23 October 2005

I am writing this in the village and am able to send it on to you because we got a new radio which can send e-mail to the server at the Ukarumpa center. (You may recall that in our last email update we mentioned that our old village short wave radio was no longer working.) We connect for email via our new radio and a special modem, since there are still no phones and no cable and no satellite here. There is no Web, just email and the connection is slow, so slow that it makes dial-up look blazingly fast! But, for the first time in 20 years we can communicate with people in the outside world. Hurray! What a wonderful breakthrough!

We're making good progress on the translation, we've completed 69% of the 2nd draft of the New Testament. Each day of the week a different group of 4-5 of the Translation Committee members comes to work with us. We've trained them to do translation and each group is working on a different book. On Monday we're doing the 2nd draft of Ephesians, on Tuesday the 2nd draft of 1 John, Wednesday is the 2nd draft of Revelation, Thursday's group - the women - have just finished the 2nd draft of Abraham's story in Genesis, with Friday's group we have completed the 2nd drafts of Jude and Philemon, next up is 1 Peter. It gets to be quite confusing switching from group to group (each with a different set of personalities and interactions) and from book to book (each with highly varying quality of first draft). Just conversing in Gapapaiwa is hard work and add to that the difficulties of translation and by Friday we're exhausted.

But we're getting there! The only complaint we have is that most of the committee members have slipped back into their old habit of coming at 9:30 to 10:00 instead of 8:30 like they are supposed to. So it is pretty frustrating to sit there for over an hour waiting for them. So you might pray about that, because it adds up to a lot of lost time over the long term. On the other hand, they are very happy that we brought instant coffee and milk powder this time instead of plain tea and sugar, and also Catherine has been baking them bread every day to eat for lunch. High living, yeah!

We have had several heavy rains and our tank has been filled to overflowing. It looks like the drought conditions that dominated the climate for several years are gone. Everyone here looks practically plump (No, not by USA standards. But they're not just skin and bones anymore). We are being given hands of nice mature bananas and large yams on a regular basis, more than we can use, so that is also a sign that the gardens are doing well. Most of the food they give us is just sitting here, though, because the wives of the Translation Committee members cook for us every afternoon and we eat together when the day's work is done. (The extra food sitting here gets disributed to friends after dark.)