June update

June has gone by so quickly, I can hardly believe it! The weather is getting cooler here, as it is almost mid-winter. Still, that means mid-twenties during the day and about 5 degrees cooler in the evening! But, I am glad I brought a sweater or two.

This month has been full of changes for me. For the first two weeks, L and I were housesitting for a missionary family while they traveled to a different part of the country to meet up with future colleagues. It was so good for us to spend some time away from the center and experience what life is like in Nampula city. We learned our way around the city as we walked to get our groceries, and we also got to practice our Portuguese with our guard.

We held another dictionary workshop, this time for 5 languages! It was a busy week, with many late nights of editing and formatting data, but a lot of work was accomplished.

After the family returned to the home where we were, we went back to the center to live, but not for long! From June 18-22, we traveled with a Swedish couple to attend a Bible dedication in the town of Balama. There are now four books of the Bible translated into Meetto, and instead of waiting for the whole New Testament or even the whole Bible to be translated, it has been decided to publish parts of the Bible as it is completed. This way, the people have access to the Word now. Balama a very remote place, and we had to drive on a very bumpy, very rudimentary road for an hour outside the closest urban area. We also were able to visit a village near Balama called Ntete. I was so grateful to see a true African village! As we walked from one end of the village to another, children seemed to appear out of nowhere to follow us wherever we went! We visited old friends of the Swedish couple (they used to live there) and the people were so very friendly. I was able to see the incredible need for Bible translation there because although the men in the village generally could speak some Portuguese, all the women and children only spoke Meetto. The dedication was a large celebration and the people were so happy to have the Word in their language!

When we returned to Nampula, L and I were (and still are) on our own because the other linguists had left the country for various reasons! I have been getting the dictionaries from the workshop ready to print, and currently I have completed all except one. These books are being printed as I write this! It is very exciting to see the end of all our hard work. When the dictionaries are completed, I will begin another project involving lexicostatistics. I will be entering data from many different Mozambican languages and running them through a program to compare similarities and differences between them. We are looking for evidence to determine whether these languages can be considered dialects of the same language or entirely separate from one another. This will affect how we choose which languages to begin translation projects in.

Thank you so much for your support and prayers! I am in Mozambique for another 4 weeks, 2 of them housesitting for another family. There is much work to be done before we interns leave, so pray that we would be productive and that our work would be effective and contribute to the work of translation.