Gwahatike Survey Trip

Jon had the chance to visit many of the Gwahatike language villages along with part of the language survey team here in PNG recently. It was about one week long and ten villages were visited.

The purpose of the trip was to evaluate how much the existing completed Gwahatike New Testament is being used. We also identified the barriers that prevent the people from using the Gwahatike NT. We did this by doing one-on-one interviews as well as facilitating community discussions in each of the villages we visited.

We now have more strategic ways to engage with the Gwahatike community in this area. It was also encouraging to see new initiatives started by the people in the community over the last month related to vernacular scripture use!

Enjoy the pictures!

Jon giving some pointers to the pilot ;)

The team after we landed at the Saidor airstrip

We hiked each day for at least a couple hours exploring this beautiful area of God's creation

One of the community discussions held in Umboldi village

Another community discussion in Mulumyang village. The different papers on the ground give a visual of what the community is discussing and give a good picture of particularly the barriers that exist to using the Gwahatike NT

Group shot including the language survey team and the main local guides

Steering Committee Workshop

We recently helped run a workshop in Madang town. The workshop helped to establish or strengthen local steering committee's to direct the work of language development and Bible translation. It was attended by seven language groups from the Madang and Morobe provinces including the three languages we work in within the Gwahatike Multi-Language Project.

Local ownership is a critical piece of a successful Bible translation project. Often times it is difficult for the translation team to give ownership over to the community. Even if all of the right attitudes are present in the translation team there needs to be some structure brought into the relationship between the translation team and the broader community they are serving. The local steering committee (or local language board) fills this role.

It was a successful workshop with all of the teams leaving with an action plan for how they were going to support Bible translation in their context.

Jon taught some of the modules

Group photo of teachers and students

Ministry Update

You may not have heard many updates about the Gwahatike translation programs on this blog but the teams have been very busy over the past months. It is an exciting time as we look forward to reaching some of the goals that we set more than two years ago! We had set as a goal two years ago to complete and print the gospel of Mark in each of the Domung, Madi and Asaro'o languages. This was an ambitious goal especially when you consider the investment that we put into training of the translation teams members. These next four months are going to be busy as we try to reach this goal before mid-August.

As we continue to work towards these goals we had a work session in Madang town in which all of the teams were able to attend. Myself and one of our colleagues went to Madang for two weeks and we had two teams come at a time to work with each of us. I trained the teams on how to use Paratext more effectively (this is the main program used on the computer to do the translation work). While I worked with one team, the other team worked with this experienced translator who was able to advise them on how to do the translation work and do some adviser level checking of the scriptures.

Madi translation team during Paratext training

Domung team during the Paratext workshop

Group photo with the Madi and Asaro'o translation teams

Asaro'o translation team hard at work

During this work session we also had a new team come from the Gwahatike language area (the original language to have Bible translation done). The Gwahatike New Testament was published in 2000. Since then, the translation work has not continued as the team members focused on helping their neighboring language groups translate the Bible. We are now exploring the possibility of starting new translation work in the Gwahatike language, possibly portions of the Old Testament.

Gwahatike team reviewing a portion of Genesis

"And as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, "Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise.""

Luke 24:5-7