God enabled us to return home with no alternator belt

Psalm 18:32-33 says, "It is God who arms me with strength and makes my way perfect. He makes my feet like the feet of a deer; he enables me to stand on the heights." This past trip to Ngoyla was accompanied by a miraculous return. I managed to drive back with a damaged alternator/water pump belt. By the end of the trip, it was no belt at all! I have a picture of it... it looks like some dirty wire, certainly not a belt that was meant to turn an alternator and water pump. It was just draped around the pullies loosely, certainly not pulling anything. But the Lord made my way perfect! Not only did the battery never run out of electricity during the 600-mile trip, the engine never stopped and the red light never came on to indicate that the battery was not charging. It came on only after we had arrived at our destination. This was the third time that God has done this. The first two times were when a metal tube, a piece of the carburator, was aspirated into the engine block of our VW combi and when I mistakenly dumped kerosene into my gas tank instead of gas. In each of these three cases, I never knew that a problem existed until we had arrived safely at our destination. God is working miracles!

A New Committee to Give Leadership to the Njyem

Yesterday, Dec. 23, Mary and I returned from the Njyem city of Ngoyla, Cameroon, where we spent 10 days. We introduced the Njyem language committee to the new orthography for their language that we designed and encourage them to try. It is available to anyone with interest in such things at my public drop box, as is described here. On the 18th the language committee board was elected. The President is Aimé Mbɨ. He and the others of his board have a 2-year mandate. Their positions do not entitle them to any salaries. The name of the language committee is CODELAN: Comité de développement de la langue njyem. The authorities of Ngoyla were not physically present during the meeting, but they were invited and gave us a public place to meet in. The committee will meet again in January to approve an action plan. We are going to write a training manual as fast as possible to assist them in meeting their goals.

AIDS Awareness Needed for the Njyem

In February I worked with Collette Nkom on an AIDS brochure that is now available for use in helping the Njyem community resist this terrible danger. You can print the document from Adobe Acrobat on any printer.

The Gospel of Mark in Njyem

In February 2010 we sent a preliminary version of Mark to the Njyem villages. We are now done with a light revision of the whole Gospel, incorporating some new proposals for the writing system. We will be going out to Ngoyla on Dec. 10. You can see the document here, in Open Office Writer format, which works well in Word, as well. We are also taking a summary of the writing system to test out: pg1, pg2 and pg3. If we can convince ourselves that people are learning to write and to read with a minimum of effort, we will do the pedagogical manual that corresponds to this orthographic standard.

Now Available to You!: The Njyem orthography

The Njyem orthography ("writing system") is described in French on 12 half sheets ("A5"). Included in it are some sample texts. This is our attempt to make this available to the Njyem community and to its French-speaking friends. The front and back sides of page1, page2, and page3 make up the entire Open Office document. We returned from Ngoyla Dec. 23 and know now that some speakers of Njyem can become literate and writers using the new system. If anyone in Brazzaville, Souanke or Ouesso can make use of it, please send me news of your experience and the reactions people have to it.

Collaborative Research

We in SIL are all about cooperation, and nothing means more to me than cooperating on the frontiers of science. In that vein, I am posting the zipped-up FLEx project on Swo ("[sox]" in the Ethnologue) that I have been working on for about 2 months. This project will be going dormant if others don't pitch in and make it their shared concern. FLEx is the package of programs that is properly referred to as "Fieldworks Language Explorer". It is free, which by no means indicates that we set a low store of value on it. "Why are you letting this promising project go dormant", you ask. The answer is that we must move back to the Njyem project, which has the potential of taking off.

Room for us in Ngoyla

Researchers have gone to Ngoyla to study the spread of AIDS and its precursors that are in the animal kingdom still, waiting to cross over to people. They have made a building available to us when they are not using it. This will be a big help to us in getting established there.

Collaboration between SIL and the Church

This week many denominations from Cameroon sent their representatives to the training center of SIL to discuss how they can cooperate in completing the Bible translation task here in Cameroon. Pastor Ernest Njyelo of the Nzime translation program attended the 3-day conference. He is a Presbyterian pastor working in the Nzime area.

Maps with better names

On Nov 24 I was asked to represent SIL at a map-making conference here in Yaounde and to talk to people brought in from many countries about the characteristics of the languages in the southern part of Cameroon. Since my background is in the eastern part of Cameroon, I asked a Cameroonian linguist to present the material. We worked on it together and he was very capable, giving the map-makers the help they needed. His name is BINDOM Aime. We are grateful for the Lord's provision of such help. In my brief speech, I urged them to make an effort to use the right names for places. I pointed out that it can sometimes be difficult. Sometimes people refer to a place by means of the name of the clan living in that place.