Team Vanuatu Update November 2019.

Houghton made this video for our main sending church Grace Bible in Miles City, MT USA.  But it is a good overall update of what we're working on now and what our needs and goals are.  Thanks for praying!

59% NT drafted!

Just this month we hit a huge mile marker!  Nearly 60% of our New Testament in the Rral language of North Ambrym has been drafted.  By drafted we just mean that a first draft has been written.  This is of course a small step in a long process including exegetical checks (checking that the language says what the Greek means), edits, formatting, translating it back into either Bislama (Vanuatu's trade language) or to English so an outside consultant can check it for us, and checking for naturalness and meaning with native Rral speakers, but we are excited that we have gotten to this point.

Our team that did the last check (consultant check) on Genesis in July.

We now have the following books completely finished:  Genesis, Ruth, Esther, Jonah, about 200 other OT verses, and Mark.  Acts is nearly in this category but we are awaiting an available consultant to check it before we print it.

My screen for Acts.  On the left is the back translation in Bislama, on the right is the Rral language, left bottom is Bislama Bible, various English versions, and translation notes.

We are currently editing Exodus and Matthew.

The books we have fully drafted but not finished yet include:  Exodus, Matthew, Luke, John, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and James.

Praise God with us for His faithfulness to us in giving us great helpers and wisdom as we work through these books!

The bay below our house.

Mark phone app

Another tool we have to go along with both our Gospel of Mark and our Family Story Bible is an app for smart phones.  It plays audio for the chosen chapter and highlights the scripture that is being read, which is a great literacy tool!  We also have pictures to go with each chapter, to give visual interest to those listening.  It can of course just be read on the phone too, without audio.  The tool allows links for glossary words, footnotes, and cross references, as tools for church leaders.  Please pray with us that as more and more people get smart phones here, this is able to be an effective tool to get God's Word heard and read in our communities of North Ambrym.

Mark Video

Our teammate, Casey, worked with a friend (who translated the Bible for a language on a southern island of Vanuatu) who works now with Faith Comes By Hearing to dub the Lumo video for Mark with our full Gospel of Mark!  Each chapter of Mark has its own video so they can be used with Sunday School lessons, or along with sermons or devotionals.  Praise God with us that these types of media are available to our people in North Ambrym!

New media option to go with our translated Scripture

We are excited that our teammate, Casey Ellis, is looking into some
other options of ways to get our translated bits of Scripture out and
usable for our people.  One of these options he's been looking into is comic-style videos and books.  A company called Kingstone has these on offer that we hope to translate and get in the hands of the people of North Ambrym.  Here is a sample of one video we hope to do to go along with our completed Genesis:

Literacy classes

This year our local translator Elder Harre asked us to continue to offer literacy classes to both children and adults in our village of Ranvetlam.  Because we are the village where Bible translation is based, he wanted us to also be the village of great readers of the translation!  I teach a kids literacy class every Monday afternoon for an hour or so and an adult class Sunday afternoons when I can wrangle them in.

Kids showing up for our literacy activity.

Contest to match a sentence to its corresponding picture

Gwen and Addy watched the heaps to try to help the activity flow best.  The Richards kids help me a lot in literacy class!

  

Contest in action.

 

Hand washing station before we start our lesson.  Hand washing isn't common in the villages so this keeps my classroom set of books clean and nice and contributes to hygiene practices too.

Teaching the lesson.  My helper, Nini, is in the orange shirt on the left in the front.  Sometimes she teaches the first half of the lesson for me.

Sounding out the letters they know so far.

Kids reading one of the easy readers in small groups.

Anderson (15) came with a US work team and slogged along with the rest of the kids to read together in language.  :)

 See the video below and its description for what is going on in this activity.

Literacy activity where I ask "who has __?___?" and the child who has that letter or word stands and we all read the letters/words in order.

A ladies group in my adult literacy class identifying the letters we know so far on each page.

George and Elder Harre are our two main local translators, but they still come to adult literacy class, which is great!

Wotan and Lala working together.  Lala (R) is one of my local helpers.

Marrro and Matal identifying letters.

Lili and Elsie looking through the letters.  Elsie is another helper with my children's literacy class.

Reading through a story in the Family Story Bible.

See if you can recognize the story - it's a Bible one!  No?  It's the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.  The video shows us reading until the end when I am saying where the story is found in the full Bible.  We read slow so no one gets (too) lost!  We get great Biblical questions from the adults who come!

Group reading practice in the adult class.  We read the easy readers in these groups before going on to the harder stuff in the Family Story Bible together!

One of the men's groups.  The young men are pretty good natural readers right off the bat.

Poor adults don't get any snacks, but I'm pretty sure some of the kids only come to literacy class for the free popcorn at the end!  Here are Addy and Gwen passing out popcorn that Gretchen so faithfully makes each Monday afternoon for us!

Printing and distribution of the Gospel of Mark

In April we were in the capital city and were able to print some copies of our completed Gospel of Mark in the Rral language of North Ambrym.

