Dear friends,

Greetings from Kenya’s Rift Valley, which Martha and Bruce had a chance to explore at the weekend when Bruce was one of the accompanying adults on Martha’s class ‘safari’.  In case you’ve ever wondered, ‘safari’ means ‘journey’ in Swahili.  After a bumpy ride deep into Maasai country, they arrived at Mount Suswa, an extinct volcano.  Over the next 24 hours, they explored a series of lava caves and hiked up to the highest point on the crater’s rim.  According to Wikipedia, Suswa is home to leopards and hyenas.  Fortunately, Martha and Bruce only encountered a single rock hyrax and several thousand bats.
 
Another recent safari was Bruce’s December trip to Tanzania.  Thanks for praying for that – it was very productive.  He was able to provide advice and training to two different projects: a team translating a set of Bible stories into the language of the Datooga tribe (Nilotic cattle-herders) and a team translating the Gospel of Luke into the Cushitic language of an unreached people group who have had little chance to hear about Jesus. 
 
Both projects were ‘oral’ – the second of the two languages has yet to be written down.  In both cases, the drafting was being done by local people, with Tanzanian and expat facilitators making sure that the drafters fully understood the biblical text that they were translating.  It was so exciting to see people engaging with God’s Word for the first time and making it come alive in their own language.  
 
Bruce spent the month of January checking the book of Acts for the Indian Ocean community that we’ve mentioned before.  The team is now working through his comments and he will meet up with two of them in March (at RVA) to check that the book is ready for distribution.  Please pray for them as they make decisions about key words such as ‘believe’, ‘grace’ and ‘Lord’.

The photo above of Bruce’s laptop screen shows the software that he uses when he’s checking translation.  In the top left is the new translation itself and directly below it is the word-for-word ‘back translation’ of the same passage into Swahili, which enables Bruce to understand exactly how the verses have been translated.  The middle section of the screen contains ten different versions of the verse that he’s looking at – some in English, French and Swahili and a couple in languages related to that of the community in question.  Finally, the right hand column contains an interlinear Greek-English translation of the passage and a commentary on it.  For each verse that he checks, Bruce consults most, if not all of these resources.
 
Finally, click here for a recent article that Bruce wrote about how his translation work fits into his wider role of Scripture Engagement Consultant.
 
As ever, thank you so much for your support and encouragement.
 
Love,
 
Bruce, Jan, Zoe, Martha and Joe x