It was a dark and stormy night. The rain falls. The termites rise. The streets are empty except for thieves about to begin their nightly rounds. We were taught at Kenya Safari that the key to survival in Africa is contingency planning. Contingency planning means imagining all the really awful things that could happen to you in Africa and then taking steps to ensure that these things don’t happen to you. One problem with this method is that there are really a lot of bad things that can happen to you. A snake can bite you. You can be raped. You can be robbed or chopped up with machetes. You can have a car accident and everyone but you can die. You can eat some restaurant food just crawling with parasites and get an intestinal disease and spend all night barfing and then slowly waste away and die. Your children can get kidnapped. Your spouse can go crazy. Your whole family can get malaria and waste away and die. A dog can bite you. Someone who wants your house can get you kicked out of the country. If you look the wrong way at a government official they can revoke your papers and give you 24 hours to get out of the country. You can go native. Your kids can go native. Natives can attack your kids on the way home from school. Your kids can attack natives. Your supporters back home will decide that you’re a bad investment and send you into a freefall of poverty. You can partner with the wrong Mozambican and get ostracized by all the others. You can step on a nail. You can be ensnared by pornography. Or by a prostitute. Or a maid. Or by not reading your Bible every day. You can accidentally build your house on the grave of a really nasty spirit and cut yourself with a knife. You can get robbed at the market. And robbed at the border. And robbed in your home. And robbed in your yard. You can drop your passport. You can lose your residency papers. You can fill out a form incorrectly. You can have a broken tail light. You can drive your car in an unsafe manner.

The opportunities for contingency planning are endless. Our early years in Mozambique I ran things like a military insertion behind enemy lines. I knew what to do. My wife knew what to do. Sometimes I literally made the kids fall in and stand at attention. They were forbidden to play hide and seek. We had a first aid kit the size of suitcase. We carried important papers and spare cash, and 20 liters of extra fuel at all times, and a spare pair of underwear just in case. There was no detail to small to be considered in protecting ourselves from Mozambique and Mozambicans.

Fast forward ten years. A young couple fresh from Georgia is getting settled in Tete. We don’t warn them about anything. We send them out into the bush to get to know Mozambicans because in ten years we have never been mistreated. We’ve never felt unsafe. We’ve been treated curiously but courteously. Whatever you do, don’t do contingency planning. Take each day as it comes. Discover each path as it appears before your feet. Relax in the knowledge that Mozambicans are wonderful people. Even the rascally ones. Which in Tete means most of them. The people of Tete are straight-talkers and confrontational get in your face and tell you what they think. Contingency planning is for the Marines. But walk-by-faith, seat-of-your-pants kind of folks like missionaries need to spend more time praying and less time planning. They need to spend less time thinking about what bad guys can do to them and more time thinking about what nice things they can do for the good guys. Ask An African. Spend time with Africans. But don’t do the Mother Theresa thing and hang out with the dredges of society. Spend your time with the princes and the queens. Get to know the big shots and the high rollers. To do that you need to put your kids in the most expensive school in town and just socialize with all the moms and dads waiting for their kids outside the gate.

Don’t get me wrong. I like poor people. Some of my best friends are poor people. In fact when I travel to the US I am a poor people. But in Mozambique I am an elite. Middle class people don’t know what to do with me. They’re happy to chat and they certainly don’t feel inferior to me. But azungus are azungus. We have special needs. We see the world in a different way from the average uneducated farmer and his wife. For better or worse we have a certain amount of sophistication that makes hanging out with country bumpkins awkward for everyone involved.

The only thing contingency planning is good for is giving yourself a stomach ulcer. Or pre-judging every person you meet based on whether they look like a thief or a corrupt official. For all our “fellowship of man” rhetoric we really do live in a world of us and them. But the dividing line is not between blacks and whites. In Mozambique the dividing line is social and economic. The most satisfying relationships I have with Mozambicans are based on equality. If you compared our bank accounts there might not be much equality but for all intents and purposes in this society we are equals. In my case this includes educators and government officials. This also includes pastors and church leaders at the provincial or national level. In 2004, I began to realize that I was a bigshot. At least in Mozambique. In the US I’m completely anonymous (and I love that. Really.) But in Africa where the layers of society are clearly demarcated, I can pat myself on the back for being countercultural and being all chummy with domestic workers and lowly public servants. But that kind of behavior just confuses Mozambicans and undermines the relationships I should be cultivating at the highest level of society. There’s no such thing as grassroots in Mozambique. Everything dies at the roots. But if you can influence someone at the top, everyone underneath them will fall over themselves trying to agree with you as well.

[to be continued]

If you’re a techie like me, perhaps this is the kind of meditation we should be doing:

I want to make a few comments about Christian Zen mostly for my own sake so that I can process the topic. But I’d also like to hear from those of you who read this blog and have ideas and opinions regarding the overlap between Christian devotional practice and Zen meditation. What I want to explore here briefly is not necessarily the incompatibility between two great religions but rather the impulse that drives Christians in the Western world to consider Zen, whether there are elements of Zen already present in Christian practice, and some possible responses to Christians who are incorporating Zen practice into their lives.

Modern life is stressful. And human relationships are fraught with conflict. These are two things that can motivate Christians to consider meditative practices such as yoga. Centering our mind, breathing calmly, relaxing, and cleansing our system of impurity are all necessary and restorative activities. Recent Christian history has not shown enough attention to the modern person’s struggle with stress and the quest for inner calm and relaxation. In fact, the recent practice of preaching the whole Bible has slanted Christian teaching away from a focus on Jesus, the prince of peace. The violent imagery of much of the Old Testament especially the Psalms leaves a person grasping for words of peace and harmony. And the writings of Paul are full of confrontational and militaristic themes. So, I have personally found myself stumped when trying to offer someone Christian alternatives or equivalents to Zen chants, mantras and koans. The obvious exception is the words of Jesus. Many Christian traditions place an emphasis on reciting the words of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount or from the writings of John. That’s certainly getting closer to the spirit of meditation that people find missing in their Christian experience. Two more equivalents are prayer and singing. Both activities are frequently mentioned in the New Testament and I think we underestimate their calming properties. Many times I’ve been a bundle of nerves and then someone has prayed for me or I’ve begun singing hymns and found myself much calmer afterwards. The Zen practice of focused breathing is very similar in this sense to the Christian practices of prayer and singing.

One big distinctive between Zen and Christianity is the isolation sought by practitioners of yoga versus the fellowship practiced by Christians. Yoga is often about getting alone, centering the mind and focusing on the self. In contrast with this, church is about getting together, thinking collectively and focusing on God. This is the great strength and weakness of church. One of the reasons people don’t like church is because of the conflicts that exist there. The pastor and the board are in conflict. Various groups within the church are upset with one another. The music is too slow or too loud. The sermons are too long or too insubstantial. It’s tempting to withdraw from such a messy place, get by yourself and just try to find inner peace.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to censure Christians who are experimenting with Zen meditation. For one thing, I think that much of the meditation called Zen or Yoga in the Western world is thoroughly secularized. It would be easy to criticize or condemn the practice but I think that is only going to further isolate believers who are feeling uncomfortable or unsatisfied in the church. Far better in my opinion is to focus on the three irresistible qualities of Christian devotional life. First, Christianity addresses our human needs by looking to a benevolent and all-powerful God. Focusing on ourselves and the divine within is pale and unsatisfying compared to focusing on the magnificent Christ. Second, community is the great strength of Christianity. Church will always be a bother because its filled with people rather than statues. But those people and the relationships and emotions that bind them together are what we all desperately need in our hyperlinked yet lonely modern existence. Finally, we should advocate more meditative forms of prayer. Whenever possible we should meet with others, pray out loud, hold hands, hug each other, sing songs and hand around the tissue box. There’s nothing like the koinonia of a group of believers for releasing stress and gaining strength to face the week.

Church can address some of societies ills but I’m afraid that quite often church is one of the contributing factors. There are too many activities in a modern church and these activities are incredibly complex. Not only that but when people are “together in one place” many of our churches chop up all the demographics and isolate them from one another in age and gender specific groups. I disagree with this strategy simply because it creates so much work for so many people, causes them to miss out on opportunities for fellowship and results in Sunday being one of the most stressful days of the week. No wonder people prefer to stay home in their pajamas, put some nice music on and read a book.

I personally have never wanted to engage in Eastern meditation. Corporate prayer, singing and Scripture reading have been the great sources of strength for my spiritual life. If you are a Christian and are using Zen practices in your personal life I don’t have any condemnation for you but would be interested to hear your reaction to what I’ve written here.

