Trips Archives - Page 4 of 5

What’s happenin’

Bakwe' Mission on June 24, 2009

June is here. The old body knows its alive with the the nose sneezing and running. But its great! My bees are bringing in the nectar! Lisa’s garden looks beautiful! The flowers are busting out everywhere and some of the early crops –the spinach and first batch of lettuce — are already done. Now the strawberries are ripening and the zucchini are six inches long!

In the office I continue to work on the translation of Acts along with other Bakwé related work. Check out the “Ministry” pages of the web site and you will see some more content about the translation process, as well as a list of most of our Bakwé publications. I also have been working on getting ready for my trip out to the Bakwé in August/September. Part of this preparation includes meeting with the men who will accompany me and planning out what we want to accomplish.

Benjamin Nieuwsma will come out again to train my Bakwé colleagues in audio recording. His goal will be to record all the Scripture we have translated so far in audio format. Scott Hieronymus will be coming out for the first time and helping troubleshoot and set up computers and an office network. His goal will be to set things up so that the team can return to original settings without too much help. Dr. Kjell Christophersen will come out again to run a follow-up small business seminar with our Bakwé micro-entrepreneurs. Part of what he will be doing will be evaluating how the first three projects went.

We’ll be keeping you posted via this blog while we are over there, so keep checking back for more info and pictures. Have a great June!

Mission accomplished

Bakwe' Mission on July 4, 2008

We are back in Moscow, Idaho and very grateful to God for a successful trip. We were able to accomplish just about everything important that we had planned.

Following the Ji ‘Mi -Gba micro-finance seminar, we were able to finish off training the Bakwé team. It was intense up until the last day. First there was wave after wave of music groups coming in to give the Bakwé team recording practice. Word had gotten out that we had some professional recording gear. In between the waves we helped the team set up a local network with access to the internet. Here, we were able to set up things adequately but not in the way we had originally planned –giving direct access to a friend in the States who could repair and trouble shoot their computers from a distance.

During this time Perez’s laptop gave up the ghost. We set aside a day to recover his old hard drive and put in a new one, but it turned out that the HDD was OK and the computer itself was bad. It had already served us about 8 years, so it is time to find a replacement. He can work using the spare desktop computer for the time being.

The last day, on our way out of the village we made a stop in the village of Petit-Gabo, the last Bakwé village to the south on the road to San-Pédro. Here we met the chief and observed our newest Bakwé reading and writing class in session. You can see pictures of this class in the “photos” section. We then made a stop in San-Pédro and relaxed a bit on the beach! The weather was overcast and rainy so we didn’t do any swimming, but the down-time was much needed before the 5 hour road trip back to Abidjan.

Benjamin flew out on Wednesday. During the next two days before my departure on Friday, I trained Alexis on how to use Accronis backup software, Google Agenda, Google documents, and FileZilla. Alexis and I also worked on a Bakwé text that I had transcribed from a recording. This text will be useful in my continued analysis of Bakwé discourse grammar.

Join us in thanking the Lord for keeping us healthy and safe, and for all that we were able to accomplish in such a short period of time! Thanks for your prayers.

‘Killer bees’

Bakwe' Mission on July 4, 2008

Behind our house in Touadji II we have a bee hive that hadn’t received attention since we moved to the States six years ago. The bees were still there, but the old Langstroth hive was rotting away.

One evening I decided to transfer the bees into a new horizontal top-bar hive I had made for this purpose some years ago. Janvier helped me and Benjamin stood in the background taking some pictures. We work the bees at night in order to avoid having the bees sting people passing by. Of course that means that ALL the bees are home, making for all-out war! African bees (the supposed ‘killer bee’) are extremely aggressive and this night I couldn’t work quickly since the old hive was all glued shut with propolis and hard to open.

Forty-five minutes and twelve stings later I was able to finally put the hive into the new hive with as much of their brood comb as I could transfer over. The honey we found we harvested. The honey, collected from forest flowers, was dark and rich with exotic flavors. We shared it with the old men of the village and with all those that ate breakfast with us over the next few days.

For years I have been working the African bee, learning how to manage it, with hopes of training our Bakwé friends to produce a high quality forest honey to sell to tourists and hotels. The best hive to use in that part of West Africa seems to be the modified Kenyan Top-bar Hive. Though we are living out of the area right now I still have hopes of some day helping the Bakwé start up a local bee-keeping business. While here in the States I continue to learn about bee-keeping while helping a friend work and manage his bees in Moscow, Idaho.

Ji ‘Mi -Gba Microfinance Seminar

Bakwe' Mission on June 21, 2008

On Thursday Benjamin finished up teaching the micro business seminar with the help of Perez and Alexis translating into Bakwé. About fifteen Bakwé men and women came to receive a refresher course on what Dr. Kjell Christophersen taught a year ago –how to determine whether a business activity is viable or not. After a day of review and some teaching on good business practices, Benjamin went on to teach basic accounting & book keeping. He walked them through many examples and showed them how they should keep track of their expenses and income; and also, how to calculate profit. The hardest thing for them was to understand how amortize their larger equipment. After many questions and examples worked out on the board I think they got it.

On the last day we passed out T-shirts that were donated by Credenda and took a group picture (see photos). Before everyone returned to their villages there were some short speeches thanking us for coming. Everyone was very appreciative.

One of the highlights for me during the seminar was seeing a group of older men, during lunch break, reading out loud from the Bakwé Scriptures we have translated. Thank you for your prayers. Benjamin did a great job!

Sowuta of Gblétia

Bakwe' Mission on June 16, 2008

While we were on the porch this evening before dinner Perez brought by Sowuta, an older woman from Gblétia, a village 30km to the north of us. She has learned to read and Perez, one of our Bakwé literacy teachers, was so proud of her. Other people had told me about this woman. She had some gray hair and was obviously older. She said that she had never gone to school, but that she has learned to read in our literacy classes. She has amazed everyone! To prove it to us Perez handed her the Bakwé primer and she read the first several pages that had pictures and words under them. I praised her but I was wondering if she had just memorized these, but then she turned to the very back of the primer and began reading the last and hardest story about Rat and Lizard. She read fluently! She handed the primer back to Perez.

Then, she fumbled with her bag and pulled out a well worn copy of the Gospel of John in Bakwé. I could tell it had been well used because it had oily brown stains where you flip the pages and some pages were bent at the tips. She opened it up and began reading from John 1:1. Again, she read fluently. Tears came to my eyes. After several verses he stopped and explained to Perez how she had read the whole book, all the way to where it talks about Lazarus dying and Jesus raising him to life, and to where it talks about Jesus dying. She was so proud. She said the Baoulé and the Mossi had their Bibles, but the Bakwé didn’t for a long time, and she now can read it in her own language. She also said that many Bakwé don’t get it; they don’t see the importance in reading. So she is on a campaign. She tells everyone she meets to come to class and learn to read or themselves. I was so encouraged and you could tell that Perez was proud of her too.

It makes it all worth it to see someone excited about reading God’s Word! And someone who had no access to it before this! Praise God who blesses the work of our hands and the sweat, the tears, the malaria, the typhoid and the fatigue)! On our way to San-Pédro on the 24th we will leave here at 6:30am and stop in the village of Petit Gabo on the way to San-Pédro just to observe another reading class in action. This village has literacy class at 7am in the morning before going to the fields.