Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Prayer - away for 10 days

Tomorrow at 9am we leave Ukarumpa to complete the second half of the survey trip we were unable to finish in October as our team leader, Bonnie, was medivaced to Australia. We’re heading back out for 10 days to assess how much the Benabena Bible is being used and to try to discover reasons for its use/disuse.

It’s my last survey in Papua New Guinea. On March 2nd I leave, heading back to England. Today it started to hit me...as we were planning the logistics...which villages to visit, the route to take, the supplies to include, I started to feel sad. It’s been a good two years.

But enough of nostalgia.

We’d really appreciate your prayers for:

Health: of us all. Sara Van Cott, a new surveyor is not 100%. Last week she had malaria and now she has undiagnosed abdominal pains. She will still come with us, however. Please pray for God’s protection over our health...the survey team has experienced so much sickness over the past couple of years...

Safety: for the driving, for all of us, generally. We are outsiders in this area...pray we’ll be well received.

Insight: into the spiritual situation and reasons for patterns of Scripture use.

Thank you very much.

Praying for the survey with the linguistics department, yesterday

Some of the Bibles and other stuff we're taking

Monday, January 19, 2009

As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God

I found this fascinating reading. I hope you do too.

Written by Andrew Parry, the Times

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.

We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.

Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open.

This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. “Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.

It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.

There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.

I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

TimesOnline

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Comedy

One of the things I love about communication between two people who don't share the same first language is that it can often be pretty comical. I'm talking here about people who really don't know the other's language. The hand gestures as both try to explain what they mean, the facial expressions, the confusion. Ok, so it can be frustrating, but it can also be pure comedy, especially if the two people involved are up for a laugh.

In our local town, Kainantu, there's a fast food place. It's reasonably new - been there for a few months, or a year or so (I forget). The main sign out the front says 'Higlands Chicken'. No-one really knows if that's correct or if it's supposed to read Highlands Chicken, (as we're in the Papua New Guinean Highlands). And inside there's this poster reassuring patrons of the quality of the food; a good example of the comedy of language:
You may have to enlarge the image (by clicking on it) in order to read the text

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Photos

Well, things here are going well. It's 2:45pm on Thursday and I've just had another report approved for publication on the internet. Yes, I know you're fed up of hearing about this stuff...but it's all I've been working on for the past few weeks. Next week all that changes when we head out on a survey trip.

Every department in Ukarumpa takes an hour or so, once a week, to have a devotional time. We (the linguistics section) do ours on Thursdays, from 8:30-9:30am. Last night I got 'volunteered' to lead it, which I did this morning. It actually went well - I enjoyed it. Talked a bit about grace, with a story from my life (how God worked in my relationship with my sister - when I couldn't make it better, God changed it); then about how Jesus said, 'I assure you: whoever does not welcome the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it' (Mk:10:15) which is probably referring to how children don't earn gifts, they depend on others; and finally about the prodigal son in Lk 15, where all the son does is turn around and walk home, and the Father lavishes him with gifts, placing sandals on his feet, a ring on his finger, a robe on his shoulders, hugging and kissing him.

And here are some photos. (I didn't take them.)


PNG Highlands
Hello Cassowary
Finnistere mountain range
Fergusson and Goodenough Islands, Milne Bay Province
Dusk

Thursday, January 8, 2009

No sleep but a good day

The past two days I’ve got up at 4am and 2:30am, respectively. Both times I just got up and stayed up...had an early breakfast, researched airfares on the internet, booked flights (I leave here on March 2nd) and did a bit of early morning work. Then slept from 7:30am-9am before heading to the office. That’s one of the pros of working here: we’re not held to a 9-5 schedule. It was actually quite nice to be up at 5am, when the birds start to sing, and to experience sunrise. Can’t say it’s something I see very often :-) I’m more of a night owl, even though I love the quiet of the mornings.

We got another survey report approved by peer reviewers for publication on the internet today. I had edited it so it’s satisfying to see things moving forward.