• A hilarious and sympathetic introduction to Zen
• Thomas Merton Society: What Was the Christian Monk Looking to Find in His Dialogue with Buddhism? by Alan Altany
• NY Times: Trying to Reconcile the Ways of the Vatican and the East

I was irresistibly drawn to the river in Tete. It was so beautiful. And there was almost always a nice breeze blowing up the river. Picturesque canoes worked up and down the river. They floated down to town with tomatoes and onions from the farms. And then poled the canoes back upstream. The physiques of the people along the river were amazing. The men were amazingly buff from years of heavy lifted, rowing and poling their canoes upstream. The women were pretty tough as well. They would come down to the river in the morning with baskets of clothes on their heads and spend the morning scrubbing and wringing. This created some embarrassing moments for me because I spent a lot of time bird-watching when we lived in the Hippo House. Unfortunately, the birds were quite often in the vicinity of the bare-chested women washing clothes. One time I was watching a particularly interesting bird when I saw a hand waving at me. With my binoculars, I followed the hand down the arm to the smiling face of a naked woman amused that I was enjoying the show. I really did try to avert my gaze when scantily clad women were around. Honest. But their idea of naked and our idea of naked are different. Boobs were a big deal when I was growing up. They were hidden away like sacred treasures and only revealed in naughty magazines and the Human Body article in the World Book Encyclopedia. Growing into young adulthood I was conditioned by advertising and cinema to think that boobs were really something sexy. if you think about them, and we thought about them a lot, but not in this way, they’re really just bags of fat with some glands that secrete milk for the purpose of nourishing infant humans. In Mozambique, boobs are just body parts like elbows. Women generally cover them up. But if they are washing clothes by the river, or nursing a baby they whip those things out without a second thought. This causes a lot of distraction for a young preacher newly arrived in Africa. Half the women dancing in the aisle at church have babies tied on their hips and these babies are vainly lunging at a bouncing breast in hopes of latching on for a snack. I’ve been told that while boobs are not considered sexy, hips are. So women spend a lot of time wrapping capulanas around their hips so as to not dress in an overly provocative way.

Boobs were just one (or two) ways that the African way of looking at the river and our way of looking at the river were different. I thought the river should be beautiful and natural. But Mozambicans thought the river was a place for getting work done. Women were washing clothes. Men were chopping down river reeds to make baskets. The entire riverside was carved into garden plots. I didn’t want garden plots. I wanted waving grass and beautiful birds. The river was also frequently used by men for bathing and as a toilet. While women don’t mind flashing their chests, men can’t seem to visit the riverside without dropping their drawers, squatting and pooping on my idyllic vista. This rather spoils the view and the smell of the riverside with women draping drying laundry over all the riverside plants and men pooping all over the place. And when a man wants to take a bath he just strips it all off and stands in the shallows soaping himself up for ages. If I was embarrassed that the women thought I was staring at them I really didn’t want the naked men to think they were being ogled by the missionary.

The other thing that interrupted our idyll was of course the restaurant next door. They played their music really loud. Really, really loud. And it wasn’t some kind of cool marrabenta music, it was this pop junk in Portuguese with a boring synthesized beat that just pounded on and on and on. The thing I couldn’t get my head around in Tete is that I was the only one bothered by the loud music. Everyone else seemed to take it as a favor that the neighbor was sharing their music with all forty of the huts packed in close proximity with one another. Loud music is often used to let people know that there is home-brew booze for sale. So on a Saturday you can listen to dozens of competing sound systems, all with blown speakers, some with the speaker mounted high on a pole overhead. They all are scratchily blasting music all day long and no one complains. Except me. I didn’t come to Africa to complain about music. I came here to translate the Bible. But if you think about it, the art of translation sometimes transcends the actual words and depends as much on the medium as the message. So as you might imagine, the city churches that can manage buy an electronic keyboard and big speakers and lots of microphones and they turn it all up to ten until all the neighbors can hear it. One of the terrific things about music in Africa is that it isn’t led from the front. Instead, it’s led by the congregation. Everyone joins in. Everyone takes turns leading a song. If there’s the least bit of a lull, someone will start singing. If you are a musician in this situation you have to figure out what key the singer is singing in and try to match that. It’s the complete opposite method of “worship leading” from what we have in the US. At my home church, the music minister picks out the tunes. He rehearses them with the musicians. The audiovisual people sitting in the sound booth do sound checks and monitor sound levels. Somebody with a computer sends the lyrics onto two big screens that tower over the platform. Just imagine singing out with your own song in that situation! Total chaos. The musicians wouldn’t know what key you were playing in. The guy on the computer would be scrambling through the list on his hard drive trying to find your song. The congregation wouldn’t know the words since they’re not used to singing without reading off the screens. But in Africa its better than that. If you’re in a church in America you at least know what song the person is going to sing in. In Africa, it could be anything. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been humming along with an incomprehensible song in church only to discover that they are in fact singing in English. We came to Tete supposing that in a Nyungwe speaking area people would sing in Nyungwe. But they sing in everything but Nyungwe. Chewa, Shona, even Shangan from a thousand miles away. If you’re visiting from another region it doesn’t matter. Just start singing out and eventually everyone will join in like they’ve been singing the song all their lives.

That doesn’t mean that anyone understands what they’re singing. In fact, meaning is a secondary consideration. In a Mozambican church it’s all about togetherness. We’re dancing together. We’re singing together. We’re amen-ing as the pastor preaches. We’re sitting together crammed into a too small space with too many people. But we’re together. This is cibverano. Cibverano means something like “mutual understanding.” It’s the deepest and most revered trait of Nyungwe culture. As long as we’re together it’s OK. A similar phrase is, Tiri pabodzi. It’s used as a statement, as a question, and as a discourse marker. It means simply “We are together.” But it is such an essential concept that it has to be repeated over and over again. We’re together. We’re together. Are we together? We’re together! The unity of African culture extends beyond the family unit and beyond the circle of friends to include your neighbors and everyone from your church and all the people you’ve ever met and their friends. The togetherness of Mozambican culture entwines the average person in a safety net that holds them from birth to death and  beyond. Africans are never alone. And if you prefer to be alone watch out that you don’t get eaten by a hyena. The story goes that a man preferred to live alone so he built a house for his wife way outside of town and left her there every day while he went out to work in the fields. The hyena noticed this and one afternoon before the man got home, the hyena knocked on the door. When the woman opened the door, the hyena jumped on her and ate her leaving only her hands. When the man returned home that evening, he discovered his wife dead, eaten by a hyena with only her hands left. There was nothing he could say. So, your neighbors may be noisy. The sewage from their outhouse may overflow into your yard. Their kids may steal thatch off your roof and your wife may be seduced by your neighbor. But you better not try to live by yourself or the hyena will get you. Missionaries are a lot like that man. We’re always trying to live in big houses on the outside of town. We hide inside our houses to eat and we refuse to attend four-hour church services. In fact the word azungu is related to the word for “to visit.” We are just visiting. The Nyungwe proverb says, Mulendo ni mame. The visitor is like the mist. We are transient, impermanent and prone to disappearing when the sun comes out.

Paradoxically, the great hero of Mozambican folktales is the rabbit. We don’t understand rabbit because he is so bad and yet everyone loves him. He does everything he shouldn’t. He refuses to help dig the well but he sneaks in at night and drinks the water and then muddies it with his big feet. He sneaks into a party for animals with horns by gluing horns on his head with beeswax until he gets thrown out again. He does hundreds of naughty things and always escapes. But what we as outsiders don’t understand is that while Africans love rabbit and laugh at his antics, every story just reminds them how good it is to be part of an extended network of relationships. For the word which we translate as “escaped” really means “alone.” And no amount of antics are worth the price of not being together.

Some of my Christian friends are getting into Zen these days and so I thought I might offer a statistical method for deciding who’s cooler: Buddha or Jesus.

Jesus		Buddha
1 Commandment	+1	8 fold path	+8
Nice hair	+1	Bald	-1
followers chant meaningless songs	-10	ditto	-10
174,000,000 Google results	+1	21,600,000 Google results	-1
	0		0
Rose from the dead	+5	Died of bad cooking	-1
	+1		-1
Final score:	-1		-6

Jesus wins.

