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.

Tragedies

The end of 2018 brought a lot of tragedies to North Ambrym.  A family in a village about 20 minutes walk from us lost 2 of their kids when their canoes drifted out to sea.  They had been playing at the coast, but the waves and winds were too strong, and they didn't have a any real paddle, just a small piece of coconut tree.  They were lost for days, then 3 were eventually found on the far SE part of an island SE of us.  The youngest was dead when they found them and the other 2 recovered.  One boy was lost to sea as he had tried to jump and swim for help when they saw they were drifting too far away.  What a sad and terrible thing for their family!

Then just a few weeks later, a baby from our sister village came to us gasping for breath.  Houghton was worried he may not last the day as he figured he had pneumonia.  Prior to this dozens of people were bringing babies to us with colds and flus, and baby Atel had had a cold that developed much further.  We spent the next hour or so trying to find emergency arrangements to get Atel to Vila for treatment.  We eventually realized our only option ultimately was to charter a helicopter, who came to the field on the side of our village.  A man from an emergency service in Vila that we are members of came along and was unable to put an IV in him, so got him on oxygen and Atel and his parents flew off to Vila.

Little baby Atel died a few days later.  Someone in Vila generously payed to charter a small plane for his parents to fly back with his tiny casket to Ambrym to bury him.  Several people gave generously to us toward the huge costs of the helicopter, and our home church, Grace Bible, covered the full remaining costs.  We are grateful for all of your prayers and generosity.  Please continue to pray for this family as they grieve the loss of their baby boy.

In this time, my maternal grandmother passed away.  She was a lovely woman of God who was likely our most faithful prayer supporter.  She was generous and loving, and she will be so so missed!  We are rejoicing with her, however, that she is now in the presence of the Lord!

A few weeks later, our volcano activity increased and the two previous calderas collapsed, and ash fall was a problem for a week or so.  Nearly 800 earthquakes hit Ambrym over the course of the next week or two.  Our area was spared any damage from these little quakes, but SE Ambrym villages took the brunt of not only the ash and acid rain, but major damage from the earthquakes as well.  A new vent opened nearer to them as well (rather than where they had been in the direct center of the island) so they are in the highest danger area for any future volcano activity.  The following pictures show some of the damage they received, and of course they all had to move to other areas of Ambrym.  

We are so grateful through all of this that we have a God who is sovereign over all tragedies and natural disasters, and we can trust His plan to work these out for our good and His glory.  Please pray for all of those continuing to grieve, for their comfort, and for God to be known and depended on in their trouble.

Celebrations and random pics

I'm only just now getting around to posting pictures from the end of 2018!  We didn't have any visitors for Christmas this year, so we celebrated on our own, but the village always has fun events as well.  With them we watched a movie (thanks to the Richards tiny projector and a white sheet), watched lots of songs with actions performed by the kids and youth, watched the kids play a few games, and ate all our meals together.  However, we always have to have our western food on our own day as well!

Some good friends gave us fun Christmas crafts so we enjoyed working on those!

 Addy found some fun minute-to-win-it games as well so we played those together.

Our cat Jojo likes to play as well...

He's a great hunter, but he makes a HUGE mess doing it! (See the rat by the toilet.)

When my parents visited, Elder Harre gave my dad a chunk of wood to take back to the US.  He had it sprayed and everything of course, and made a beautiful box out of it to give back to Elder.  

I take Kaiden for a walk every morning so the other kids can get some mom instruction for school.  He and I call these "troll flowers" like trolls and their funky hair colors in the movie.  Aren't they weird and pretty?

 Pretty sunrise on the way to the airport on West Ambrym.

Printing and organizing easy readers

A portion of what I do is literacy work.  People in our language group who went to school either learned to read in English or French, and international research shows over and over again that if you don't learn to read in your mother tongue before later switching into an international language, your literacy will be fairly poor.  Imagine your first time learning to read being in Russian, but outside of school never hearing or seeing Russian in any other context.  And that your teacher had the same experience.  Not only do you not know if you are sounding the word out right, there is nothing to hold on to in order to recognize the word and picture its' meaning.  Not very effective.  

Malibu and Nini organizing easy readers I printed in Vila.

I think I could guess that local literacy rates are about 5%, and that would be being very generous, especially if you consider literacy including understanding and not just correctly sounding out what is read.  Since we would like to see people able to read and understand the Bible in their own language, we have a vested interest in people being fully literate.  

Elsie, Jowed and Makin, Imkon and Steven folding and stapling easy readers I've developed with teachers.

Prior to us and an other linguist coming, there was no developed alphabet and no materials available in the local language, as it was only spoken.  So I am committed to working with locals to teach them the local alphabet and give them materials and lessons on how to read their language.  To date, most of the focus on this has been with K-3 teachers, who can then teach their students.  I am also doing adult classes and separate children's classes in our village.  The goal of course is to get not just the future generation reading, but also current youth and adults, so please pray for God to raise up someone I can train to eventually take over this work and get out to all the villages.