the village check of Luke on February 10. People from about six different villages were invited to participate in the check, and we typically had 10-15 people in attendance each day (including our four-man translation team). We met at the resource center and had electric power troubles for the first three days, most of the time having either a complete blackout or a "brownout" with only enough power to run the laptops (with AC adaptors that run on a wide range of voltages), but not the printer, fans, or anything else. We normally have a back-up power system that includes an AC-DC inverter that can run our printer and computers, but the inverter is in the workshop after someone accidentally reversed the polarity on the battery cables. The extended power outage also meant that the government station water supply (which has no back-up generator) was not working most of the time for those three days. So we struggled for the first few days in the heat without fans and without much water (usually only the water we brought with us, including about 2 gallons of filtered drinking water). In addition to our drinking water, we brought a large container of water from our house for cooking, etc., and filled up containers at the office whenever we had water available. But there were a couple of days when we only had enough water to cook, and we had to take dirty dishes back to the house (a 7-mile drive) to be washed. For the last six days of the check, we had both power and water almost the whole time. However, one whole morning we were without both, and we had to use the computer batteries until they were drained. Thankfully, both power and water were restored in the afternoon at just the right time, and we were able to continue the check without interruption. Praise God!

It took us nine days to complete the village check of Luke (all 1151 verses), averaging 128 verses per day. After our very thorough team check, it did not need a lot of revision, but we did find minor things that needed to be changed throughout the text, as well as a few verses that needed significant revision. It was very valuable to get the input, feedback, and insights of other Adzera speakers from a handful of villages, who had no previous involvement in the translation. We did not have time to village-check Titus, as we had hoped we might, but we praise God for enabling us to get through all of Luke despite the difficulties we experienced. We plan to village-check Titus in May.

Village checking the Gospel of Luke at our resource center.

This was the first village stay that we had e-mail access for the whole time. That was using a relatively expensive and slow cell phone connection that cost about 75 cents per megabyte. Needless to say, we didn't spend time surfing the web at those rates and speeds, and we set a size limit on e-mails to be downloaded, and sent our messages in plain text format. Occasionally we looked at our e-mail account on a web browser to see if any of the larger messages were important enough to read right away, and all of the other messages waited until we returned to Ukarumpa. Because of the cost and limited village power, our time spent doing e-mail was considerably limited. Here in Ukarumpa we pay a flat monthly charge for e-mail, so we can send and receive an unlimited amount without any extra cost to us. Nevertheless, for basic e-mail in the village, we are very thankful to have the cell phone connection, and it came in quite handy on a number of occasions.

Is this just an ordinary USB "thumb" drive?
No, it's the USB cell phone modem that allows us to access our e-mail in the village.

We praise God that we have had no health problems, injuries, or accidents either during our time in the village or since returning. The kids did fine there and have readjusted to their classrooms here. We came back during the school Book Festival, which included a reading contest and a Book Character Parade.

Book Character Parade: Katie & Jonathan as Saphira & Eragon from Eragon, Melissa as Cinderella, and Samuel as a wolf from The Three Wolves and the Big Bad Pig.

Next week we plan to have the Adzera translators here for a couple of weeks to work on various things, including the back translation of Luke, a key terms list, an Adzera Bible study for Genesis, and more computer training. We hope to have two other men come with them to learn how to do back translation, which is the process of translating quite literally from Adzera into English, so a translation consultant can see how the Adzera translation expresses the meaning. After the back translation of Luke is complete, the book will be ready to be checked by a translation consultant. Please pray that the time these men spend here will be productive. As you can see, we have lots of things to be working on, and we hope that the new men can work on back translation while the translators and I spend most of the time on the other tasks.

Thank you for standing with us in prayer.

In His service,
David & Susan

Click here for the Howard Highlight Prayer Letter.