It’s amazing how bad my memory is. Last time I told you about events that happened in three different years as if they were all in the same three month period. Maybe this really is a novel, a work of fiction based loosely on real events. I’m still gnawing on that last sentence of the previous chapter. To explain the unbelief of the average American believer I have to tell you about aspiration. In Nyungwe they are really big on aspirated consonants. It’s something that speakers of English don’t differentiate between at all. Look at the words “spa” and “pat.” Now say them out loud. Can you detect the difference between the p sounds? The p in pat is aspirated. That means it is “breathier” than a normal p. For a long time while learning Nyungwe I thought I needed to emphasize the aspirated p. But eventually I realized that by default I aspirate my p’s. In order to speak Nyungwe properly I needed to emphasize not aspirating. Are you still with me? What I’ve come to realize is that we are not aspirated people spiritually. We really don’t believe in the spiritual world and so by default we don’t attribute spiritual causes to natural events or see God in the details. I used to think a materialist was someone who owned two TVs. But a materialist is a person that lives totally in the material world. The spiritual world for us Americans is very unreal. This is worlds away from the cosmology of the Bible and the cosmology of Africa. For they are by default aspirated people. The spirit world is the real one to them and the physical world is just temporary or unimportant or something. I can’t really describe it for you because it is so alien to me. This is what the Bible means when it talks about the “eternal weight of glory” that far outweighs our light and momentary troubles. The spiritual world is realer than the physical world. According to the Bible and all my African friends you actually become more alive after death. In the spiritual world, the real world is the one inhabited by ghosts. Africans really think that way. But we don’t. That’s why it was impossible for me to understand how Pastor Semo recovered miraculously from his stroke. But it wasn’t hard for him. Or the people around him. They all understood that God had done something spiritual. Now think for a minute about this scenario. We as materialist Americans go to spiritual Africa to try and teach them about God. We teach what the Bible says about miracles and Jesus and the Holy Spirit even though it is completely contrary to our culture. And Africans listen to us and believe what we are telling them more than we do. In fact, their theology is more developed than ours.

But I’m not prepared to write off these materialist Christians. They are trying to serve God in their own special, cultural, rational sort of way. That’s OK, right? I mean just because we’re not all touchy-feely in harmony with our ancestors and the tree spirits and all that doesn’t mean we’re a bunch of robots. The Bible is much more African than American. So much of the Bible just sounds perfectly natural for Africans in a way that it never can for us. We nod assent to what’s in there but it takes a lot of hermeneutical leap-frog to get modern and postmodern man to the point where they can see the point in a lot of what Jesus did. His reactions, his words, his ultimate sacrifice just seem… weird. And brutal. And unnecessary. If you told Americans that the only way to end the recession was to repent, shave their heads and kill goats, they wouldn’t do it. Well, some of them would but that’s the marvel of American plurality. Now here’s where my own aspiration gets crazy. I believe in a blood sacrifice. And I believe in self-abnegation. And maybe I don’t believe in head-shaving but there are plenty of kooky practices in my religion that must seem to the average secular American like goat sacrifices. So I’m stuck somewhere in between the loosey-goosey spiritual Africans on one side and the rational see-it-and-believe it secular Americans. And I’m right, of course. And well-balanced in all things religious.

As Spock-like as we azungus are in things religious compared to Africans, we can whoop them any day on the Bible. The amount of basic Biblical knowledge that the average Sunday School kid absorbs via flannel-graph is more than most pastors will ever have in Mozambique. There are exceptions. Just this year I’ve got a couple of students in my New Testament class that know their Bible a lot better than I do. But they are exceptional. Many of the pastors in Tete can’t preach their way out of a paper bag. They’re tone-deaf to sound doctrine. Their sermons are such a hodgepodge of conflicting ideas and non sequiturs that sometimes I just have to tune out so that I don’t start raving. Maybe its just my culture talking again. Maybe what sounds to me like confused babbling is actually culturally-appropriate communication methods. I have to admit that when I return to the US that the sermons are woefully bad. Again, since Americans don’t really believe the Bible, oh, they say they do, but they don’t lay hands on the sick or cast out demons or any of that other stuff that Jesus was always telling his disciples to do, so they get these weird peripheral applications out of Bible texts. And they are always accompanied by sophisticated outlines with each of the three main points having three sub-points, etc. The other weird thing about sermons in the US is the overhead projector. Wait, I’m not supposed to be telling you about America, but Africa. So African sermons seem dumb, and American sermons seem cold. Maybe this is what happens to Bible translators. We think we know the Bible so well that we’re the only ones we can bear to listen to.

Just because I’m saying that Africans are “in touch” with the spirit in a way Westerners aren’t doesn’t mean that Africans are contemplative or mystical in their religion. Their religion is completely grounded in reality and the interaction of the physical and spiritual worlds. Our behavior in the physical world has an impact on our dead ancestors and this in turn has an impact on our world. If we honor our ancestors, they are happy. If they are happy, they will protect us and bless us. If we neglect our ancestors they become unhappy and will abandon us and afflict us with sickness, death and poverty. If you’ll consider again what I’ve just written in terms of the Hebrew Bible you will see that there is much in common between the “needy” ancestors of Africa and the high-maintenance Jehovah. He wants sacrifices and honor and in every imaginable way impinges upon the life of the Israelites. If they neglected him, he would curse them. If they honored him, he would bless them. This transactional relationship is why Africans like the Old Testament better than the New Testament. The Old Testament takes African ancestor worship and bumps it up a level. In the African cosmology, God the Creator sits above and uninterested in his creation. He is divine. He is great. But he is unapproachable and uninterested. What the Jewish religion does to the African mind is show that God is in fact interested in the affairs of humans on earth. He is relational. He is in essence the One True Ancestor. That’s why the genealogy of Christ in Luke’s Gospel is so potent. Jesus is traced back all the way to Adam who is “the son of God.

If the God of Israel is the Father of all Ancestors, then Jesus is the most powerful of all witchdoctors. While the Old Testament gives African believers a blueprint for ritualism, the New Testament shows Jesus as a potent worker of magic. He controls the elements. He speaks to spirits. He can see and act over distances. He can heal people. He can wither fig trees. Jesus is a very scary person. At least that’s the way he is portrayed in the synoptic gospels. (John’s Gospel is another ball of wax) We Americans are not conditioned to see Jesus as person to be feared. But that image is foremost in the writings of the Gospels, especially Mark’s, and it is the element of his personality that most inspires devotion in Africa. I grew up with an image of Jesus wearing an immaculate robe with a blue sash. His hair was brown and wavy like a well-groomed hippy. He loved children and lambs. But that’s not the antisocial character that we see in the Gospels. He is tough. He gets angry. He shouts down demons. His behavior parallels in almost every aspect that of the traditional witchdoctor figure in Africa. A loner on the outskirts of society. Feared. Respected. Given plenty of space. Approached only in the direst of circumstances. That’s Jesus of Nazareth. Christianity is experiential and personal in Africa. It is not at all about theology. Or intellectual belief systems. Jesus is worshipped in Africa not because he satisfied some philosophical transaction between God and creation. Jesus is adored because he can do magic. He has power over malevolent spirits. He can help us in our time of need. And this is why pastors are such powerful figures in Africa. They hold in their hands the magic book. They know the rituals that will avert the wrath of the Old Testament God. And they, as servants of Christ, are able to combat demonic forces, ancestor spirits and witchdoctors.

As much as I whined about memorizing Greek paradigms (I just plain didn’t do it), I was loving getting to be a student again. Being a boss is the pits. Having people waiting on you for the next thing they’re supposed to do is really rotten. Especially in Mozambique where employers are tyrants and employees are foot-dragging slouchers (Maybe that’s just universal). My job as supervisor for the Nyungwe translation started off on the wrong footing and our steps got increasingly tangled, when I wasn’t putting my foot in my mouth, since so many people were calling the tune. Mozambicans have their ideas of how employers are supposed to treat their employees. And aid organizations in Mozambique have a completely different idea. Traditionally, a worker in Mozambique was called bicho by his employer. That means essentially “bug” or “vermin.” Maybe I’m wrong and it’s a term of endearment. So there’s not a lot of respect for employees. During the process of moving from a Portuguese colony to an independent African state, Mozambique swung the other direction and created a “people’s paradise” in which all the legislation favored the workers against the employers. The result is that hardly anyone employs anyone. It’s too expensive. You’re too vulnerable to litigation. And employees are really tough to fire. The system within the system for us was the aid organization monster. The wealthiest employers who are most immune to financial pressure are the aid organizations. Whether it be health, infrastructure or education, these international organizations blow into the country and throw everything out of whack. They pay fabulous salaries. Their employees drive nice cars and jet all over the country for conferences and meetings. And they make it really hard for poor organizations like ours to hire qualified staff. We are constantly looking for college educated and well-trained Mozambicans to work as translators or management staff. But so are the aid organizations. And I don’t blame young Mozambicans for heading off to work on contract with an aid organization rather than commit to a long-term, low salary translation job.

