It has now been over a year since our first trip into southern Africa as workers looking to find the projects and places where we can help bring more truth and life to marginalized and hurting people. The past year has been both rewarding, successful, and eye-opening. I am just finishing teaching courses in computers, writer development, and anthropology at The Word for the World’s (TWFTW) annual training event in southern Africa. Last year’s event marked my first time working overseas and returning to the event has been excellent. As I start to reflect on the past weeks, I can see God’s hand moving, both in the lives of the students (who are all Bible translators, or translators-to-be) and in me…
Two such student/translators are pastors from Zimbabwe who I met last year. At that time, one of them spent a late night talking to me about his people, the Kalanga, and how they were fighting to preserve their language and culture despite political and tribal oppression. Their efforts included creating political campaigns, holding events to help increase their people’s pride and maintain their identity, and one pastor had even started translating the Bible by hand–into notebooks. Both pastors joined our training program last year to start pursuing diplomas in Bible Translation–to develop the skills necessary to do the work they had already started, and to help legitimize their efforts at home. In the past couple of months, their translation project has been officially started with TWFTW; and, the team received their first laptops the week before training this year. One of the pastors had studied computers with me previously, and the other was getting ready to take the course. For the latter, this would be the first time he’d ever used a laptop and it would be on the very machine he would be using to continue bringing the truths in the Bible to his own people. I had the amazing opportunity to help him start using software and technology which will take off years from the translation process. By the end of the second week, this pastor was turning in assignments for all of his courses as .docx’s, created on his own computer!
Also, the other pastor, since taking the course last year,
had been finding time to work on borrowed computers to copy his handwritten translations into Word documents. This year, he sat in the computer class on his shiny, new laptop and learned to import the work into translation software—I was blessed to help him move years of his originally hand-written translations into translation software. As I was saying goodbye, he told me he already had four books copied into the software–which can now be easily edited, reviewed, revised, checked, and accepted into the growing body of work being created for the Kalanga people.
A final note on these guys: the government in Zimbabwe has accepted the Kalanga as a recognized, official language. Alongside their translation work, these guys will be starting the process of creating primers, textbooks, and other material to be used by schools in their lands. Also, one of their colleagues is now allowed to be teaching courses at the University of Zimbabwe in Kalanga.
God is using His people to bring about reviving transformations in southern Africa—and this is just one quick story from so many more. I am humbled to play even a small, behind-the-scenes, role in what’s going on. More and more, I see how small I am, and how uncomprehendingly infinite God is. I am gaining a whole new understanding of how God uses weak things to overcome the strong…the meek to conquer the proud…and the oppressed to break chains.
“It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery.” -Galatians 5:1