Our roads! our roads!! our roads!!!

After a very tiring day in the office and trying to head back home to your family, sometimes you begin to wonder what next as you begin to see strange signs on the road. Even going to work sometimes you are not sure that your car will make it before the industry close to our office that deals with logs for electric poles always does wonders. If their huge trucks have not blocked the roads, they will have made it impassable. One day they had two trucks on the road so the entire road was completely blocked. I stood there for a while and no one even recognised my presence. I had no choice than to look for the back road. In is interesting how the truck drivers always consider themselves as the "kings" on the high way. Well we have to give way to the big vehicles else they crush us. Sometimes we have to pack our vehicles in the neighborhood and head to the office trusting them in the Lord's care and protection. Our Lord never fails us, he keeps watch all the time. The good news is that on the flip side, the road through our neighborhood is being worked on, for which we are so thankful to the Lord.

Special outfits made with love

When I was in Thailand in 2016, I came across this particular fabric and thought it was very nice. So I immediately got a piece. I knew very well that Lilian can work on it and produce something very beautiful. This weekend, she was very busy and look at what she produced for both of us! Now Caritas has not been to school this academic year because of the political situation. However, she has been spending her time learning how to design and sew and look what she is able to make. She can even make her own clothes now. I admire my wife and daughter for this special talent that they have to design and make outfits.I consider these as made very specially and with love too.

ParaTExt 8

I have setup ParaTExt 8 on about 25 laptops for 11 language projects. One remarkable thing is that I not had any difficulty at all in running the setup. One particular computer will not accept 7.5 but ParaTExt 8 installed smoothly. So these teams have all migrated to ParaTExt 8 and have had some training to use it and are using ParaTExt 8.0 successfully except for the slowness issue which has just been addressed by that updated. At least I downloaded the update and tried in my computer and it running well now.

Recently, I was working with one of the projects as we process their text as they prepare to go for typesetting. They are really taking advantage of the new features in ParaTExt 8 especially those that help in running basic checks, Wordlists, Key terms and Parallel passage checks. One of the translator (Christian Alomofor point on the screen) is also an exegete for other languages in the cluster. He is very happy to learn various tools in ParaTExt and sees how this prunes their work and now wants to encourage the teams he works with to begin using the checks and don't wait to introduce the checks at the very end. This is what I have been promoting and pushing over the years because when I train translators my expectation is that exegetes/consultants should enforce the use of various ParaTExt tools since they are in contact more often.

Got more work done today!

Today I had my daughter (Pamela) come along to help me in the office with my work. At first she didn't know she could help help me in anything but I had some evaluations that she could read and put together a summary for me. This is the kind of work that she is trained to do so that worked well. It was really good to have someone to work and talk with. It was a very busy day though with lots of interruptions from people needing different things. Besides the office Internet was not working and I was trying to fix it. We had lots of fun too. Too bad she is leaving tomorrow.

Consistency Checking with the Tunen Project in Ndikinimeki

12-16 I am working in Ndikimeki (Tunen) with the Bible Translator. He is not well but he is very passionate. He had an accident 45 days ago and has not gone away. He tells me that this is even the best moment for him to do more work on the Tunen Scriptures because he can't go to the farm or run around to carry other activities. I am very happy to work with him because he knows what he is doing. He told me that this is his text and that is truly it. I feel happy to work with people like because it makes my work much easier. This is an example of someone working from home without having to be in an office. It is much easier working from home.
Ndikinimeki is a very interesting place in this country. It is found between two climates. That of the rain forest and the Savannah. It has a very beautiful mountain on one side and a thick forest on the other side.

Adult Learners!

Last week, I was teaching a FLEx class and my learners were very interesting. First of all, they could tolerate my French! Two of the learners were particularly interesting. One said that I was very fast. He had asked several questions but was also very busy trying various tasks related to the class. Another one sitting right behind was very quiet and I was concerned if he was following up. When I checked, he was doing just fine. He had his manual handy to look at, while following the teacher simultaneously. The other one actually had his manual covered on the table, was mostly busy trying several things though related to the class. I asked the one with many questions if I could connect his laptop on the projector for him to be the 'driver' and he was happy. I think this worked well for him. To teach adults successfully, you must apply the LASTS principles: Learner centered, Action with reflection, Solving problems, Teamwork and Self-discovery/Self-Direction,

FLEx training in the Mbam

5-9 June was the long awaited time that we had been waiting for. We had 7 communities present: Lefa, Nulibie, Tunen, Tuki, Nasue and Numala. During these days, we spent time to setup their computers with the FLEx program. And trained them on how to use this program to do their dictionary work. We had someone in the team who didn't know of the existence of such a program but they were very innovative, they have been able to get people and divide them to talk about different things in groups. When they learned about categories and semantic domains in FLEx, they were amazed and could see how they will easily use this feature. The next thing to happen in these communities is a Rapid Word Collection workshop and then processing the dictionary will be the next thing.