All this was in the back of my mind as I got on the plane to head back to Africa. We had two well-trained young bucks but they were working for pennies and it was going to come to a showdown. Either we needed to come up with more money or the translators were going to follow the money. Before you get the idea that these young men were money-grubbing capitalists, I want to speak in their defense. Strictly speaking, I wasn’t receiving a salary to work overseas as a Bible translator. But for all appearances I was awash in money. I drove a vehicle that was equal in price to a lifetime of salaries for a dozen Mozambicans. I rented an expensive house, paid more money for electricity and phone than the translators earned in salaries and regularly shelled out thousands of dollars for ministry trips inside and outside of Mozambique. As far as the translators could tell I was hugely wealthy and they had to wonder why if I was getting rich off translating the Bible they couldn’t too. Or at least get a fair wage. At that time, any salaries or other expenses had to be raised by the individual missionary who was assigned to that project. So while I was in the US I had to raise money not only to feed my wife and children but also to pay rent on an office, fill it with equipment and employees and even cover the cost of red pens and sugar for their tea. But the price was more than financial. Because salaries were coming out of my pocket, the financial relationship between me and the translators overshadowed every other aspect of our interaction. I really wanted to disciple these guys. And learn with them about the practice of Bible translation. But having to be the financial manager as well ruined a lot of our working relationship. No one is to blame here. We were all learning through the mistakes we made. But it was really miserable for the translators and me.

Finally it got so bad that I had to fire the translators and shut down the office. I can’t go into details but a combination of my lousy management skills and their seeking other sources of income resulted in a meltdown that made it necessary to call things to a halt. The stated reason for bringing everything to a halt was so that we could restructure the translation project with the local churches in charge of an association that would manage the work, pay the employees, and allow folks like me to serve from the side rather than from the top. It was an important step. It needed to happen. But it was painful and awkward. Even now I think that if I had the skills I could have run with that translation and managed those strong-willed translators and produced a translation in a fraction of the time it has taken us until today. Lourenço and Branco are still my friends today. Or possibly they are my friends now because they’re not my employees. They’ve continued to show interest in the translation. Branco contributes to literacy and education efforts in Tete. Lourenço is working for one of those big aid organizations. They still wish they could have kept working on the translation.

But what came after was slightly better than what we had before. For the first time all those pastors in Tete started getting the idea that we didn’t really know how to run a project in Mozambique. But unlike Bud, I didn’t run off to China. I stayed in Tete (Why, Lord?!?). And when the translation started up again it was firmly in the hands of Mozambicans. The new translators were long-time Tete residents and respected church leaders (Unlike the others two that were young upstarts who had been out of the region for more than a decade). And we started to produce some of the best translation to that date.

The translation came to a halt and the lead pastor of the translation council had a stroke. He lost his ability to speak and his health seemed to be deteriorating rapidly. Pastor Semo had become a good friend. I remember when my relationship with the translators was at its lowest ebb that he had been the one who finally sat down and gave me a serious talking to. Not in a scolding way at all but gently giving advice. It was a first. Until that point, encounters with the pastoral council had involved a bunch of guys coming and hearing all the great plans that the missionaries had come up with. But when the translation project fell apart we ran out of ideas and just shut up. And eventually the pastors started telling us what should be done. You have to understand how circumstances work against these local translation projects. The pastors are poor, overworked and undereducated. The missionaries are over trained, wealthy and have pressure from home to produce results. The tendency quite simply is for the local pastors to agree to anything and the missionaries to push ahead whatever idea comes into their heads no matter how inappropriate. The deep courtesy of Mozambicans, and I suppose all Africans, just prevents them from interrupting you no matter how stupid your idea is. Not all the Mozambicans are by any means saints. There are some that will hook up with you in whatever hare-brained idea you have as long as you’re paying the bills and driving the Toyota. The Bible says, “All have sinned.” That’s a good place to begin our interaction with others, especially those of another country. Each of us brings our weakness and selfishness to every encounter. But within each one of us is that mustard seed of faith that is struggling to sprout amidst our dirt.

So the translation is dead. The council president is dying. And I catch some weird lung infection and spend a month in bed (My lungs never recovered). It was that dark moment that all novelists seek in which the characters are stumped. The heroic quest is in danger of failing and all seems lost. It got worse. Pastor Semo was going to go with his brother back to his family in a remote corner of Mozambique. They were all unbelievers. According to them, the reason that Semo had lost his ability to speak is that he hadn’t made any sacrifices in honor of his parents after they died. He hadn’t even visited. So, his stroke and loss of speech were the result of an ancestral curse that could only be fixed by him going back to his homeland. This was just great. Not only had I fired the translators but now our star pastor was lapsing into paganism. Several weeks later, I got a call on the phone. The voice on the line said it was Pastor Semo and that he could speak again. Now I was really despairing. Not only had Semo resorted to occult practices but it had worked. I was so freaked out that even though I knew he was home I avoided visiting him. Finally, he got tired of waiting and came to my house for a visit. I dreaded his explanation but this is what he told me: When he visited his family, he still couldn’t speak. And he refused to make sacrifices to his dead parents. Then one morning both his sisters came to him and said, “Last night we both had a dream that you could talk again.” As they were speaking with him, a man from Zimbabwe came up to him and introduced himself. He was a Zimbabwean evangelist who was in the area and God had told him that there was someone here who couldn’t speak that he needed to pray for. The evangelist laid his hands on Semo and prayed. Then he put his finger in his mouth and pulled out some sort of ball. All of a sudden Pastor Semo could speak again. His family was so dumbfounded that many of them were eager to listen to the evangelist’s message of Jesus. I met the evangelist. And I saw my friend Semo go from a mumbling failing man to a man with a clear voice and a healthy body. I saw it with my own eyes and I still can’t believe it.

I can’t leave 2002 behind without telling you about 1992. I was a college student adrift. One of the great unemployable with a degree in my pocket and thousands of dollars owed in school loans. My degree at University of Oregon had prepared me for what? Cubicle wars, possibly. Or permanent underemployment. In South Africa, it used to be that if you weren’t clever enough to pastor a church that you got sent off as a missionary. I suppose a similar force was in operation in my case. I had a degree in English. Not English Lit. Or English composition. Just English. I enjoyed getting the degree. Lots of reading. Not too much work. Write long papers with big words. It was a nice way to spend several years of my life. But I knew in my heart that this degree was worthless. Marxists would tell you that a degree is just an elitist way of excluding the poor from certain tiers of society. I think they’re right. And I’m glad my parents sacrificed so much and laid out so much cash so that I could get that piece of paper. Because that diploma was like a magic wand getting me into all sorts of good stuff that I wouldn’t have had access to otherwise. Strangely enough, no one has actually ever asked to see the physical piece of paper and I’m not sure I even have one. I did check my transcript several years ago and it does in fact say that I graduated. I didn’t attend the graduation ceremony but went fishing. It was Eugene after all and pomp and circumstance are a Greek thing.

So, I was drifting. I somehow get conned into living in Mexico with a missionary couple as a volunteer. They were absolutely hilarious. And really godly. I still am haunted by memories of Bob praying loudly early in the morning while I was trying to sleep. What a saint! According to Bob and Faye, I slept a lot. No sooner had I wasted a month of my life fixing up Bob’s computer than he gets a new one and all my work is wasted. And they traveled a lot. I couldn’t keep up. For one thing, hotels are really expensive. And my budget was about $300 per month. So I took to sleeping in dumpsters while they stayed at the Holiday Inn. OK, not dumpsters, but a few roach-infested hotels, for sure. Eventually, their plans changed and my plans changed and I decided that I really didn’t want to hang out in Saltillo while they were gone so I jumped at the chance to attend Oregon SIL. I wasn’t entirely sure what Oregon SIL was. I had it confused with something else called Quest. So just to be sure I signed up for both and figured whichever one I should go to God would open up the door. I got accepted to both. So I attended ORSIL that summer and was going to go to Quest in the Fall.

