Thank you for your prayers for my Nigeria trip and your prayers for the family at home while I was away. It was a success in almost every regard. The visa-on-arrival process was painless and relatively quick. The first startling thing was how aggressively the customs agents asked us all for “coffee money” as they were processing our passports for entry. Our mentor has been to Nigeria frequently and said she’d never experienced such requests at passport control. I will be sharing more of the “experiences” on our blog so you can read them if you’re interested—we’ll put links to those in future newsletters but you can always check abidinginhesed.com/ministry.

After settling into the guest house where we stayed and worked we met our primary contact, Rev. Benjamin Dapel Matawan, director of the newly formed Neighborhood Bible Translation Initiative. This organization has been formed by Ron pastors for translating the Old Testament into Ron and to be a platform for doing translation in the communities around them that do not have a Bible in their language. It’s really exciting to see a community doing this themselves! 

Every morning we started by singing a song in Ron that they taught us. Monday morning the Ron team looked around and said, “We have too many people to do this all in one big group. Let’s split up and cover more ground.” We made a quick plan for two groups, and then changed it to three. 

From Tuesday on we had groups with two translators, two consultants-in-training, and our two consultant mentors floated between the three tables. Each consultant-in-training led the discussion for about three days. I got to dive right in on day two. The Ron really hoped that we could actually check all of Genesis with this division, but it became clear before too long that our pace would not be nearly fast enough for that. There was simply too much new: new translators, new consultants-in-training, a new book, many new terms… Genesis 1-11 has a lot of unique vocabulary! We spent hours on sky/heavens and firmament, and we’re still not sure it’s right.

In the end, we checked Genesis 1-12, 24-25, 39-40 (the little chunks came from our over-optimistic division of labor), rechecked and harmonized Genesis 1-11 as a whole group (since three groups had taken different chunks), recorded Genesis 1-11, and packaged and distributed an app to them with the Genesis 1-11 text and audio that they could take to their communities for feedback. The last evening, we could hear parts of Genesis playing from all over the room because everybody just loved having it. We are very hopeful that their community and churches will be excited about this work and will continue to invest in it.

That hope has another big cause: the community checking training held on Saturday was a smashing success. Praise God that around 50 people came and excitedly learned a bit about how to check a Bible translation and got to practice it with an intentionally “bad” translation of the Tower of Babel story. Five packed tables excitedly weighed in on what was missing, what was added, what was distorted, and the best way to say it in Ron. On top of that, representatives from a few of the Ron’s neighboring people groups came—ones without scripture—and were so inspired that as they sat off to the side they started drafting a translation of the same text and read it out to us all at the end.

It was a good trip, but also good to be together as a family again after almost three weeks apart.  

Some prayer requests from the Ron translators:

• Gambo’s uncle is in poor health after a stroke.

• For godly, upright leaders in their community and country (national elections are in February and getting a lot of attention).

• For honesty, transparency, unity, and diligence among their own people and their new Bible translation organization.

• Joseph’s family is mourning after his niece died in a mine cave-in (while we were there), her twin sister was working with her and had gone for water when it happened.

• Also while we were there, a Christian woman in their community was severely beaten and hospitalized after Fulani herdsmen broke into her fields to graze their cattle and she called the police on them. This is just one incident. The reason we had to relocate our workshop out of the Ron community was because after a similar incident the farmers reported the herdsmen who were arrested and fined and in response murdered the farmers.

• For health and safety for translators and their families, several had sick children. If you wish to pray for them all by name they are: Benjamin, Joseph, Jerry, Victor, Panchin, and Gambo.