We also had a team meeting and drew up some ideas to help a Wycliffe colleague design an interview schedule to assess in what form Scripture should be distributed in a certain area of PNG (orally, in book form, over the radio, on DVDs...). It was good to brainstorm various ideas. I’ll be meeting with this guy on Monday to chat through what we came up with.

And THEN to finish the day off perfectly, I got two packages. My first Christmas presents from overseas! We all have little post office boxes here at Ukarumpa and when you get a small, faded, yellow piece of cardboard in your box with a thin, red border around it saying, ‘Package too large, collect from desk,’ you know it’s a good day. I got CDs (Jack Johnson, Sleep Through the Static; and Bob Marley, Chant Down Babylon) a DVD, some chocolate and a couple of letters and cards. You don’t know how nice it is to receive mail here. It felt really special to go back to the office and open those gifts, to read the messages and remember friends. Thank you very much to my parents and Andy and Katherine.

Then to make the day even better I got some credit for my phone, walked to an area where we get a cell phone signal and called a guy who I became good friends with in Zambia, at school. We chatted for 45 minutes or so about life, catching up on the past year since we last talked, sharing our struggles, joys and hopes for the future. He’s a Zambian guy who now lives in Johannesburg, working for a management consultancy firm. We didn’t chat for longer as he needed to finish off applications for MBA courses at Stanton and Harvard. When I retire from this work and start my own business I’m expecting free advice from him, so I try to keep on good terms ;-) But seriously, I really value the friendships of people all over the world who keep in touch. It’s always so nice to hear a familiar voice on the phone or get an email or letter. God uses you to bless me.

All in all, a good day. It is now 10pm, pouring down with rain and maybe time for a hot drink. I may have some of that tea I brought back with me from England. Hmmmmm.....

Monday, January 5, 2009

3 hours in the office

It’s 3 hours into the first day back at the office. It’s actually kind of nice to be back here, getting on with work. The 5 days away in Madang were good though. I mainly stayed in the guesthouse, read, and watched cricket: South Africa v. Australia. It was really nice to watch live sport, something I haven't done for a long time, especially as the underdogs won.

But, back to work. Because Wycliffe’s work is linguistically based, we’re encouraged to publish as much as possible. We have access to lots and lots of linguistic data, from surveys like the ones I do and from Bible translation work, and it’s good to get the information “out there” for other interested parties. This morning I’ve submitted a paper to a linguistic journal. I submitted it a while back and the editor (rightly) asked for it to be reworked. A linguist who works in an office opposite mine helped a lot with reshaping it and we got it finished this morning. We’ll see what the editor says this time. The paper is basically about how we try to consider the people's view of language boundaries and language names rather than imposing western "outsider" categories. Here’s the abstract:

This article is a response to the criticisms made by Mühlhäusler (2006) of the methods used by linguists in assigning language names and boundaries. Referring especially to Papua New Guinea, he claims that, “the names and boundaries of languages reflect expatriate practices, not local knowledge” because “linguists have largely ignored indigenous metalinguistic views.” However Mühlhäusler’s assertions do not reflect current realities on the field. By focusing on an analysis of data collected during the surveys of the Sos Kundi (2007) and Ambakich (2003) languages, this paper summarizes how the “indigenous metalinguistic view” has been, and is still, a key part of language surveys and other linguistic work in Papua New Guinea.

For the rest of the day I’m going to edit survey reports for publication on the internet, on Wycliffe’s own website. I do enjoy doing that. Oh, and I need to do a bit of preparation for a survey we’re doing to finish off later on this month – the Benabena survey that didn’t get finished because of Bonnie’s infected leg. We have a new surveyor here: Sara Van Cott! She's been here for a few weeks, is from the States, and that’ll be her first survey. I’m sure she’ll be glad to get out of the office and out to the villages.

Well, hope your Christmas and New Year were good. By the way, the lack of photos is because my camera died. A replacement should be coming soon.