As I’ve already mentioned, I was hopeless at phonetics. A very nice lady by the name of Adalee would say, “Waw kawng SHEEE!” and a hundred other phrases until we had mastered the sound system of Taiwanese. I got a B. Now that’s really embarrassing. Among Christians, everyone gets an A unless you’re really a dummy. That’s why Christian high schools have something like ten valedictorians every year. In fact, they give so much extra credit that lots of the students get more than a perfect grade. So, getting a B among all those Christians was their way of saying, “You’re not very smart. But we affirm you in the Lord. Everyone is created for a special purpose and even though you can’t distinguish between alveolar and retroflex we still know that you must have a niche within the family of God because God doesn’t make junk.”

Halfway through the summer I got kicked out of the basement where I was staying with my buddy Andrew. We moved in with two girls who lived outside of town. For some reason this didn’t strike me as strange. Here I am shacking up with a couple of hairy-legged Eugene hippy gals while attending this very Christian almost cult-like school. It’s not that there was any hanky-panky going on. We just needed a place to sleep and this friend of ours had an extra room. Man, I can’t remember a thing about that house except pickle jars in the window and dandelions in the driveway.

The one student that had no trouble in phonetics that year was Hilary. She was some girl from Oklahoma. And she was so smart that she sometimes had to explain difficult problems of morphology to the professor when he got muddled. I was pretty obedient to the rule during my mission in Mexico that said I wasn’t supposed to date natives. I stayed out late with natives. And went to parties with natives. But I didn’t date anyone. Honest. But when I came back to Oregon all the bets were off and ORSIL was one long linguistic-babe parade. The place was crawling with bright, good-looking Christian girls. But, I wrote Hilary off the first time I saw her walk across the quad. She had this sleeveless turquoise dress on and she just glided across the campus. She had that “taken” look. I supposed that she was engaged to some Oklahoma Bible college boy with a crewcut. So we were in the same class but I didn’t waste time flashing the charm or anything. In fact, I even dated one of the missionary’s daughters (Note to self, never take your daughter to an SIL). When the Summer ended I found out that in the entire school the only person going to Quest besides me was Hilary. We even planned to meet up in San Francisco and travel to Idyllwild together.

While I was bumbling through the summer in that puppy dog sort of way that men have, Hilary was aceing her classes and seriously smitten with me. She didn’t just have that sort of romantic attraction that people called love. God gave me to her. She heard a voice from God say that I was the one she was going to marry. Looking back I rather like the idea of being a godsend. While Hilary is sending off all these “Don’t bother I’m taken” signals, I’m not realizing that she’s taken by me. She even had trouble eating and sleeping. Now perhaps you appreciate my amazing animal magnetism. She and I meet up in Big Sur. I meet her eccentric parents. Hilary and her mom bring me cappuccino in bed. And I fall in love. I know, I’m shallow. But here’s a good-looking girl bringing me coffee in bed in a little camper perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean and it’s easy to just succumb to the whole romantic scenario.

We got engaged at Quest. It was such a fast courtship that my Mom thought Hilary was somebody else. That month which was supposed to be this intense recruitment event for Wycliffe Bible Translators turned into an affair to remember in the midst of the Tahquitz Pines. One day the director of Wycliffe USA visited, spoke at chapel and ate lunch with us. He sat right down next to Hilary and me, looked at us for a few seconds and tells me, “I think this is really great.” So God speaks to Hilary and Hyatt Moore speaks to me. Who were we, mere mortals, to refuse such divine endorsement?

If my daughter ever tells me that she’s met a young man and wants to get married next month, I will simply say, “No.” I don’t care if God spoke to you, you’re not getting married until we’ve all had a chance to get to know this guy since we have to be married to him too. Despite the whirlwind romance (Met June, engaged October, married December) we have been extravagantly happy. Our first year of marriage we just went on dates and got to know each other. The advantage is that we got to sleep together without shame. Hilary is a very happy person by nature and I’m as you might have guessed very not serious. So we laugh a lot. In fact, a young lady told me once after seeing Hilary and I together,  “You guys seem so happy.” I replied, “We’re much happier than you think we are.”

Note: This chapter originally appeared on my blog as Greek, Hebrew and the Joy of S-x and Freaks don’t want no Greek. I know that’s cheating but I need a day off.

If you listen to Suzanne, and Iyov and John, you might think studying Greek and Hebrew is an experience in mystic Bible bliss. It’s not. Take it from me. Greek sucks. Hebrew hurts. One semester of Bible Greek is enough to turn any normal human being off “the original” for a lifetime. Didactic methods in our Bible schools and seminaries are bad. So painful. So achingly boring that if you think studying Greek is fun you have to either be steeped in self-deception or a masochistic moron. OK, sorry that was a bit strong. But it sounds so nice… “masochistic morons mumbling masoretic mantras, mmmmmmm.”

Case in point. I never darkened the door of a seminary until constant cajoling from one of the veterans of the Bible translation battle shamed me into enlisting myself in a 1st-year course in Bible Greek at a certain seminary. At that point I had been reading Greek for more than a decade. Not well. But I could scan a text, focus in on the bothersome stuff and generally fake it. OK, I thought. I’ll suffer through a semester and memorize all those declensions, etc. that Greeksters delight in spouting.

Welcome to γέεννα

In a scene reminiscent of the movie Brazil I found myself sitting in an undersized desk with, I kid you not, a little desktop that swung on a hinge. Right-handed, of course, which made it a bit of a carpal killer for note-taking lefties like myself. The professor’s tie was wide and striped. This all really happened. I don’t need hyperbole. Because he loved the textbook so much, the original publisher allowed him to reprint it at will. Which was a good thing because no one had requested a copy of this particular text since the 1960s. Our first week was spent mastering a fool-proof system of little index cards with declensions, etc. on them. After that class time was divided between us being quizzed on things like the future imperative participle second person plural and little pep talks by the professor on “What a logical language Koine Greek is. It’s beautiful isn’t it?!?” Answer: No, it’s not. It’s messy and weird like all the 6,912 current living languages and on top of that it’s dead and has been for 2,000 years. Not beautiful, sorry. Not even kinda cute.

So, wait a minute here. You want me to regurgitate on demand things like “the future imperative participle second person plural?” I was studying GGBB on the sly because despite not having any pretty pictures or a cool CD-ROM like BBG it was People Magazine material compared to the photostat our teacher was drooling over. In GGBB (If you don’t know, you are truly a lost soul) there was a footnote saying, “There also is a participle which is built on the future tense stem, but it occurs only twelve times in the New Testament.” Despite the strange position of also and only in that sentence I understood the author to be saying, “Don’t bother to learn all the paradigms for first-person, second-person, etc. for the future participle because that would be stupid.” When I questioned the professor on memorizing forms that never occur in the New Testament he looked at me sideways and I could see him mentally putting me down in his little book as problem student. Why did you climb the mountain? Because it’s not there.

What, you might be asking about now, does this have to do with s-x? You can read about all the details of sexual reproduction in a textbook of biology and physiology and it will never stimulate the least interest in personally experiencing the process. Greek grammar books are like that. I know the joys of Greek. Just yesterday I was getting really excited about the word κατά. But a Greek grammar is the linguistic equivalent of a cold shower. Here’s a sample:

“No case ending is used, the tau drops off because it cannot stand at the end of a word (rule 8), and the omicron lengthens to compensate for the loss.” (Reference not cited out of respect for the author)

OT scholars may be cooler than NT scholars but I can guarantee that their grammar books are just as dull. So keep on reading all the scribes and Pharisees who want you to believe that mastering the languages of Moses and Paul is the prerequisite to getting deep insights into the Book of books. But don’t believe them. Instead, in due course, Grasshopper, I will reveal to you all the secret tricks you need to study the Bible like the big boys (and girl). Without the flash cards. Or the little desks with hinges.

Editor’s note: The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily represent doctrines and practices approved by the denomination with which David holds ministerial credentials or the mission that sent him to the depths of Africa on a shoestring budget (No hard feelings…) Also, David wishes to apologize for saying “Greek sucks.” Neither his mother nor his wife approve of such language.

P.S. I changed the spelling of the S-word to try to fool weirdos out there who are looking for something they ain’t gonna find here.

In Greek, Hebrew and the Joy of S-x, I claimed that Biblical language instruction courses are “bad. So painful. So achingly boring.” And called Greek students “masochistic morons mumbling masoretic mantras.” (Technically, “Masoretic” would be Hebrew students, but in this instance alliteration trumps accuracy.)

Why the vehemence? It’s simply this: Biblical Greek instruction forever scars anyone exposed to it. The end result of studying Biblical languages should be an appreciation for the unique qualities of those languages and an ability to study them to our benefit. But instead, students are mired down from the very start in things like “the movable nu” and a bewildering terminology for talking about Koine that is itself a foreign language.