Magreet and her husband were here from Canada and she helped a full day.

If you are retired and want to spend some time helping out Bible translators in Vanuatu, there are always odd jobs for skilled and unskilled people looking to volunteer.  Or if you are a student and have summers off and want to come, please do!  These kinds of volunteers save us thousands of dollars in travel to come to Vila to do these things ourselves and of course save us time so we can continue translating the Bible!

Casey Ellis also helped a full day (as you saw in the video above).  Had I done it myself it would have taken 4 days instead of 2 for just 80 copies!

 

Completed books

In June, Casey organized a distribution and workshop time for leaders in the northern villages of our language group for our completed Gospel of Mark.  About 20 came and we (Houghton, Casey, myself, and our local translators) each taught various sessions throughout the day.

Elder Harre giving an overview of Bible translation history.

Houghton videoed the various segments so we can post them on Ambrym facebook sites.

George taught a Bible overview

Casey taught how to use an app for smart phones/tablets to listen to the audio version of Mark.

Houghton shared the qualification for teaching/preaching the Word.

He also taught how to find the main point in a passage and to preach using the tools in our Gospel of Mark.

I taught a session on difficult letters/sounds in the language for new readers, and I also taught about the various study tools in their Gospels of Mark (footnotes, headings, glossary, cross references, illustrations and captions, reference headers, etc).

Please pray for Casey as he follows up with attendees of the workshop that they would do the hard work to practice reading in their language and use their translated Scripture.  Please also pray for salvation of those who are reading and hearing for the first time in their own language!

Below see a bit of comic relief of our trip to and from Olal village where the workshop was held (just over an hour's drive for us).

Roads are really rough so we get tossed and slide around quite a bit in the back of the truck!

Jesiah brought some music and a speaker so we listened to the Muppets soundtrack and Christian rap on the way to Olal.  Interesting combo...

Some of the everyday hard stuff

Living in a village can be quite a challenge for someone raised in a sterile, clean, organized, convenience and comfort-oriented country like the US or Australia.  Here are some of the everyday hard things that can cause annoyance and stress. 

Sometimes this much dirt/ash falls just overnight or in a few hours.

Mold grows on the countertops, walls, dishes, silverware...

Sometimes our cargo gets a dunking in the ocean before we get it.  Argh!

And sometimes our cargo leaks all over multiple boxes!

Or our boxes are busted open.

 Kaiden and I went through multiple rounds of pink eye this year, as well as getting weird eye infections turning us in to temporary aliens.  Fortunately they always clear within a few days of taking meds!

Gwen had several rounds of small boils on her face, one of which got dangerously close to her eye and just wouldn't heal up.  Huge armpit boils seem to be common too!

 

Rats are fortunately now mostly only a problem when we are in the capital city to resupply (and for the week or so after we return), thanks to our killer cat.  He makes a big mess when he's chasing/playing with them, but typically always finishes them off in the shower, so it's easy to clean up!  He also goes after any geckos, lizards, skinks, spiders, moths, beetles, and crabs that come in as well.  Or sometimes he brings them in...the other day there was a big green lizard in my pillow case where he lost it after an extended play session.  Fortunately I knew it was lost somewhere in my room so it wasn't too much of a shock when I felt it under my head!

Rats made a huge nest under my bathroom vanity out of pieces of mat, toilet paper, and other scavenged items.  Gwen kindly helped me clean out as much as we could get to!

They destroy our tupperware.

Sliding and bashing around on the terrible rods.

Lack of Western medical care for our friends.

It is difficult to be unable to help friends who could get great medical care in the US, like Douglas, in the center, above, who was sent home with cancer because the hospital in the capital city couldn't do anything for him.  Or Lising from our village who died last month at barely 50 of something not even diagnosed that the local clinic gave her Tylenol for.  Or baby Atel we helicoptered to Vila for treatment for pnemonia who died in the hospital a few days later.  These are hard things to see our friends and neighbors facing.

Sometimes it is just hard to live here, and regular stressors get under our skin.  Please pray for us for faithfulness when the little things add up some days!

Our first Scripture printing!

When we were in Vila last, we were able to print and bind our very first verse-by-verse portion of the Scriptures with our completed Gospel of Mark!

Margreet and her husband Henk came from Canada to Vila to help with grounds and office projects for our group.  She assisted me with several very useful things that would have been very time consuming to do myself, not the least of which was the binding of our Gospel of Mark!

As you'll see in the video, Casey and I did the printing and collating of Mark.  This was our first time using all of these machines and is quite a process!  It took a total of nearly 40 hours of labor just to print and bind 80+ copies of our Gospel of Mark!

Thanks to Casey for putting this video together!

Our plan is to hold a workshop in June with village leaders from around the language group in order to demonstrate the features of Scripture productions (headings, illustration captions, footnotes, glossary, cross references, etc), and how to preach exegetically through Mark.  Our hope and prayer is that people come to know Jesus through His Word in their own language!  Please pray for Houghton and Casey as they prepare and for the hearts of those who will attend.