Good week/Bad week

Some weeks fly by without your noticing them much; some weeks are memorable, some are enjoyable, and some are harder than usual. Some are a mix of different things, and that’s what we’ve had this week! This week, we’ve had a few challenges and some blessings, and I guess that all balances out to become a neutral week. 😀

We had a run-in with sickness. Gerdine spent the weekend mostly asleep with headaches, stomach ache and exhaustion. The stomach bug went around us all, and noses were blocked. Hopefully, we’re rested enough to get 3 more weeks of good work in before our break.
The Hansen family has had it far worse than us. The stomach bug that took Gerdine out for 2 days has taken their family out for the whole week! Natalie has been struggling to keep up with their laundry with their running through so many clothes.

This week has been miserable weather-wise. We’ve had a full week of clouds, cold, strong winds and rain. We’re very grateful to have a house with a tin roof – we can count on being dry inside, which isn’t something our Kovol community can say! The weather has been so bad that our female guinea pig with her two babies died of hypothermia. After finding mum and baby dead yesterday morning, I took the surviving baby inside to warm up on a hot water bottle. He made a recovery, and the weather started to look better, so I put him outside again. He didn’t survive the rainy night 🙁 That was a mistake! That leaves us with 2 guinea pigs, but they are bigger and seem to do a better job at staying dry and warm. Who would have thought hypothermia would be an issue in the tropics?

Work-wise, things have been going well. I finished comprehension checking the Joseph story and am ready for a translation check in April. I also pushed forward to finish the draft for our literacy teacher’s manual. After all those hours poured into it, I was keen to click the “generate teacher’s manual” button in the software to see what we got.

Here’s what I got!

I laughed my head off seeing this error message. It’s been that kind of week, I guess. What’s the problem? How can I fix it? Where do I start troubleshooting? Oops! 😀 It’s not a particularly helpful error message, is it? I love the fact that the action I can take is to just click OK and accept it :p It makes me chuckle.

I’m not complaining too bitterly. 🙂 I’m sure I’ll figure it out next week.

This week has been a good week also. Our Kovol community continues to be an amazing bunch of people. It’s great to see their smiling faces and enthusiasm. We have a regular stream of visitors and helpers who don’t mind checking things with me. I got to comprehension check Genesis 45 with 3 different sets of people. I read the chapter a paragraph at a time and then tell them, “Say that again in your own words.” I can then ask follow-up questions to check on details they have missed. It’s hard work remembering every detail from a spoken paragraph. Sometimes, a simple prompt has people remembering those details. If not, and something is consistently forgotten, it’s time for me to redraft. Comprehension checks are great. I get to read God’s word to people who haven’t heard it before.

Having now finished the Joseph story I decided to mount a white board in my office to show the guys our progress in translation. After writing out the work still to do in translation before our evangelistic teaching begins I was thouroughly intimidated! There’s so much to do!

Another positive was Oscar turning 7. Our little man is 7 years old! He’s in a Thunderbirds phase and had us make a Thunderbird 2 cake for him. Hilariously, Oscar got an invisible ink pen as a present. Today, I set him on his maths worksheet and went off to play pirate ship with Alice and Mille, a favourite of theirs which involves putting underpants on our head and hunting for treasure. Oscar runs up a time later and tells me he’s all done, and when I go to investigate, it looks as if he’s done nothing. Well, he’s done his entire worksheet in invisible ink! When I check it out with the UV light, it’s all there. Funny little munchkin 🙂

There’s us, then. We’re looking forward to next week being better. All the same, every week that goes by is steady progress towards completing our translation and literacy projects. We’re blessed to be here and be a part of it.