Students are permanently scarred by Greek study in one of two ways. The first group endures the rite of passage and vows never to go through it again while simultaneously feeling a lasting sense of shame and inferiority because they couldn’t hack it. The second group actually thrives under the Greek instruction. They enjoy memorizing all the different forms and vocabulary. But their scar is more subtle. They become convinced that being able to parse a Greek verb equates with understanding the Bible in Greek. I admire the brilliant minds that gravitate in this direction. There are three people I consider my Greek mentors, one of them a grandmother. Their love of the language inspires me to endure the pain of parsing.

But understanding a language doesn’t mean you understand the message. This happens to me all the time in Mozambique. Someone is talking to me in Portuguese or Nyungwe or even English. I understand every word he is saying. But I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about. There’s some missing bit of information that I don’t have access to. Almost every time it is some cultural context that isn’t available to me as an outsider. Reading the Bible is like that. You can understand every word and still not get it. Trouble is we never read a passage and say, “I don’t get it.” Our minds are very tricky in this regard. They insist on comprehension. So we always think we understand what it says.

Students of the Bible would benefit more by studying New Testament culture than Greek grammar. Michael Kruse is doing an outstanding job discussing New Testament culture and the Roman concept of family. His posts on Kruse Kronicle are really helping me to appreciate the Epistles. The context of a statement in the Scriptures is almost always implicit. We should use the “plain meaning of the text” not to step forward toward a present-day application, but to step back and say, “Based on this it seems Paul is addressing this problem…” Then we can move forward to application.

Last week, I thought I’d start working through 1 Timothy in Greek to freshen up my parsing skills. It was fascinating. I dove into the word ἐπιταγή. Wouldn’t it be better to translate it here as authority? And why is σωτῆρος ἡμῶν anarthous but τῆς ἐλπίδος ἡμῶν articular? All this in the very first verse of the book! But here’s the catch: As rewarding as this study is, it has very little bearing on the spiritual and practical impact of this book. When we study the original language our tendency is to get bogged down in details and miss the point of the passage which is almost always found in larger chunks of discourse. Read an idiomatically translated version of 1 Timothy and the natural flow of the language will help you focus on the forest rather than the trees. For that reason, even though when studying I read Greek and translations that emphasize form, for my devotions I use Contemporary English Version.

I’m one of those freakish people that believes you don’t need Greek to understand the Bible. Thanks to many scholars and translators and centuries of study I have the benefit of the Bible translated into my language. But a Bible translation is not just a translation of the Word of God. A Bible translation is the Word of God. Only when the Scriptures have been rendered in my own language can I understand their message. Going back to the Greek can actually be a step backwards in understanding, giving more misunderstanding than insight.

It’s funny to look at these posts two years later. I think some of this I don’t believe anymore. But I’ll have to sleep on it for a few weeks and get back to you.

I’ve chosen Hippo Hunting as the working title for my book. Pat me on the back because I just got half way to the goal of 50,000 words before the end of the month. After 15 days of writing I’ve managed 25,248 words. A lot of it is drivel. Some of it is really depressing. But I have to admit there’s some good stuff in there. A big thank you to those of you who have written encouraging comments. I need that.

If you would like to read Hippo Hunting from start to finish you can read the PDF here: Hippo Hunting (PDF) (513K).

Also, I’ve added a tab at the top of the page for books. Hippo Hunting is on there and I’ll try to get The Cyber-Psalms and a couple more if I get inspired during the holidays.

Love ya,

D

There’s really only one thing you have to do during your first four-year stint overseas: survive. And the way to know if you survived is whether or not you decide to go back for a second term. Despite the challenges and our slow adjustment to life in Africa we we’re definitely going back for a second helping. The translation was flying. I had notebooks full of linguistic data. We had published Luke and Jonah and were plugging away on more books. We had produced the SGM Jesus Christ: Savior of the world booklet and 10,000 copies would be printed and ready to distribute before we finished our year in the US. We were so excited about these booklets that we actually planned a trip back to Tete in the middle of the year just to distribute these books and check on the translators. For some reason we all traveled back to Tete instead of just sending me alone. What were we thinking?!? Moving a family of six people from Africa to the US is enough work and expense but we actually did it twice! Maybe I didn’t think I could survive for a month away from my family. Our organization is always looking for ways to make its member go on a road trip. They plan meetings in Kenya and Malaysia and Texas and other forbidding places and expect people to just leave their family and stay in some lonely hotel for a week. Early on in our marriage, my wife and I made a covenant: We are we. Come SIL or high water we were going to do our best to travel together. It wasn’t just because I was left defenseless in a strange town, but because Hilary and kids were left without me in a strange country. The first two times that I had to travel in Mozambique for more than a few days, Hilary and the kids were attacked by snakes. Dad leaves and a snake gets in the house. Sounds like the Garden of Eden doesn’t it? Other difficulties afflicted my family. I had to travel right after Benjamin’s birthday in March so I got him a rabbit for a gift. While in Maputo I would call in the evenings and get the report of the day’s activities from each child. One evening when the phone rang, Hilary called out, “It’s Daddy!” Eleanor got to the phone and breathlessly started telling me the sad news about the rabbit. During a rainstorm, Patrick, had got wet, caught a cold and died. So, each child in turn had to get on the phone and shout, “Daddy, the rabbit died!” Finally, Hilary got on the phone and said, “Hi, honey, how are you doing?” A strange voice replied, “This isn’t Daddy.”

I’m glad I’m married. Really. And I’m glad I have to lug a huge family all over the continent with me every time I make a trip. It’s more fun that way. But I’m pretty jealous of the single missionaries. They have all the fun. I know they are said to be more prone to depression and mental illness, but even so, they are are a lot more efficient in Africa than us married folks. If you’re single you just throw some things in a bag and go. You get invited to things that us married people never see because we’re too busy giving babies baths and singing bedtime lullabies. I remember when I was a single guy in Mexico serving as a short-term assistant for a missionary there. I had a terrific time. I stayed out late. I got invited to parties. All the girls thought I was cute. I learned Spanish in a fraction of the time the poor married guy stuck at home did. Not only does a single person overseas have more fun but they get more work done. Mysteriously, all the singles in our mission are women. I know one or two single guys serving on the field but there are hundreds of single women. And they’re all smart, intellectual, motivated and independent. If you are a single guy and you’d like to be a missionary, by all means don’t marry some prissy girl from your home church. Just get over to the mission field and all the odds are stacked in your favor. Either you will meet a missionary lady who has the same call on her life as you do, or you’ll marry a local girl. Then you’ll really master the local language and culture!

In Africa being married does give you some status that a single person doesn’t have. And if you have four children or more then the Mozambicans you deal with will think you’re at least an adult. In Tete all the market ladies were very excited when Hilary was pregnant. “Now you’ll have another girl to help you in the kitchen!” And “Now you’ll have balance: two boys and two girls.” Of course, when we had another boy that simply meant that Hilary needed to have two more babies, girls, so that we would have an even six children. Our prenuptial agreement was that Hilary got to have as many babies as she wanted. This seemed like a good deal to me. But her resolve began to waver after three and she was really done after four. Now that they’re all big and gangly and not so cute anymore she sometimes gets that look in her eye but then she remembers diapers and nursing and all the rest and is content to cuddle other people’s babies.

I left the translators in the Nyungwe office with a lot of work to do. They just needed to translate like crazy while I was gone and then I’d check their work when I got back. That’s a pretty cushy job. Air-conditioned office and a nice desk job is the way to go if you have to live in Tete. There are worse jobs. Much, much worse jobs. Some people make their living by selling charcoal. But before they can sell it they have to cut down a bunch of trees, make an oven the size of a house and set it to smoldering for close to a week. Then they have to bust up the charred wood, load it into bags and then transport it to the city on the back of a bicycle. Other people earn a living by making gravel. This involves hitting big rocks until they are a bunch of little rocks. Then you make piles of these little rocks and wait for someone to come along and buy the gravel from you. There are many people who live as virtual slaves, working for someone without pay in exchange for a place to sleep and one meal a day. If you’re smart and lucky you might get a good job driving a Toyota for an aid organization. At least until you crash and die. One aid organization down the street from us had a fenced enclosure full of totaled Toyotas. I’m not exactly sure how this was supposed to help feed and educate children at risk but there you go. So all in all, sitting in the translation office cranking out Bible verses wasn’t a bad job. The translators weren’t happy though. Their desk was the wrong height. They didn’t have any red pens. They needed sugar for their tea. I started avoiding the office just because I didn’t want to have to face the discontent workers.

But in 2002 I got to leave that all behind and return to America for a full year. I would be getting some of the education that I had never had time for because I was too busy getting knocked around in the school of hard knocks. So I got to study linguistics at the Summer Institute of Linguistics at the University of Oregon. Hilary and I met here ten years earlier and what better place for future linguists to fall in love!

Nice glasses!	Hilary at Oregon SIL 1992

Ten years later. Oregon SIL 2002 (Photo at Sunriver). How much linguistics have these people done in a decade?!?

Summer Institute of Linguistics was so called because in the good old days all the missionaries in Mexico had to be called linguists in order to get a work visa. In the summer they really would go back to the US and compare notes on all the strange languages they were studying in Latin America. The name stuck and even today SIL is called ILV, Instituto Linguistico del Verano, in Mexico. Going to a Summer Institute of Linguistics is a language geek’s paradise. When I was there, surrounded by all these intense, earnest linguists, I felt normal. At home even. Many of them liked linguistics even more than I did. They made linguistics jokes. They had a special skit night just for linguistic skits. The teachers lived in the same dorms with the students and it was linguistics all night long. SIL people have a reputation for being elitist. That’s because we are. But if you look around the world you’ll find at any one time more than a thousand languages being analyzed and described by SIL linguists. We’re quite good at linguistics but we’re not so good at sharing what we’ve learned with others. And again that comes back to the hurdles faced by anyone who wants to publish their stuff. I’m sitting on all sorts of fantastic data. But frankly I don’t want to spend 18 months writing up a miniscule portion of it just so I can get it published in an obscure journal. Just last month I collected so much indigenous music in a four day visit to the village that it would take me months to get it in publishable form. Most SIL linguists are just like me. They’re too busy doing linguistics and putting it to use to improve a Bible translation to take a break and organize all their notes.

I took a Bible translation course that summer as well but it was a bit of a disaster. In the best of times I’m a lousy student. Teachers have called me a trouble-maker, arrogant, and intelligent but difficult. Being in this Bible translation course, I had a hard time paying attention. All the other students had never done the real thing. But I had. And I knew all the answers. My poor teacher, (Name withheld out of respect), would have pulled out his hair if he wasn’t already bald. I was strong on linguistics but weak on Biblical languages so after SIL, our family moved to Portland so I could study Biblical Greek at a seminary. Again, it was a disaster. Me, the TPR worldwide expert, studying Greek using the same methods employed by Erasmus was not a success. At the time I thought the methodology was bad. But I’m beginning to think that already at that point old age was wiping its cold hand across my memory and making it impossible for me to memorize anything. Now, several years later and several thousand Google searches later I am incapable of remembering anything including how I started this chapter and how I thought it was going to end.

Forgive my megalomania. What I am about to say to you will sound like the grossest arrogance. I have known what it is to be Jesus Christ. I have left the glorious halls of heaven and stepped into the muck of humanity. Incarnation is the ultimate humiliation. Not simply to live fully within the flesh. But to live as a worm and remember when you were a butterfly. Incarnation is metamorphosis in reverse. And that is what it’s like to leave your homeland and be reborn in another. Nor is this a first world to third world demotion. Anyone who has lived in the comfort of their home culture and then been transplanted voluntarily or by force knows what I feel. Christ saved the earth. But it ruined heaven for him in the process. Never again, having passed to the other side can we again feel at home in Egypt. You despise me now. For my presumption. My suffering is small next to the Savior’s. But he was large when he came to earth. I was frail and dumb, even while convinced of my strength and my wisdom. To have it stripped away. To question the thundering voice of my destiny. This was too much for me. Too much for anyone. We are all broken down when we leave our home. Not as a tourist but as a savior. Who’s to say you have not come into the kingdom for such a time as this?

How I would love to return and forget. To lose myself in the smells of my family home. The mist on the fallow fields around the town where I grew up. To hear only one language and to not know another. To sing songs in church without thinking. Just to feel. To feel my culture and my people and my language and my land wrapped around me. To feel all that without feeling it at all. Just to live. All that is taken from me now. Everything is ironic. Family celebrations ring false. To gather at the table for Thanksgiving seems an affront to the starving. To wander through shopping malls and drive through supercities and always to remember, remember, remember. How is this memory a mercy? How are the faces of the dying and the starving and the ill and the poor some sort of sacrament? A requiem for humanity. Noble, heart-wrenching. But, ah, sometimes I would like to forget. I would like to live and struggle in the material world of my home country. Screw the third world. Let them solve their own problems. How has our colonization done anything other than muck things up? I can grow petunias in a rock quarry. But far better to leave the pit to the snakes and the cactus and those desert creatures that thrive in scarcity.

When we begin to live overseas our presuppositions grind up against the alien reality of a different culture. Everything squeezes, squeezes. Until we snap. The bugs never leave you alone. They climb the walls. They are always on your skin. The ants swarm continually until you learn never to leave anything out. Termites are working, working on the walls, and the foundation of your house. Gnawing on everything. Overwhelming a bookshelf if you leave for the weekend. Return and your treasured books are gnawed and encased within red tunnels of mud. People never stop banging on your gate with impossible requests. From being just one in a million in America I am suddenly different and a target. Beggars make a beeline. Thieves make plans. Con artists smile and sidle. How can you tell who the good guys are? How can you decide who to help? Everyone you meet is a pastor of a struggling church, or maybe just a flimflam man with a borrowed tie and a slick story. Every beaten-down woman with a malnourished child on her back is going to die if I don’t help her with money right now. A trip through town can be a gauntlet or a journey through a house of horrors. Lost legs don’t lie. Blind and leprous aren’t faking it. But if I say yes when will I ever be able to say no?

All the civility that causes us to behave breaks down when you live in another country. Family ties. Church conformity. Peer pressure. The desire for a good reputation. All that goes poof. Nothing presses on you anymore. You are left flimsy and vulnerable. That one hidden temptation can become huge and easy to satisfy. Cross-cultural stress can magnify the attractions of the forbidden and strip away our ability to resist. Why did I survive when so many like me fell apart? It is a mercy that I did not flame out. Was it a grace as well?

Bureaucracy is bringing me down. It’s not just the incomprehensible nature of the things I’m asked to do. But it’s the capricious nature of everything that leaves me feeling fatalistic. Could I hurry this up with a little cash under the table? My conscience won’t allow it. But if I’m not going to use the dollar to push things forward I have two other options but at this stage I think there is only one. This blue shirted official is extremely concerned because I have done something wrong on my paperwork. I did not know that my nationality is americana since nacionalidade is a feminine noun. This means that all the paperwork must be redone. Can we just add a little line to the o so it becomes an a? No, that would be tampering with official documents. You must start over. So, I start filling out all these forms trying my best to conceal the boiling rage against this stupid country, and this stupid worker and this stupid system. The man behind the desk looks at me sadly. He is not sad that I haven’t bribed him. Not all officials are corrupt. He is sad because I blamed him for the error. Because I refused to see past the task to the person behind the desk. If I had only been friendly. If I had simply apologized and asked for his help. But foreigners are so stupid that way.

By God’s mercy, in those early years in Tete, I never shouted at an official behind a desk. I never pushed a Mozambican or insulted them. I never spoke ill of this country, its institutions or its future. But behind closed doors, my family heard me rage against it all. My wife found me in our bedroom shaking and swearing because of people who had pushed me too far. Of course now I am philosophical. Now after many years I have learned not to hurry but to wait. And most of all I have learned to laugh. Laughter is the sound of our frustration being rolled in sugar. Laughter is the acknowledgement of our own folly and the admission of our own limitations. Now I laugh. But in 2001, I was wound up. I was on a mission. I was changing the world. And I was meeting frustrations at every turn. The music of the disco next door was pounding. The guy I paid to guard my house was casing the joint for a robbery. Every office I visited was inhabited by strange people with inscrutable motives and grandiose plans that all included me spending thousands of dollars on development projects that had absolutely nothing to do with why I was in Africa. No one was doing what I wanted. I invited people to meetings and they didn’t come. Others called meetings and didn’t invite me. The heat and the dust and the scarcity and the general incomprehensibility of everything ensured that I couldn’t think clearly about the Bible translation or linguistics.

If you think I had a Messiah complex you should have met Bud. He was called from the backwoods of Arkansas because God told him to go to Mozambique and preach to the natives. At that point he didn’t even know how to find it on a map. But he dragged his crazy wife, and his impossible optimism and several thousands of dollars to Tete of all places and started putting chapa roofs on churches and buying bicycles for “pastors.” If you think I was naive just meet Bud. He preached the Gospel every Sunday. The Gospel is very simple. He told everyone this. Actually, the Gospel is really complicated. But Bud was simple. And so he got ripped off and robbed and lied to and every once in a while some kind Mozambican tried to be nice to him. But by that time he was such a bundle of nerves that he had started shaking his fist at government officials and calling perfectly good pastors crooks. Bud made me feel normal. Long after a voice from heaven called him to China and he had disappeared from Africa forever his memory lived on. Sometimes people even knocked at my door and said, “Are you Bud?” No, friend. By God’s grace, I am not Bud.

The qualities of a good Bible translation form a four-sided triangle. The basic characteristics are accuracy, naturalness and clarity. This means accurately representing the meaning of the original text using natural language in a way that clearly communicates. The fourth side of the triangle is acceptability. If a translation is not acceptable then it doesn’t matter how accurate or natural it is. I know it’s not logical but acceptability never is. This reduction of the complexities of translation masks many of the issues that cause translators to pull their hair out. How can we be accurate when the commentators don’t always agree on the meaning of a particular passage? How can we know what Jesus intended by a parable when the cultural distance is so vast and the corroborating data is so slim. When we started working on the Nyungwe translation our method was a bit like teaching a child to catch by surrounding him with people all throwing balls at him from different angles. We compared the Greek. We compared the Chichewa. And the Shona. We compared four different versions of the Bible in Portuguese. With all these translations in mind we tried to have an idea of what the general consensus was about the meaning of this passage and then express it in passable Nyungwe. Then my job was to look at the Nyungwe and see if it accurately reflected the meaning of the original text. This was confusing. And while on the surface the translation often looked quite similar to the original I didn’t know if the translation would be in the least bit clear to the average speaker of Nyungwe. This was a controversial point. Some theorists said that a Bible translation should only be meaningful to people who already knew the Bible through another language. If the Bible was understandable to pastors then they could explain it to their congregations. There were others who said that the purpose of a Bible translation was to be understandable to the uninitiated listener. The uninitiated listener was symbolized by a little old lady living in a village. Would she be able to understand what the Bible was saying, even without the benefit of preexisting Biblical knowledge?

Another thing that shifted quite regularly was our translation method. The first draft of the Gospel of Luke had been produced by Branco recording himself reading the Boa Nova Good News translation in Portuguese and then interpreting it on the fly into Nyungwe. This method was so easy that he actually recorded the entire Bible this way. The problems were many, however. Once the interpretations were transcribed, typed up and checked by a translation consultant it was discovered that they weren’t very accurate or natural. Branco had been outside of the Nyungwe speaking area for almost two decades. He used words like Mwari for God (the Shona term). We spent so much time cleaning up that text and comparing it to eight different translations (I wasn’t a Greek expert at that stage… ) that it would have been much faster to just start from scratch. Which brings up the first law of shortcuts: They’re not.

We also tried retelling which was a method I heard about in the journal The Bible Translator. This involved having the translator read a passage in another language and then retell it in their heart language. This doesn’t work. At least the way we did it. Because Mozambicans have fabulous memories. Lourenço just read the passage once in Portuguese. Looked at it really hard for about fifteen seconds and then rattled off an essentially word for word translation in Nyungwe complete with the stilted sentence structure of the Portuguese. I also tried to have the translators work separately, swap translations, correct each others work, and move on. This was going to be a much more efficient use of our time than just having one translator type while the other watched. Wrong. I was setting them up to criticize each other and that’s a no-no in this culture. And plus, Africans like to work together. In fact, put an African in a room by himself for the day and he will curl up and die. Or at least not get very much done. The sweet spot for translators is a team of three. One is in charge. Two is a people person. And Three is the one that gets picked on by One and Two. If you put two translators in a room together they’ll tear each other’s throats out. But with Three in there, One and Two are able to balance out their egos and also incorporate each other’s advice without losing face.

After much trial and much error we settled on the Almeida translation in Portuguese as our base text. It had an important similarity with the Greek. It was almost incomprehensible. But it was well-loved by the churches in Mozambique and it was so literal that it many places the word order was identical. Having one translation as our base, even a really archaic European language translation was far superior to the room full of barking dogs that we had previously. Now we had just one big dog to try to listen to and figure out what it was saying.

The other side of the equation was the naturalness of the language in the Nyungwe translation. Since I hadn’t done any linguistic study I didn’t have any way of telling if the translation being produced was natural or not other than asking the translators, “So, is this natural language?” To which they would always respond, “Yes.” We also had a reviewers committee that met several times a month and they were a lot of fun. And they enjoyed getting together, drinking Cokes and reading through the translation we produced. I remember one member, Marizane. I showed him the first translation we had produced up to this point. You have to understand that Marizane played Jesus in the Jesus Film so his opinion mattered. I remember handing him a piece of paper with some Nyungwe Scripture on it and asking him what he thought. Angels hushed their singing. The traffic on the road stopped. This was the biggest moment of my translation career and in fact the moment I had fantasized about for more than a decade. Marizane read the page and then began to rub his eyes like he was having trouble reading the words. I realized that he was crying. He looked up at me from reading the page and said, “Now God speaks my language!” We hugged. Angels broke into a chorus. And little old ladies praying over our newsletter back in Oregon knew in their knower that God had heard their prayers.

Actually, what happened is Marizane read the translation for a few seconds, paused, looked up at me and said, “Está.” The word está in Portuguese means “it is.” And it’s not even “it is” in a sort of definitive way like “It is THE WORD OF GOD!!!” It’s more like “It is right now but tomorrow it might not be.” So this was quite a letdown. It would not sound good in a newsletter to our supporters back home. I would not be featured in a Wycliffe Bible Translators promotional magazine any time soon: “Nyungwe man says Bible is…sort of.”

The best thing we did for the Bible translation was stop translating and start studying Nyungwe. For three weeks, the translators and three other guys met together every day and wrote stories. They interviewed little old ladies. They recorded folktales and cataloged proverbs. I’m still studying the data we collected in those three weeks. We collected so much interesting stuff that a theoretical linguist could have overturned any wild theory out there. I learned more about Nyungwe culture and values and sense of humor through that brief study than I could possibly process in a lifetime. One thing I learned is that proverbs mean anything. One of my favorites was, Luwiro la muncenga nkhuyambira pabodzi, “To run in the sand you must all begin together.” Nobody could agree on what this meant. But the explanations taught me so much Nyungwe language and culture that it didn’t matter.

After only a short while I started to notice that the language I was hearing in the recordings of native speakers didn’t sound anything like the language that was in our translation. For one thing, I hardly ever heard ndipo. Our Bible translation had the word ndipo at the beginning of almost every phrase. It more or less meant “and” or “then.” But it was used ten times as often in our translation as it was in natural communication. So, while in the early days I had insisted that the translators make all the logical relations between clauses explicit, after listening to the way people really communicated the translators and I took out all the connectors like ndipo and only added them back in if it caused confusion. Now we were talking. Talking. I realized translations are a necessary component of church life. But the written word just isn’t very popular here in Mozambique. If people have a choice between buying a book or a radio they’re going to buy the radio. There is no culture of books outside of schools. And school books quickly end up torn to strips for cigarette paper or worse toilet paper. Was this the destiny of all our hard work. Would we work for twenty-five years and at the end have nothing more useful than TP substitute. When you’re the last one standing at the gate, and the hordes are piling through, you have to just keep swinging. Bible translation is like that. You work for a quarter century and then people decide that they don’t speak that language anymore. Or the old pastors decide they don’t like this new-fangled translation and so they discourage their flock from using it. Or people would rather sit around watching TV than read your Bible. It is a divine task that always verges on despair. It is faith mixed with heavy doses of futility. But it’s a high calling nonetheless. To be able to look back at a lifetime of toil and see not only a Bible translation, and dictionaries, and bilingual education and young people using the language to write love notes on their cell phones. To be able to take that three weeks of text collection and stick on a shelf in some library somewhere in the world. It might be ignored now. It might be despised. But someday, someone will dust off those pages and discover a treasure. Just a month ago, years after that sissy pink edition of Luke came out, I was visiting the chefe of our village and he brought out a worn out copy from inside his house. “You have to get me a copy of this. This one isn’t mine. I love the stories. And I want my own.”